Even Managers and Leaders Need to Hone Their Customer Service

Customer service is an essential for business success. You won’t grow your business unless you bring in new customers—and you won’t win over customers unless you can provide them with a consistently positive experience. That’s one of the reasons why ACES provides so many customer service training resources, and why we encourage small business owners to involve their team in this important professional enrichment.

But make no mistake: Customer service is not just for those customers who have job titles like “customer service associate.” It’s important for leaders, managers, and business owners to hone their own customer service skills, too, and to constantly be getting better at providing a meaningful customer experience.

Part of that is because leaders and managers will have plenty of customer contact, whether they particularly want to or not! Sooner or later, an issue will arise that requires you to demonstrate warmth, patience, and professionalism to your consumers. But just as significantly, leaders and managers can build a culture of customer service by modeling what true service looks like.

In other words? They can lead by example.

How to Be a Customer Service Leader

There are several ways in which managers and leaders can achieve this:

• Articulate the importance of customer service even from the start. Include it in job descriptions and voice the importance of customer service during interviews and new hire orientations. Make it known from Day 1 that employees are expected to make strong, friendly service a priority.
• Always make customer service something you discuss in annual employee reviews. Get employees involved in the process, too: Ask them how they would characterize their customer service skills.
• Make sure you understand the precise nature of every job, and that you get some experience working alongside each team member and ascertaining what kinds of customer interactions—and potential customer problems—each team member deals with. You can better provide customer service coaching when you have empathy for each specific team member.
• Make yourself available to help employees hone their customer service skills, or simply to answer any questions or assist with any particularly prickly issues they face. Make known that, when it comes to customer service issues, you have an open door policy.
• Invest in customer service training for your team members—the best way to put your money where your mouth is, and to show that you care about empowering their customer service efforts.

Yes, it’s that important—and when it comes to building a customer service culture, leaders set the tone.