Any ideas on processes/ways to improve in-person customer service?

[thestrangebrew1]

My department is absorbing another division and I've been tasked with over-seeing the counter staff and figuring out ways to improve customer service. I know things like surveys will help build a base-line of how our agency is doing in regards to customer service, but I wanted to ask you guys what you feel is good in-person customer service?

A little background: I work for the Community Development Dept. (local gov't agency), so we deal with land use (zoning, planning etc.) and building permits/code compliance. Comm Dev. is absorbing the Building Division, who share our counterspace at the other end of the counter.

The way I look at it, there are 3 core components to providing really good in-person customer service:

1. Customer Experience: When a customer first walks into our office, does the office feel welcoming? Our counter is a combination of dark grey paneling, beige/white countertops, and with covid, we've got a huge plexiglass running across the entirety of the counterspace (about 20' long) from the counter top to the ceiling. While I may not be able to reconfigure the space, I'm thinking of maybe sprucing it up with some fake plants or something.

2. Professionalism/Courteousness: As a customer is greeted by staff, how was staff dressed? Did staff greet the customer with a smile? Did the customer have to wait long before being greeted by staff? What are some ways to encourage staff to maintain this level of professionalism and courtesy. I'm thinking some form of cross training between the two divisions at the counter would improve the help. As it stands, if someone comes in for a building permit, they go to someone at one end of the counter, because the Comm Dev. staff can't really help with building permits and vice versa. I think cross training, at least for general questions and intake of applications would make sense and provide the best service.

3. Communication: When communicating with a customer, was the information being communicated in a way the customer can clearly understand? If the customer wants to do something on their property that's not allowed, how is that message conveyed to the customer? Was staff knowledgeable on the subject matter?

Anyways I may find more things to think about or ask, just throwing my thoughts down more than anything right now. Appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

 

[herm0016]

i imagine the building dept. here having a sign that says "no way you can do that, unless you have lots and lots of money"

customer service is about efficiently helping the customer. dispense with the potted plants and all that BS. a smile is great, but the customer leaves with a smile if they get the correct info/are treated with respect and honesty.

things like review the apps with the customer for easy to fix mistakes can go a long way building trust.

 

[sdifox]

Provide a way to submit building plans for approval and permit issuance. Easier on everyone.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

i imagine the building dept. here having a sign that says "no way you can do that, unless you have lots and lots of money"

customer service is about efficiently helping the customer. dispense with the potted plants and all that BS. a smile is great, but the customer leaves with a smile if they get the correct info/are treated with respect and honesty.

things like review the apps with the customer for easy to fix mistakes can go a long way building trust.

This is actually something I've been thinking about. Our land use apps require property owner signatures and sometimes staff has taken them in without them only to request it later. I'll need to nip that in the bud pretty quickly.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

Provide a way to submit building plans for approval and permit issuance. Easier on everyone.

We implemented electronic submittals during covid and it seems to be working fairly well so far. We also require plans be submitted on a flash drive or cd if the customer absolutely has to come in in person.

 

[herm0016]

stuff like this may slow you down for a min, but it helps train the customer, and you will spend less time trying to get ahold of them to fix it in the future.

This is actually something I've been thinking about. Our land use apps require property owner signatures and sometimes staff has taken them in without them only to request it later. I'll need to nip that in the bud pretty quickly.

 

[highland145]

Like herm said, efficiency.

Something I ran into with the tax office...was looking at buying a building. The property tax was $1K on the county site. My bro asked what it would be if we bought it? I said $1K. Nope, it was rate capped becauae the previous owner had it for years. The 5th person I talked with knew how to calculate the tax...$5K. So your people understanding their jerb.

Edit: Lady at the county gave the bro a permit to put a billboard on his property. County enforcer shows up and threatens to arrest people if they don't stop building it because it wasn't zoned for billboards. After some...discussion...they let it go because the county didn't want to reimburse my bro his $ for the costs.

 

[deadlyapp]

Pay attention to the questions that are asked and answered (correctly) and develop a FAQ. You'll save your team tons of time by having quick answers that they can search on their computers, and you can make it freely available on your site so that customers don't spend their time coming to you.

I don't particularly like phone menus, but I have interacted with some very strong phone menus in the past that could very easily answer your questions if prompted with a general question.

I think you already know it, but having a positive, empathetic, calm demeanor is the biggest thing for a customer service person. It doesn't work well when you come in with someone already raging, but the best customer service I interact with are those who don't argue with me for being wrong, but are empathetic, try to understand the problem, and try to come up with solutions or tell me they don't have the answer and have to figure it out.

 

[LikeLinus]

I would suggest you do some research on best practices for customer experience.

You need to map the customer journey from start to end. Identify the key touch points and milestones through that journey. Once you map everything out, you can identify processes that you can improve upon and possibly implement new processes where you see gaps.

A customer survey will help you get a good understanding on their experience and establish baseline scores on customer loyalty and satisfaction. You can do yearly customer surveys to track their loyalty and satisfaction. That should help you see if your process improvements are improving those metrics.

Take a look at books like The Power of Moments, Good To Great, The Cult Of The Customer and such. This site might be a good place to start for resources. The CX Lead - Build Better Customer Experiences. I'm sure there are tons of others.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

This is some great feedback and I def. appreciate the input.

One of the things my boss is kinda high on is placing a couple of kiosks near the exits with ipads for a quick survey. I haven't run into many of these, but I don't remember actually wanting to take one as I'm leaving. Being in local government, it's difficult to provide an incentive to take the survey (ie 5% off your next permit application, it just doesn't work like that as opposed to retail or fast food etc.). The best I could do is have staff encourage our customers to take the survey when they wrap up their discussion. I was also thinking of including a survey link in our email signatures or maybe even setting up qr codes to link to the survey.

If there's no incentive to take the survey, what other mechanism would make you as a custmer want to take it? I know for me personally, I tend to use a survey as a way to vent on a negative experience. I generally don't provide any feedback on positive ones (I guess similar to product reviews right?)

Oh and @Linus, I checked out the link you gave and even ordered a few books I'll be checking out. Appreciate the help there!

 

[deadlyapp]

This is some great feedback and I def. appreciate the input.

One of the things my boss is kinda high on is placing a couple of kiosks near the exits with ipads for a quick survey. I haven't run into many of these, but I don't remember actually wanting to take one as I'm leaving. Being in local government, it's difficult to provide an incentive to take the survey (ie 5% off your next permit application, it just doesn't work like that as opposed to retail or fast food etc.). The best I could do is have staff encourage our customers to take the survey when they wrap up their discussion. I was also thinking of including a survey link in our email signatures or maybe even setting up qr codes to link to the survey.

If there's no incentive to take the survey, what other mechanism would make you as a custmer want to take it? I know for me personally, I tend to use a survey as a way to vent on a negative experience. I generally don't provide any feedback on positive ones (I guess similar to product reviews right?)

Oh and @Linus, I checked out the link you gave and even ordered a few books I'll be checking out. Appreciate the help there!

That's a hard one. We're currently doing a survey for our customers (purchasing industrial equipment parts) and we blasted out the survey to many people we've done work with recently, but also put it in our signatures. As far as I know, we haven't gotten much up-take.

Rather than spending money to install kiosks, I'd think about earmarking that money for some gift cards or something - $100 to home depot, a restaurant chain, or whatever. Have a drawing once a quarter or so (so it doesn't cost you much). I'm sure you can slap it into a marketing budget or something.

 

[LikeLinus]

This is some great feedback and I def. appreciate the input.

One of the things my boss is kinda high on is placing a couple of kiosks near the exits with ipads for a quick survey. I haven't run into many of these, but I don't remember actually wanting to take one as I'm leaving. Being in local government, it's difficult to provide an incentive to take the survey (ie 5% off your next permit application, it just doesn't work like that as opposed to retail or fast food etc.). The best I could do is have staff encourage our customers to take the survey when they wrap up their discussion. I was also thinking of including a survey link in our email signatures or maybe even setting up qr codes to link to the survey.

If there's no incentive to take the survey, what other mechanism would make you as a custmer want to take it? I know for me personally, I tend to use a survey as a way to vent on a negative experience. I generally don't provide any feedback on positive ones (I guess similar to product reviews right?)

Oh and @Linus, I checked out the link you gave and even ordered a few books I'll be checking out. Appreciate the help there!

We work with a company who learned our business and then tailored our customer surveys. They then send them out for us using customer information that we collect when they start their accounts. Do you have information like that? Do you have a web site with a login?

• Print material (invoices, documents, recipes and such) that you can include a link or QR code on?
• Phone call message at the end of a call.
• Reps discussing with customers in person.
• E-mail link. Use collected email addresses.

I'm sure there are more, but you get the idea.

 

[Captante]

Go 100% remote?

Oh wait ....

 

[DigDog]

A: you know all those little "hey maybe if we did THIS or didn't do THAT" suggestions your entry-level staff gives you, that you never considered implementing?

 

[thestrangebrew1]

A: you know all those little "hey maybe if we did THIS or didn't do THAT" suggestions your entry-level staff gives you, that you never considered implementing?

Yea this is definitely a direction I want to go. I'm going to try and be as inclusive with staff as possible so they feel they're part of the solution rather than me providing direction. It's going to be a learning curve for sure.

 

[CZroe]

Heard a Dillard’s manager complaining that an associate made a $1,700 sale and didn’t ask for contact details to call the client back to thank them later. He doesn’t want them to be a cashier.

I dunno... as a customer I don’t think I’d want that call.

 

[Captante]

Heard a Dillard’s manager complaining that an associate made a $1,700 sale and didn’t ask for contact details to call the client back to thank them later. He doesn’t want them to be a cashier.

I dunno... as a customer I don’t think I’d want that call.

Totally agreed ... I would not be happy at all.

 

[Brainonska511]

One of the things my boss is kinda high on is placing a couple of kiosks near the exits with ipads for a quick survey. I haven't run into many of these, but I don't remember actually wanting to take one as I'm leaving. Being in local government, it's difficult to provide an incentive to take the survey (ie 5% off your next permit application, it just doesn't work like that as opposed to retail or fast food etc.). The best I could do is have staff encourage our customers to take the survey when they wrap up their discussion. I was also thinking of including a survey link in our email signatures or maybe even setting up qr codes to link to the survey.

For an incentive, you could always frame it as a way to get 'better local government'. People might appreciate having a say in helping to make it better for future interactions.

 

[deadlyapp]

Heard a Dillard’s manager complaining that an associate made a $1,700 sale and didn’t ask for contact details to call the client back to thank them later. He doesn’t want them to be a cashier.

I dunno... as a customer I don’t think I’d want that call.

Depends on the goods. When I worked sales at a Sears I would regularly call customers who made large purchases to make sure they had no issues. This would generally be things that needed set up (like a tractor, or TV+stereo, etc), or got delivered. Most customers liked the extra touch.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

For something like a govt agency department, my numero uno concern is the experience of the customer service rep. I should *never* go into a conversation with more knowledge of their systems than they do. It irritates me beyond words when, after 30 minutes worth of online research, I can train someone on their job.

Secondary to that, I would say my most important requirement would be for them to get me what I need, quickly and efficiently. It sort of ties in with number 1, but I can't stand when I'm told to go online for x y z resources, oh call back on whatever day, go to some other office for things 1, and 2. F all that noise, if I need information on zoning, I need to be able to get all of it in one place, from one person (whether that's the person I talk to first, or the person they initially route me to), and done so with a sense of purpose so I can get on with my day.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

For something like a govt agency department, my numero uno concern is the experience of the customer service rep. I should *never* go into a conversation with more knowledge of their systems than they do. It irritates me beyond words when, after 30 minutes worth of online research, I can train someone on their job.

Secondary to that, I would say my most important requirement would be for them to get me what I need, quickly and efficiently. It sort of ties in with number 1, but I can't stand when I'm told to go online for x y z resources, oh call back on whatever day, go to some other office for things 1, and 2. F all that noise, if I need information on zoning, I need to be able to get all of it in one place, from one person (whether that's the person I talk to first, or the person they initially route me to), and done so with a sense of purpose so I can get on with my day.

This is the purpose of our consolidation. Previously we had 5 different agencies that needed to review applications and a customer would be bounced around to different offices, a few of them in different parts of town. Now we're down to 4 agencies in the same office, and 1 agency that's in a different part of town, but we're looking to see if we can bring them over also. This should increase our efficiency pretty drastically once we get everything up and running.

 

[CZroe]

Depends on the goods. When I worked sales at a Sears I would regularly call customers who made large purchases to make sure they had no issues. This would generally be things that needed set up (like a tractor, or TV+stereo, etc), or got delivered. Most customers liked the extra touch.

Just clothes and fashion accessories here. I would give them the stink eye for even asking for my contact details. If they got it from a credit application or something I’d feel it was an abuse of the information I provided.

 

[deadlyapp]

Just clothes and fashion accessories here. I would give them the stink eye for even asking for my contact details. If they got it from a credit application or something I’d feel it was an abuse of the information I provided.

Nearly every store has a loyalty program now, and they certainly work. If I was spending a lot of money at a store, I would be OK with them contacting me (generally), but agree that just a high value clothes purchase doesn't warrant a follow up (unless it's like a suit/tux, etc).

 

[Sukhoi]

Make sure all of your forms, rules, regulations, and other documentation is easily available on your website. If some form mentions "must comply with Reg 31.356" make sure I can find Reg 31.356.

And yes, as mentioned, make sure your staff is knowledgeable. It drives me bonkers when after a couple minutes of internet research I know more than the "expert" at some nanny organization I need to get permission from to do something.

 

[dullard]

1) Empower your employees to fix the customer's problem.
2) Empower your employees to fix the customer's problem.
3) Empower your employees to fix the customer's problem (not just a wild goose chase of hoops to jump through).
4) Empower your employees to fix the customer's problem.
5) Empower your employees to fix the customer's problem.

If I think of anything else worthwhile, I'll post it. But that should cover it. If #2 doesn't work, #5 certainly will.