Working from the Inside Out: Top Internal Customer Service Standards to Help Any Organization Succeed

"The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind."
- Jacob Bronowski

Because of the competitive nature of today's business world, your company must consider the importance of consistent customer service as you seek to stay viable in your market.

This means not only having a top-level service-training program to help your employees understand the external or customer-driven service they must provide, but also having that same level of performance and consistency inside the organization as well.

Let’s look at some key insights to understand as we create that internal service standard:

Perhaps most importantly, we need to understand how to best communicate with individual co-workers.

Similar to developing the best atmosphere and communication techniques with clients, we need to extend the same service to our own team. Realizing that not everyone communicates or behaves in the same fashion that we do can help us reduce frustrations when working closely with other co-workers. Whether we are presenting information, assigning a task, or simply trying to make “small talk,” we need to understand how our co-workers can most effectively be addressed and what sort of approach will best create the connection we need.

The primary goal here is to simply develop a sense of trust and respect among our team members as the business grows.

Assessment tools like the Personal Profile System and DiSC® can be invaluable to help profile our co-workers and ourselves. We need to know that some people need direct, to-the-point communication; some people need detailed, fact-driven information; and some people need a more personalized, non-formal approach when being spoken to. Using tools like the DiSC® Team Graph can create a visual picture of what the team looks like in terms of personalities and how to best work with everyone else on the team.

Knowing how to talk to a co-worker is a critical component of internal customer service because it helps us create a more effective environment and takes the guesswork out of how to talk to our fellow employees.

Equally important is ensuring that a well-defined vision has been created--not only for the organization, but also for individual departments. This can help create the consistency in how we approach our co-workers from an organizational standpoint.

Remember, we are trying to develop a sense of reliability and uniformity internally, so that from the outside we appear trustworthy.

What better way to do that than to develop our people with a common vision so that no matter what the situation, the entire team is working toward the same results? This is a critical concept because the client will notice!

Consider the above simple yet effective solutions when creating a uniform service standard internally.

In these times, it seems as though to remain competitive in your industry everything becomes an extension of customer service. Ensuring that your service standards are consistent among your associates, both inside and outside the company, is the single most important thing you can do.

For tips to effectively train your people and streamline your organization, and for other solutions to your staffing challenges, visit www.traininginabox.com. Sign up for your free newsletter at www.quicktrainingsolutions.com to make your HR training and development life easier. Corey Nielsen designs and delivers innovative and effective training solutions for businesses through NTG, his business development and training company.

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