Driving Customer Service Standards & Behaviours for Select Service Partner (Food & Beverage units in airports and railway stations)
With over 170 locations and the numbers of staff on each site ranging from single figures to several hundred, Select Service Partner (SSP) identified that customer service was being driven by process, with little emphasis on the behaviours and attitude that should be displayed when serving a customer.
For SSP to maintain its market leading role, attract and retain customers as well as gain and retain contracts, they recognised a need to change the approach to customer service, with more coaching around the attitudes and behaviours that staff needed to display when dealing with customers.
Having already identified the 5 key attitudes and behaviours that reflected their desired Customer Service Personality and Style, what they needed from TFA was help to come up with the tools that Unit Managers could use to maintain the focus on Customer Service and embed the new behaviours.
The challenges of day-to-day operations in the units demanded that learning activity should be flexed around normal operations, and should therefore be restricted to individual activities of 5-10 minutes duration. In addition, the solution needed to consider the needs of team members whose first language wasn’t English.
Measuring success:
SSP were looking for an improved positive response to the question “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a colleague, friend or family member?”
The TFA approach:
Research with the Unit Managers (UMs) told us that they needed (and desperately wanted) clear direction on what to do and simple tools to help them do it well. It was clear that the activities needed to be easy and enjoyable for UMs to facilitate to grow their confidence and support the development of a coaching relationship with their teams.
The materials created consisted of a set of 25 ‘character cards’ with instructions for a range of ways they could be used to support learning; each based on a well-known family card game. Branded as ‘SSP Service Style’, the idea was that participants would quickly become engaged in discussing the characters depicted as an alternative to role play, and that learning could be facilitated as a very natural outcome to the activities. An accompanying Manager Guide provided UMs with everything they needed to make full use of the cards on a 1:1 or group basis along with a simple matrix to indicate which activity was best suited to a range of potential scenarios.
Blank cards were also provided so that UMs could work with their team to complete cards for their own team, alongside actions to improve scores. Poster size cards were used to recognise individual achievement and communicate star performers.
Ongoing success:
TFA has subsequently supported SSP to:
- create a Retail Version of the cards for their M&S Simply Food units
- integrate the Service Style behaviours into the SSP Sales Wise behaviours used within the business
- develop the behaviours into ‘Till Takeover’ activities for local champions to facilitate within SSP units at Dublin Airport in order to provide a more intensive burst of customer service activity.
(NOTE: The project has been submitted for the 2010 National Training Awards.)
