Clear Communication and Customer Service

6/5/2018 (Permalink)

Developing strong communication skills is essential for many levels of personal and professional success. Those same skills can be applied to assist in creating exceptional customer experiences. Practicing a communication skill will make that skill second nature and reinforce the benefit clear communication will have. Many communication skill drills involve role-playing, and while that can be helpful it is not necessarily retainable, and “retainability” is a significant part of training.

One of the alternatives to role-playing exercises is the “building block challenge.”Which involves breaking up participants into groups of three and having them work together to build a small set from a building block toy line. The catch is that only one person can see and read the instructions, one person is allowed to build the set, and the “middle person” identifies the pieces based on the description. You set a time limit and rotate roles so that each participant gets an opportunity with providing and executing the instructions and change out block sets each rotation to ensure each experience is different. The purpose of this activity is to build skills based around providing instructions and directions without having any physical input on the project. The challenge has been used to train over the phone technical support specialists and provided measurable positive changes to efficiency and customer service metrics.   

You may not provide support over the phone, but practicing conveying a message clearly while having tactile tools for the exercise to view progress, can improve your ability to communicate and provide benefits to personal, professional, and customer relationships.