Is your customer service team struggling to consistently wow your customers?
Even if you carefully hired people with lovely personalities and a strong desire to assist your customers and leave them happy, your team may still be encountering problems. Depending on the complexity of your product or the nature of your customer’s needs, the problem may lie in your team’s problem-solving skill set, because even the friendliest response can’t replace the correct solution to a problem. If you suspect this may be what’s hindering your team’s success, train your team via practice exercises to use the I.D.E.A.L. approach to boost their problem-solving prowess.
Identify the problem(s)
Ask your team to quickly and accurately identify the problem from sample cases. This is easily found by comparing what the customer expected and what the customer received. Remind them to look for any need behind the need and to ask any clarifying questions. These answers will become the problems that form the central bubbles on their brainstorming charts.
Define the possible solutions
Next, each person should develop possible solutions to address the identified problem(s). Encourage them to develop creative solutions where appropriate and log the solutions around the problem bubbles.
Evaluate the ideas
Radiating out from the listed solutions, your team should now list pro’s and con’s relating to each approach. Once the ramifications of the potential solutions have been carefully thought out, one can be chosen as the best course of action.
Act to implement the plan
The team members can now practice communicating their chosen solutions to their “customer” in a clear and concise manner.
Learn for the future
Lastly, be sure to take advantage of the collective power of the learning experience by opening the floor to the group for input and reflection on the chosen course of action and the way in which it was communicated.
Through repeated practice of the I.D.E.A.L. problem-solving method, your team will begin to innately approach problems in this manner. This will result in efficient, accurate solutions being delivered to your customers in the friendly manner your team has always prided itself in. What more could a customer ask for?