When Jerry Campbell thinks of prime examples of customer service, he can’t stop the famed Cheers’ lyrics, “Where everybody knows your name,” from running through his head.
“If you go into your favorite restaurant on Friday night, and you walk in, and they know who you are, you feel good,” says Campbell, chairman, president and CEO of HomeBanc N.A. “That’s the experience we try to create.”
When Campbell founded the bank in 2007, he instituted a company philosophy revolving around personal service. Features include personal bankers, meaning no teller lines, and a Sunset Commitment, which guarantees an employee will get back to you before the day ends.
But in order to have a successful customer service program, you need to be able to train employees in the aspects of delivering that service, says Campbell, who has about 100 employees.
Smart Business spoke with Campbell about how to develop a customer service training program for employees.
Commit to training your employees in customer service. If you don’t have any customers, you don’t have anything. We always say that nothing happens until there’s a sale, i.e., a customer. But I think to have a successful customer service program, it starts with the training of your staff. We have about 40 hours of classroom training for all of our staff who deal with customers.
We train our people to be close to our customers (and to be) relationship-oriented.
Determine the best training for your employees. You have to figure out what business you’re in. Are you in a sales business, a service business, a technical assistance business or what?
If you’re in a service business, you need to do service techniques all the way from how to answer the phone, stand up and introduce yourself, give your card to someone, all of those things.
I’m sure you’ve gone into a business where someone doesn’t stand up, they don’t introduce themselves, they don’t give you a card, and in some cases, they might even act like you’re a disruption of their process for whatever they’re doing.
Our training is sort of equally divided between sales and technical issues like compliance and regulations and so forth. We’ve gone to a lot of online training for some of the items, some of which we get through the regulators and some we buy from third parties. Then we have classroom training, which is more sales-oriented, specific to our business and our products and how we operate.
So I think it’s a function of you’ve got to decide what business you’re in and what are your niches. Then, how do you train for that.
