Honesty and Your Customer Service Team Feedback

A while ago, I saw an online discussion regarding ‘what’s the one thing you most admire about your customer service manager?’

One of the most popular answers was ‘open and direct in communication’.

The corporate customer service management trainers at Manager Tools often ask ‘how many of you, provided it was done ethically and respectfully, would like your manager to tell you how you’re doing more often, even if it were negative?’. Want to take a guess at how many people say yes? Everybody.

Time and again, we see that customer service agents want to hear more often how they’re doing.

Is your customer service REALLY that good?

We all want more feedback ourselves. We want to know how we stack up in our service offering. Is our customer service REALLY good? 

Every time we review and plan on starting some type of feedback program for our team, we typically come up with excuses and don’t come through. The excuses don’t matter. When we fail to give our customer service team members feedback, we fail our customer service team.

‘I tried it, and it worked – my customer service team members were happy to get feedback’.

Great customer service requires feedback.

Everyone wants feedback. Everyone wants to improve. Feedback in customer service helps improve the service experience and makes great customer service more consistent.

Giving feedback to employees isn’t hard. Just start:

‘Can I share something with you?’

‘When you do X, it means that Y can happen. Thanks’.

‘When you don’t do Y, then Z happens to the rest of the team.’

Try it once today. Pick your best performer. You don’t need to tell them what it’s all about. You don’t need to introduce it. Don’t make a big deal about it. Plan what you’re going to say, and say it. Better customer service will happen in the future because you chose to offer effective feedback today.