Training Exercise Customer Focus

Good for

Building empathy for the customer.

For new starters who need to understand more about customer types that they will be helping.

For longer serving members of the team who may have stopped connecting with customers and what they need from them.

Reminding employees that customers are people and have specific needs which they require help with.

Length

As short or as long as you want to make it.

You will need - optional

You can even give them props to signify your different types of customers, hard hats, types of shoes, - there's a useful page on customer segmentation to help you think about that.

Instructions

Introduce the idea of customer focus - that our behaviour needs to focus on the customer.

Use different situations or customer experiences to explore customer focus.

Training Exercise Customer Focus - Option 1

Ask your people to telephone into your organization. Record the experience, or put the call on loud speaker.

Ask them “what did you think as a customer? How did you feel?”

This simple change in perspective gets people talking, debating what is important to your customer base and more likely committing to individual action plan that will improve your overall approach to customer service.

What behaviour did the employee have that indicated they were customer focused.... or now?

Option 2

If you do have mystery shopping data available use that to inform your training session or team meeting.  Get groups to discuss the customer experience, and ask how that experience made the customer feel.

Build the data into a quiz. A quiz is a highly interactive way of getting people to see the bigger picture of what you offer and how well, and what they need to do to keep the customers happy.

If you have mystery shopper video, then play that facilitate a discussion about the behavior which will have affected the customer both positively and negatively.

Option 3

Use props ( shoes or hats ) or photo's of different customers to help people think through their responses to different kinds of customer and what their needs might be.