Who are our customers?
Featured in the Excellent Customer Service training manual
By Susan Iacovou & Caroline Clemie
Category: Customer Service
Credit price: 4 download credits (Single user)
In many organisations employees concentrate their efforts on completing their own tasks, with little interest in where their role fits into the overall organisation, or even their department or unit. Ask a member of the team what they contribute to the organisation and you may find that they have surprisingly little awareness of the customer service chains of which they are a part. Without an awareness of the next link in the chain, it is often very difficult for team members to understand why they need to produce a product or service in a particular way – after all, they may not have really thought about the user of that product or service. Similarly, if they don’t think about the previous link in the service chains of which they are part, it is unlikely that they will get the information or service that they need. Simply defining the customer service chains is often enough to change the attitudes, and hence the actions, of team members. In this unit the team identify the customer service chains of which they are a part.
You introduce the training activity by outlining the concept of customer service chains to the team. They work on an exercise looking at the customer chains people participate in every day. Next, the team identify the customer service chains in common work situations taken from outside the organisation. Following this, they consider a three-stage process that will help them to recognise customer service chains of which they are part of. Then, they work through the first two stages of this process and discuss their conclusions. You brief the team on how to complete the customer service chains relating to their own tasks and they go away to complete the chains. During this time you check on their progress and help them with any difficulties they encounter. The team come together again and discuss their completed customer service chains. You explain that the work that they have done in this training activity forms the basis of later work on improving both the service they receive from previous links in the chain and the service they give to the next link in the chain. The training activity concludes with an outline of the main learning points.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to explain how to define the team’s customers and record the relationship between the team and their customers in the customer service chain.
- Themes:
- Planning,
- Questioning,
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 20 |
| Typical Duration: | 04:15:00 |
| No of Pages: | 28 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers during the early stages of introducing a customer service focus as a means of defining the service providers and customers with whom the team interact.
Download the training activity, Who are our customers? as featured in the Fenman training manual; Excellent Customer Service