Customer service is a big focus of mine right now.
With so much going on in our world, I feel that our co-ops are at a bit of a junction where it would be good to clarify goals and prioritize efforts in this area.
For me, it is one of the most important things we need to do to be supportive to our staff.
Staff need to know what the expectations are for providing excellent customer service.
We need to make it clear that customer service is a high priority.
This means we need to train, provide examples, and practice how we want customer service to show up on our sales floor.
Staff also need to know how to effectively navigate challenging customer situations.
This means there needs to be a clear and defined understanding when a customer’s conduct has pushed outside a boundary line along with what our enforcement/security and de-escalation protocols will be.
Without clarity on these points, confusion ensues, emotions get engaged and situations can spin in any number of ways – many of them not good.
A good way to get clarity is to work through scenarios to determine responses.
For instance, if a customer is needy, impatient, snotty, what are our service expectations?
If a customer is behaving in ways that are targeting a staff person with discrimination or harassment what steps will be taken?
If a customer comes in wearing a political piece of clothing causing some staff distress what are our expectations of response?
Staff need to be provided with clear guidelines to follow in seeking managerial support when lines are crossed.
And this, I feel, is a big one, providing training to staff on how to build their capacity to deal professionally with annoyances, challenges, and deeper provocations that can happen with current day cultural and political differences.
There may be differences in our co-ops for what standards we have, what protocols to be followed, and where our boundary line exists. What is the same for all our co-ops, is the need for managers in our co-ops to provide clarity, training support, protocols, and talking points.
When we are clear as managers our staff can be clear. And that clarity provides structure and functionality.
This gives us our best chance for navigating difficult and emotionally charged situations in a professional, responsive way, not a reactive knee-jerk way.
We’re all swimming in some swift currents right now, and it’s an important time to connect with staff on who we will be for our communities at this time.