Building Initiative in Your Customer Service Teams.

Everybody says they want more initiative in their team members. But you can't exactly teach it. So how do you infuse it into your customer service team members ? How do you encourage it to grow ?

I answer these questions and others, with what I call The Initiative Formula. This formula can be stated, “ Initiative is bred by confidence, confidence is bred by competence.” My simple formula distills where initiative comes from, and how to get it to grow into one short sentence. But since it is not that simple, especially from the start, this article will go into more detail.

The Initiative Formula, can be thought of as having two halves.

FIRST HALF: Initiative is Bred by Confidence,

Its human nature to seek that which is safe. What this means is if your customer service team is unsure of their skill sets, they will be slow to act outside the boundaries that their skills as they understand them allow. The same is true of their understanding of their authority. Time after time I have seen customer service team members not exercise authority to solve a customer's issue.

This tends to happen for one of two reasons 1) They don't know (perhaps were never fully taught,) that they have the authority to act without approval. 2) their organization has such an environment of fear, that they fear getting in trouble whether they have the authority or not. Accountability is critical, a climate of fear is inexcusable ! When customer service managers are coaching their teams, they must take care that they encourage the desired growth, without putting a damper on independent action. The same could be said of those who supervising front line management. Is the way you deploy your goals through your front line managers, encouraging or discouraging independent action by those they lead ? Are your front line leaders getting to the goals you set, or are they gaming the system and getting there the easiest way possible ? How is that answer impacting the growth of their teams ? World class customer service comes through hard work, not gamesmanship !

SECOND HALF: Confidence is Bred by Competence,

Confidence on the part of your team members comes from two things. First knowledge, which of course springs from training. Second from experience.

Training to be effective has to be the right kind of training of the biggest points I see missing in customer service training is organizational knowledge. Who does or has the authority to do what for the customer where ? How does the organization function ? What makes it succeed ? What hurts it ? If I make an exception what are the boundaries ? How do I prioritize ? Agents who understand these things well tend to exercise a lot more initiative. Another thought, how often and regularly do you trained. In the military or with first responders, training once, or even dozens of times is never enough. In those environments, you have to act even quicker than you can think. They train over and over on the same skill, until it becomes automatic. Then they train some more ! The military in particular is an absolute expert at training. So why then in business do we see training once, or maybe once a year as good enough ?

The main factor with experience is that it takes time. Experience and time are tightly linked. But this is business, we don't have time to sit and wait for people to gain experience. What we can do is make sure our people make the most of the wait ! Are they getting the right kind of experience to grow the way we want. Should they cross-train on other accounts or functions ? Should they get some supervised experience training and leading others ?

BACK TO THE FORMULA: and final thoughts.

There are probably as many kind of customer service teams as there are customer service teams. Add to that there are almost as many details as there are teams. No one article therefore could cover this topic in full. The key take away is the formula itself. Initiative is Bred by Confidence, Confidence is Bred by Competence !