Here are some tips to help you motivate your team and ensure that the training is effective:

Change the Name

Instead of using the term “Customer Service Training,” which may sound boring or uninspiring to some, consider using a more inclusive and exciting title, such as ESS Chain of Excellence or ESS Boot Camp. Promote the session as a reward for great work and highlight at least two benefits that will make their jobs easier. Also, use the opportunity to celebrate the team’s achievements and strengthen their relationships.

Design the Session with the Provider

Avoid using a generic training program that may not be relevant to your school, role, challenges, and learning needs. Instead, engage a provider who specialises in customer service and can customise the content to meet your team’s specific requirements. Ensure that the provider encourages attendees to share their concerns and best practices, but avoids role plays that can make staff feel anxious or uncomfortable. Also, build in time for breaks and ask the provider to encourage attendees to go outside to refresh their minds and bodies.

Join in the Event

As a manager, it’s essential to lead by example and show your team that customer service excellence is everyone’s responsibility. Join in the event as a team member and participate in the activities. Ask questions, share your challenges, and listen to your team’s concerns. Let the provider handle the tough questions and provide solutions. Use this opportunity to reinforce the importance of people skills and working together.

Remember, even if some team members still resist attending with a positive mindset, a well-designed and delivered session can be a positive step forward. External providers should be bringing their A Game and providing ideas to keep your team motivated to work together and provide consistently excellent service.

Contact us today to book the perfect professional development for your team.

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Encouraging your team to ‘play’ at work can have a positive impact on their customer service skills. By treating every challenge or problem as a puzzle, your team can come to work with a curious mindset and be ready to solve the puzzle of customer expectations. The staff ‘win’ when they are able to identify and exceed those expectations.

Motivating ESS to Exceed Customer Expectations

However, it is important to note that motivating staff with just the promise of pay may not be enough to sustain their desire to consistently exceed customer expectations. It takes dedication, education, and self-motivation to achieve this level of service excellence, especially when interacting with all types of customers every day.

To help your team, you can ask them what motivates them to exceed customer expectations. Some may enjoy the challenge of adapting to each customer’s unique service style, while others may find joy in helping people or listening to their needs. It’s important to allow your team to freely share their thoughts and ideas on how they can do better and provide what they need to achieve their goals.

Allowing Your Team to ‘Play’ at Work

Allowing your team to ‘play’ at work does not mean being unprofessional and silly with customers. It means giving them permission to think like detectives and solve the ‘puzzle’ of customer expectations in a professionally inquisitive way. This approach can lead to your customers receiving a level of service that delights them and your staff feeling energised by a ‘game’ that has many ways to win.

Empowering Your ESS to Provide Excellent Service

Providing excellent service is not a ‘one size fits all’ process, and it’s important to empower your team to think creatively and develop their own strategies to exceed customer expectations. By giving them permission to think like detectives, you can have a team of people who come to work ready to ‘play’, and a satisfied customer base that feels valued and respected.

Conclusion and Further Resources

If you want to help your team become detectives, you can check out Chapter D of my book, which provides further insights on this topic. You can click this link to download the first chapter for free.

By Cate Schreck

The post Motivating ESS to Improve Skills and Exceed Expectations appeared first on Just For Schools.

The truth is that providing consistently high levels of service is not natural for all ESS. For some people, it takes a lot of energy and over time, even the most highly skilled and service-focused ESS can become complacent.

• They may forget how important the first 3 seconds are when they greet people face to face.

• They may forget how it’s vital to consider their tone of voice when speaking on the phone.

• They may forget that visitors to the School who are within eye or ear shot of ESS will assess the School on how staff interact with each other.

So, how do you inspire ESS to provide consistently excellent service all day, every day? 

Ask them to identify their WIIFM: What’s In It For Me. Ask them, to ask themselves; “What’s In It For Me to provide excellence service, every day?”

This is a personal question. Some may say it’s so they get to keep their job so they can pay the mortgage, put food on the table, or save for something special. These are what we call external rewards as they are all related to money and status. Those goals are great, but this activity is about the internal rewards.

Some examples of internal rewards are:

• Getting to help people everyday – good for self esteem and for developing empathy

• Making work friends – sometimes they can be friends for life

• Improving soft skills (people skills) – great for now and wherever my career takes me

• Keeps me active – physically and mentally

Once you know each person’s WIIFM, never let these be forgotten. Talk about them at meetings, share them across the team, invite new staff to add theirs to the list and where possible, give staff an opportunity to refresh and improve their soft skills as they are transferable. To help you make it clear why seeking and completing soft skills development is worthwhile, tell them this:

“I/We may not be able to guarantee you a job for life, but I/we can guarantee you a career for as long as you want, as soft skills are in high demand by all employers.”

If you would like help creating a culture of service excellence in your frontline ESS, grab a copy of my book “The A-Z of Service Excellence”. It’s packed with ideas, insights and actions that will help you keep your team focused and inspired to reach their WIIFM.

Cate Schreck

The post How to Inspire Your ESS Team to Focus All Day, Every Day appeared first on Just For Schools.

When I ask them what they do to harness the Superpower of their Education Support Staff, they look at me a little confused and ask what on earth do I mean.

We all have this Superpower, but it often gets forgotten.

Let’s try out your Superpower now. It’s easy to do. Just turn up the corners of your mouth… and… Smile. Go on, don’t worry about who can see you, just smile.

In as little as 6 seconds a “fake” smile sends a message to your brain that you must be happy. This creates a rush of positive endorphins, and before you know it, you will not only look happy, but you will feel happy too. Double win.

Be careful, though, if someone else sees that you’re smiling they can become infected with a smile, and before you know it, everyone around them is smiling too. Triple win. 

Smiling is a universal means of communicating positivity and happiness, but did you know that whilst 30% of us smile more than 20 times a day, those with the greatest smile Superpower are children, who smile as many as 400 times per day. Where did all our smiles go?

The health benefits of smiling and laughing are also impressive. In 1971, Hunter Doherty (more commonly known as Patch Adams) created the Gesundheit! Institute. Patch and his team of clown doctors effectively used laughter as medicine and that method has flowed around the world and exists today in Australia as The Humour Foundation.

Their research tells us that laughter;

• Relaxes the muscles

• reduces pain and stress

• promotes a positive outlook and a feeling of well-being.

Families and the community are more likely to recommend and enrol at a school staffed with people who smile – big genuine tooth showing and eyes glowing smiles. The same goes for the inner workings of your school. And it’s not just the community who benefit from a culture of fun and smiles. A fun-focused workplace motivates employees to be more productive, less negative and have a greater tolerance for and understanding of unhappy customers, unplanned changes and unexpected challenges.

My definition of the Superpower of A SMILE;

A Small Movement Improving Lives Everywhere.

If you want help increasing smiles among your ESS, Chapter F in my book “The A – Z of Service Excellence” is dedicated to FUN. The book contains 250 pages of insights and actions to help your ESS harness their Superpowers and have your school known for more than what people would expect. You will be known for how you make your ESS and your families feel; valued, respected and happy.

In the meantime, rather than hire kids to work with your ESS, remind your teams to get their smiles out. (If they have a problem with smiling, you’ve got a bigger problem and you need to fix it fast so contact us now.)

The post Why Kids Should Be Your Frontline Education Support Staff appeared first on Just For Schools.