Here’s the situation. Your customers are flooding you with customer service complaints so you schedule some customer service training, right? Not so fast! To get to the heart of the problem, I suggest that you ask “why.” Not just once, but at least five times.

    I know you’re probably scratching your head so let me put it this way. If you don’t find the right solution, then you are wasting time while your competitors continue to improve. And you still have the original problem to fix. For you to get the right diagnosis and solution, I suggest asking a series of “why” questions. Let me give you an example.

    A medium-sized distribution company was bombarded with complaints that customers were being ignored, product wasn’t ready at Will Call, customers left on hold, and employees were being edgy in speech. The management was not happy with this situation and contacted me to do a series of customer relations seminars to eliminate their problem.

    The first thing I wanted to do was get a feel for their current level of customer service to customize the training. So I shadowed employees at one of their main distribution centers including ride-alongs with their drivers. When there was a break in the action, I asked the employees probing questions to understand their job processes and thoughts while with the customer.

    What I found was employees with very good individual customer relations. They had the desire to serve people and they had the relational skills to do so. Although they didn’t always use these skills, I still felt something else had to be at the heart of this performance problem. So I started asking “why”.

    Why did the employees get edgy with the customers at times? Because of the stress that was caused from disappointing customers each and every day.

    Why were they disappointing customers? Because the interactions were consistently longer than the customer expected.

    Why were the interactions to long? Because the employees could not find the information they needed to process the customers request.

    Why couldn’t they find the information? Because they didn’t know were to look.

    Why didn’t they know where to look? Because they couldn’t remember from their new hire training.

    Why couldn’t they remember? Because procedures were not written down for reference and inexperience did not give them the ability to take proper notes during training.

    The root cause was not personal relation skills; it was a lack of retention from initial training. The solution was not customer service training, but work process definition, creation of reference materials, and training to use the materials.

    With this diagnosis and solution in hand, I wrote new job aids for this company and worked with a veteran employee to teach others to use them. This corrected the problem and avoided paying for training time that wouldn’t have worked.