Helping to ensure client satisfaction

A leading firm of business and financial advisers asked us to deliver customer services training to its reception staff, ensuring a professional welcome for visitors to the firm.

The brief

A leading firm of business advisers wanted to make sure that reception staff across its 30 UK offices were fully effective in their important role as the first point of contact for callers and visitors. We were asked to train staff so that visitors would gain the best possible customer experience on entering the building or during their first telephone call.

The challenges

Staff working in the firm’s 30 UK offices were to be trained in a two-day customer service team event. It was important to make sure the work was well-targeted and enabled them to refine their customer service standards.

The solution

We suggested conducting a mystery shopping exercise ahead of a two-day customer service training event so we could establish the current level of customer service.

The execution

Through a mixture of telephone calls and personal visits, we were able to measure existing levels of customer service, presenting our findings in a comprehensive report that gave important insights into the way visitors and callers were met by the firm’s reception staff. The results of the exercise were used in the training workshop that followed, to enable staff to gain an insight into how their customers see them. This gave the tutors the opportunity to work on real issues that needed to be improved and to help people feed into improvements of their customer service standards.

The verdict

Thanks to the mystery shopping exercise, and the training workshop the reception staff now have their own set of customer service standards that they are being measured against. Feedback from the workshop was that it was very practical and enabled everyone to contribute to setting their own standards. There will be another similar workshop in the future to measure progress

• Excellent customer service was a priority for the receptionists as the first point of contact for the firm’s customers
• A mystery shopping exercise, carried out face-to-face and over the phone, helped give focus to a follow-on training workshop.
• Offices across the UK were visited or called as part of the exercise.