By Maggie Bayless

When clients ask us to help them develop customer service training for their businesses, we always start by helping them articulate and document what “great service” means to them. Effective training starts by defining what the trainees will be expected to know or be able to perform at the end of the training. If you’ve been reading this column for the past few months, you know that we’re using Zingerman’s Four Training Plan Questions as a model:

1) What is expected of the trainee and by when?
2) How will the information be made available?
3) How will we know the expectations are or are not being met? and,
4) What are the rewards or consequences for meeting or not meeting the expectations?

Last month’s column addressed Training Plan Question Three and various ways to measure whether expectations are being met. Once you’ve done the measurement, it’s time to consider Training Plan Question Four: What are the rewards or consequences for meeting or not meeting the expectations?

Rewarding Great Service
Why should you reward great service? Because you want to keep the great service providers on your staff. Survey how your organization rewards staff members who provide great service. Are the best service providers being paid significantly more than their peers who give mediocre (or poor) service? Are they rewarded with preferred shifts or an occasional break from doing inventory? Or, as is often the case, are they rewarded by being expected to pick up the slack for employees who make service a lower priority?

Perhaps you feel that providing great service is its own reward — the pleasure comes from giving a customer what he wants. Doing so makes work more fun and life more enjoyable. However, although personal gratification is a strong motivator, it is inherent to the great service provider. Great service providers will provide great service wherever they go. What motivates those people to stay and work in your organization instead of moving across town for fifty cents more per hour? At Zingerman’s, we’ve found that granting employees the empowerment necessary to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy and then recognizing them for excellent customer service are important ingredients in retaining top-quality service providers.

The Consequences of Poor Service
Why have consequences for poor service? For the same reason that you want to reward great service: to keep the great service providers on your staff. Great service providers appreciate being part of an organization that values good customer service. They want to be part of an organization in which they can feel confident that customers will be treated well by any and all employees, and one in which employees are treated well by each other. Building and maintaining that culture means not only rewarding excellent customer service, but also enforcing consequences for poor service.

It’s up to you to decide on the minimum service standards that must be met by employees in order for them to continue working in your organization. Several of the expectations you developed with regard to customer service should be baseline standards. If a staff member cannot demonstrate the ability or the desire to meet that minimum level of performance, the consequence should be that he/she finds a new employer.

Keeping those employees who consistently fail to meet your expectations while preaching the importance of good customer service sends a very mixed message to your great service providers as it devalues their efforts.

How Should You Reward Great Service?
At Zingerman’s, we recognize and reward service in a variety of ways:

• Our Service Star Award is presented monthly; Service Star winners receive an extra $50 in their paychecks. Candidates must be nominated by another member of the organization. To encourage staff members to notice excellent interdepartmental service, the person who nominates a winning Service Star also receives a reward — a $25 Zingerman’s gift certificate. To promote cooperation between our businesses, this nominating bonus is doubled if your nominee is from a Zingerman’s business other than your own (e.g., someone from the Deli nominates a winner from the Bakehouse).

• Extra Mile Stories are a regular feature in our monthly staff newsletter, Workin’! Submitted by employees about their coworkers, these stories document everyday acts of exceptional service. The “Extra Milers” earn a $10 Zingerman’s gift certificate.

• We also recognize teams of individuals for their contributions towards service excellence. A contest for “Best Customer Service Improvement” is conducted each quarter. The award’s purpose is to promote service-oriented teamwork; therefore, entries must come from a department or business and not an individual. The winning team receives $250 to use to benefit the whole team.

Additionally, passing Zingerman’s Basic Customer Service Test (a short written test) is one of the requirements for successfully completing orientation. The reward for completing orientation is becoming eligible for benefits (health insurance, paid vacation, employee discounts). The consequence for not completing orientation is the employee does not receive benefits.

Effective rewards don’t have to be expensive or fancy. Creative ideas used by other businesses that we’ve worked with include reserved parking spaces, preference in making scheduling requests, or being excused from one month’s inventory. If you’re not feeling creative, have your staff brainstorm ways they’d like to be rewarded for great service.

Besides recognizing great service providers with formal rewards, informal recognition is an effective method of informing staff that their efforts are appreciated. Thank you notes and flowers are always nice. It is a Zingerman’s tradition to end each meeting with “appreciations” — the people mentioned are usually those who have gone the extra mile for someone they work with. The written version of appreciations is one of the most-read sections of Workin’! Each month, about half of the appreciations submitted to Workin’! relate to great service received from a manager, staff member, or peer.

In the end, the true measure of an organization’s customer service culture can be found in the stories that are told about how customers’ expectations were met and exceeded. Following is one of my current favorites:

“We noticed that Daphna took the time one Saturday morning to run over to Zingerman’s Practical Produce (our produce market across the street from the Deli) and make fruit salad for some customers who were asking for it when the Deli had run out. Thanks for helping out, Daphna!”

When you hear employees relate stories like this about one another, you know you’re creating an organization where great customer service is more than just a vision — it is a reality. That doesn’t mean you stop trying to improve, but it does mean that you’re doing something right!