Listening to the Service Experience

Creating a great sales effort begins by hiring people that have the raw ability to learn and to:

* fully understand products or services

* effectively deliver presentations fearlessly and consistently

* care about their customer's experience by listening and learning.

How? Here are a few ways to listen and learn:

Live Chat

Eliminate phone tag and offer service on demand. Even if you run a small businesses you can provide real-time support for visitors to your website. Organizations like LivePerson.com, BoldChat and Live2Support.com provide outsourced support services at competitive rates.

On-Demand Consumer University

Learning isn't limited to employees. In fact, consumers can benefit (and appreciate) the same information you provide your team.

Video FAQ and How-to's

You Tube offers a video plug-in for your site, that gives you the chance to quickly and affordably post content, like how-to videos that can make life easier for your customers.

Social Media

Services such as Facebook help you connect to multiple communities. Tools like Visibility and Radian 6 allow you to measure the effectiveness of your outreach to those groups.

Staff profiles and Blogs

Customers want to follow the team members they talk to everyday, not necessarily the CFO or COO. Get over your need for control and let your people blog. Employees may pleasantly surprise you by attracting even more customers.

Independent Reviews

Customer reviews and feedback are part of a richer online experience. Some companies, like customerreviews.com, offer widgets that can enable a review function within your own site. Others, like tripadvisor.com offer 3rd party reviews for specific services, in this case, hotels and travel services.

10 Questions to Ask Your Learners

Creating a great learning experience begins with a systems approach to course design - looking for ways to structure the total learning experience (before, during and after an interaction).

Ask your audience these basic questions to quickly spot some opportunities:

1. How did you hear about this training? What were your expectations?

2. In general, how do you feel about this course?

3. Were you able to demonstrate your skills before this class?

4. What else do you need to learn about ___?

5. Are there opportunities to learn (resources) outside our training curriculum that you would like to include?

6. How could we create more informal and social learning?

7. Would it improve your experience if we invited customers to assess your performance?

8. Can you see yourself having to address any of the scenarios or customer-driven situations we offered?

9. How could we create even more meaningful challenges for future students?

10. Do you think our leaders support the learning through their behavior?