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To Increase Customer Loyalty, Deliver Service and Coach Sales
We’ve had a difficult two years, however, we are re-emerging as a much stronger company," says Sales and Service Trainer Barry Timmins. His organization, the Chemical Services Division of $1.6 billion hazardous waste management leader Safety-Kleen, recently has gone through significant organizational change. But instead of stalling, Safety-Kleen assessed operations during its tumultuous period to see how and where it could help people be more effective after the company reorganized.
The result was two initiatives that are helping Safety-Kleen employees excel at their most important jobs. For field customer service staff, that means becoming more competitive by focusing on serving the customer’s total needs rather than just focusing on performing tasks. For sales managers, the goal is increasing salespeople’s effectiveness through coaching.
Serve Customers’ Underlying Personal Needs
"We needed to improve customer service to solve retention and service issues we were seeing in the field. We knew we could sell, but if we couldn’t deliver, we’d fall down," says Timmins. Advantage Performance Partner Bob Thomason recommended Delighting Customers, from Customer Focus, Inc., a comprehensive program that uses video-based behavioral modeling, team activities, and simulations to help employees develop key customer service skills. More than 350 field customer service employees would complete the training. Safety-Kleen also provided a service manager class to help managers better support and reinforce the Delighting Customers program.
One thing that sets Delighting Customers apart is its innovative, hands-on learning experiences. During the "Blind Customer" exercise, a participant leads a blindfolded person through a set of obstacles. Safety-Kleen participants leading the "customer" focused on the task, then realized that up to 80 percent of their value came from the way they handled the customer’s underlying personal needs.
"The principles of these exercises really hit home," says Timmins. "Our competitors, like us, are very task-oriented. It was an awakening for us to realize there were other needs below the surface that we hadn’t focused on before." Field customer service staff also learned how to handle customer complaints more effectively. "This program has reduced people’s stress because they now have a model to use when they get into a highly-charged complaint situation."
Make Coaching Sales Managers’ Top Priority
Safety-Kleen believed that coaching was a sales manager’s most important role, but the company had no standardized techniques to reinforce coaching organization-wide. So Thomason and Advantage co-founder, John Hoskins, helped Timmins and Sales Senior Vice President Jerry Correll improve coaching effectiveness using a combination of Field Coaching, from Porter Henry & Company, and a follow-up coaching campaign.
Field Coaching taught managers a standardized process for planning and executing joint calls with salespeople, and then coaching after the call on tactical selling skills. Correll let sales managers know that coaching was their most impor- tant job, and helped many managers reduce their administrative burden so they could focus more on coaching. Before the Field Coaching training, salespeople completed surveys assessing their managers’ coaching ability, which helped managers know where to focus. "We also created sales call videotapes of actual Safety-Kleen salespeople to make the learning more relevant," says Thomason.
To sustain momentum, Hoskins and Correll created a campaign in which managers committed to a total of 500 coaching calls in four months. "In this way, Field Coaching became more like a call-to-action planning session, which is exactly what we wanted sales managers to come away with," says Thomason. "It was not about training, but about changing behaviors," he added. "We suspect we’ll hit our coaching call goal, which represents a significant increase in coaching activity," says Timmins. The team will reconvene after four months to complete a second survey and see how far managers have ‘moved the needle’ of coaching effectiveness from the perspective of their salespeople. Additional manager training will supplement those results.
These training initiatives have become important parts of Safety-Kleen’s competitive re-emergence. "We feel that the customer service training will help us improve relationships with customers, and give us a competitive edge. We also feel that the leverage point to improving our sales force is increasing the effectiveness with which our sales managers do their most important job, which is coaching," says Timmins. "And we’ve been very pleased with our Advantage relationship. This is a partner that seeks to understand our entire organization and that we have many different needs, and is able to bring us great solutions that are an excellent cultural fit."
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better equipped the sales team to uncover deep customer needs and resolve customer issues