GREAT Skills
How to achieve greater proficiency in GREAT Customer Service interactions
What was your New Year’s Resolution? Have you kept it so far? What about your resolutions from last year? Can you even remember them? The chances are that you didn’t keep your promises to yourself. In fact, only 8% of us keep our New Year’s Resolutions. Why? Most of us don’t turn our resolutions into habits. Intention doesn’t equal results: it is not enough to simply say that you are focused on providing a great experience for your customers.
James Clear, author of ‘Atomic Habits’ asks us:
- How in shape or out of shape you are? A result of your habits.
- How happy or unhappy you are? A result of your habits.
- How successful or unsuccessful you are? A result of your habits.
Clear says that our lives today are essentially the sum of our habits. In other words, what you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe, and the personality that you portray. Clear says that the way to create a habit is through a repeatable cycle of three Rs:
- Reminder (the trigger that initiates the behaviour)
- Routine (the behaviour itself; the action you take)
- Reward (the benefit you gain from doing the behaviour)
So what does this mean to you when learning about GREAT Customer Service?
Success doesn’t happen as a result of completing a training programme. Real success comes from what you do as a result of your learning. If you don’t revisit and refresh your learning, or create new routines as a result of it, your learning will be lost and the investment of time you have made into the GREAT programme will be wasted.
Ebbinghaus’s Curve of Forgetting tells us that you can forget virtually all of your learning within seven days if you don’t revisit your learning. What a waste of time and effort!
So, to create new and successful habits, and for your learning to become habit, try this:
- Choose one GREAT skill and focus on it until you have mastered it. Then work on another. Avoid trying to focus on too much at once.
- Refresh and review your learning. Look back over it and remind yourself of what you have learnt to help you get there by constantly revisiting your workbooks and refreshing your memory
- Create new GREAT routines by taking action and repeating the actions from your Action Plans that work for you over and over.
- Reward yourself by recognising the impact you are having, what works well for you and celebrating success. Share your successes with your colleagues and learn from each other.
Take a look at our GREAT skills programme and if you’d like to explore this topic or any other aspect of customer service training then please do give us a call on 01582 463464. We’re always here to help.
