How to find great customer service and call center staff!

Great customer service is something that can be hard to find now days. I do however believe there is a revival going on in this country brought on by the wonderful world of social media. Had it not been for sites likes Angie's List, Tripadvisor and even Facebook, where a person can in seconds share their experiences with anyone on the globe, companies may have let this slip. I am glad.

Now as a person who prefers to shop online, I do not really need customer service, unless there is a problem, so I expect if there is great service as I feel I save the company a lot of time and money just by taking care of my order myself, online and having it shipped.

If you have ever spent time at WalMart or Mcdonalds, you must likely have experienced anything but stellar customer service. I honestly do not know if its the pay, benefits, atmosphere, culture or what, but time and time again, you will not get good service. Go to a Starbucks or Panera and you will be warmly greeted, even forced into conversation with a real human being and they politely the worker will up-sell you on items. It has to be culture and training. As someone who worked at Mcdonald's as a teen, I recall they spend a lot of time training on products and procedures but not a lot on customer service. They should reconsider this policy. I often thought it was a good place to start, but now that my own teenage daughter is working there I think its a bad place to start. Why start off your career learning how NOT to give stellar service.

So what is great service and how do you give it? Well great service always starts with an attitude. If you do not like people or serving people, then you really should find another line of work. You are not going to be happy and you will give the company and products a bad name. When people are recruiting for call center and customer service associates, you really need to start with attitude. How do you know if a person really cares about helping people? Look at their resume, look at what they do with their spare time, find out if they volunteer or what activities they do on the weekends. A true service minded person will live it, you will find it with good questions. Second, seek a coachable person. If you get someone who has the heart but not the talent, you WIN. You can also train a good worker with a positive attitude.

Start with those two items and you will be in good shape. More to come...

Karen