How Customer Service Tip of the Week was created
The Customer Service Tip of the Week started out like many business ideas: it came out of trying to solve a problem for a customer.
I was meeting with Sue Thompson, who at the time ran the transportation and parking department at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). She had hired me to facilitate customer service training for her team, and they had worked hard to develop a reputation at OHSU for outstanding service. Now Thompson was concerned about sustaining her team's progress.
She knew that people could slide back into old habits without constant reinforcement, so she and her management team regularly discussed service in team meetings and one-on-one conversations. At the same time, Thompson felt it would be helpful to have a reinforcement message that came from someone besides herself or her management team.
I suggested a simple reminder system, and offered to set up an automated email list that her employees could subscribe to. Each email would contain a single customer service tip related to something we had talked about in training. The emails would be sent once per week to provide regular reminders while giving employees time to try out each tip with their customers.
Thompson agreed to the suggestion and we implemented the weekly emails with great success. "We often discussed the tips during our weekly staff meeting," she said. "It really got the ball rolling on people sharing their experiences and ideas for consistently working on and improving our service. These improvements were quantified in our drastically improved customer service scores and in the many unsolicited accolades all areas of the department received from our customers."
Over time, Thompson found the weekly tips helped her team stay focused on service. "Working in parking, the team was reminded regularly that the only thing we sold was customer service, so we had to be the absolute best at it. The weekly tips reminded us of this and that it was up to us to create that culture of exceptional customer service."
I quickly decided to make the weekly emails available to anyone who wanted to subscribe to them. Today, thousands of customer service professionals all over the world receive the Customer Service Tip of the Week email each Monday.
About the tips
They’re rated one of the best customer service training programs in the world, and they’re totally free.
Each week, you’ll receive one tip from Jeff Toister to help sharpen your skills.
Get the Book
Contains more than 52 tips plus a guide for training your team.
