On their way from point A to point B, your customers likely pass many options for getting gas, a quick bite to eat, or other convenience items. Why should they choose your store? The answer is all around you. It’s your staff. Your team members make or break customer loyalty through the service they provide. This goes far beyond what you might think of as traditional customer service. Service is your invisible product. It’s more than just a smiling face or a “have a nice day” at the end of a transaction.
Service is about the cleanliness of your pump area, parking lot, aisles, and restrooms. It’s about your merchandising efforts and loyalty programs. It’s about your compliance with accessibility, anti-discrimination, and all other legal regulations. Service is about anything and everything that affects your customers. As a manager, you won’t always be able to ensure all these elements of exceptional service come together as they should. But you can provide the training, coaching, and environment that creates a staff willing and able to put service first. Let’s take a look at each step toward effective training.
Transform Your Training Techniques
Leverage available training technology to provide consistent training on everything from safety to food service. Online learning shifts the store manager’s focus from delivering training to managing knowledge. With the time managers save, they can focus more on their primary responsibilities of achieving higher level company goals.
Follow Your Training with Long-Term Coaching
Teams need both coaches and trainers. Training can’t succeed if it isn’t followed by daily coaching, and coaching can’t succeed without a solid foundation of training. Store managers should work to develop their staff every day through ongoing coaching, encouragement, and enthusiasm.
Create a Productive Training Environment
Ongoing learning can’t happen in a vacuum. When trainers, coaches, and managers create am effective training environment based on positivity, open communication, praise, and feedback, employees will be more open to learn new things and improve their performance.
Effective Training is a Process
Remember these steps: 1) Use the technology-based training 2) Follow training up with daily coaching and 3) Provide a productive training environment. With this plan in place, your team members will have the knowledge and skills they need to provide exceptional service on every shift, setting you apart from the competition.
