Improving the customer experience for diverse customers
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 30 seconds.
Training designed to improve the customer experience for diverse customers often teaches key concepts like racism, oppression, privilege, bias, and microaggression. Addressing these knowledge gaps is essential. But just as important, maybe more so, is teaching new skills and behaviors.
Why? Because diverse customers have significantly different needs. And if customer-facing employees are ignorant of this fact and don’t have the skills to uncover and meet those needs, then diverse customers will take their business elsewhere. So, with training time and budgets at a premium, what skills should training target first?
Three critical skills
The three skills with the most substantial influence on diverse customers are curiosity, listening, empathy.
Yet, in contrast, data shows these three are often the very skills that sales and service people fail to deliver on. As a result, whether they serve internal or external customers or work in B2B or B2C environments, sales and service people have consistent gaps that must be closed.
Defining the three skills
Genuine curiosity is about asking questions to foster openness and create dialogue that will help build an emotional connection and uncover, explore, shape, and define customer needs. Associated skills include asking a range of open, closed, information-gathering, probing, and confirmation questions.
Active listening is about understanding both content and emotional messages in diverse customers’ responses in a manner that shows interest, demonstrates comprehension and builds trust. Associated skills include paraphrasing, reframing, summarizing, picking up clues, and reflecting keywords and phrases.
Empathy is about using acknowledgment, reflection, and rapport to understand, connect with, and share the thoughts and feelings of the customer. Associated skills include imagining how someone else is feeling, responding emotionally according to their feelings, and acting with compassion.
Deliberate practice requires a combination of learning, observation, practice, reflection, feedback, coaching, and trying again.
Using deliberate practice to build these skills
Practice comes from a Greek word that means action with reflection. Deliberate practice is an adult learning technique that can help customer-facing roles to learn new skills, attitudes, and knowledge in a way that encourages action with reflection.
Deliberate practice requires a combination of learning, observation, practice, reflection, feedback, coaching, and trying again. The key is to keep the learning solution as engaging as possible.
Here's a visual that describes how deliberate practice works:
A learning solution to improve the client experience for diverse customers
So let's imagine a practice-based learning solution for this specific need. Perhaps it would include the following:
Pre-work and post-work, including definitions of key concepts, ready references, and self-reflective activities.
Live, actor-led demos: on inclusion, unconscious bias, gender diversity, and empathy presented in large groups.
A mini-tutorial: on core concepts (inclusion, diversity, discrimination) and skills (empathy, curiosity, listening) delivered in small groups.
Roleplay practice: realistic customer scenarios followed by feedback and coaching on critical skills delivered one-to-one or in very small groups.
When all these factors and more are in place, customer-facing employees can apply the skills of curiosity, listening, and empathy in an authentic and customer-facing way.
But remember, skills alone are not enough.
There is one final and essential point that I’d like to make. Understanding and meeting the needs of diverse customers cannot rest solely on the shoulders of customer-facing employees. Consumer brands need to do much more than retool their sales processes and upscale their sales forces.
For example, building a diverse workforce is critical to success. So, too is creating a culture of psychological safety so that all employees feel safe, included, and empowered. In addition, consistently supporting diverse communities is a factor that diverse customers use as a basis for their spending. When all these factors and more are in place, customer-facing employees can apply the skills of curiosity, listening, and empathy in an authentic and customer-facing way.
If you’d like to discuss any of these ideas, please email me at drobertson@practica-learning.com. You can also Contact Us or call us at Toronto: 416.366.6296 or Toll-Free: 1.866.945.0648.
We’re here to help your teams master the business communication skills they need to build sales with diverse customers.
