Customer Service Training

As a company of (mostly) engineers we love to solve complex problems. Can you solve this problem for a customer on time and under budget? Now we’re talking!

How do we best ensure we are working to solve the right problem? Sometimes we are so eager to get started that we don’t properly define what it is that needs fixing. Even our customers don’t always know exactly what they need! Identifying the problem often takes time and a lot of good communication.

A few weeks ago, the entire Signal.X team went through a training session on giving great customer service. For Signal.X, this type of training is a new thing. We often have technical training sessions, but this is considered soft skills training. That said, there is nothing soft about giving great customer service. When done well, it helps us to properly identify the issue or request, deliver our service effectively, and look for ways to go “the extra mile” which can make all the difference to our customers.

We like to say that great customer service is something that we do, and it is something that sets us apart from our competition. It is even a large part of our mission statement. Now, we can say that we are actively training on customer service.

We decided to work with ZingTrain, a Zingerman’s company, for our training modules. Zingerman’s is a company (known around the world for their amazing sandwiches) based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, only a few miles down the road from Signal.X. We like the way they break down a seemingly abstract approach to “giving good customer service” into an easy-to-define recipe. We engineers can appreciate that!

With better customer service, one positive outcome will be to do a better job in helping our customers properly identify the problem so we can properly harness our technical know-how and get everyone pulling in the same direction.