AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.1
List: Responsibilities of a ManagerThe responsibilities students should identify in Student Resource 10.1 include:
Baking/cooking/making sandwiches Cleaning, quality, and service inspections Serving Interacting with customers Responding to both positive and negative feedback Monitoring online reviews and websites for content and accuracy Supervising employees Hiring/training/counseling employees Encouraging/motivating employees Managing inventory/ordering supplies/stocking the fridge Promoting the business (chamber of commerce, charitable organizations) Networking Doing paperwork/bookkeeping, human resources Political activism on behalf of the business/business owners
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.2
Guide: Internal Customer ServiceUse this guide at the beginning of Class Period 3 to inform class discussion and introduce the students to the concept of internal customer service. This activity is followed by a more in-depth examination of this topic, so the objective here is to ensure that students grasp the basic concept of internal customer service first.
Ask students to think about a sport they like to play or another activity they enjoy, such as drama or music. Ask them:
Who else is involved in making the team, the concert, or the play a success?
You may wish to use one or more of the following examples to help them understand:
If you play on the school baseball or softball team, you have one or more coaches. But you also probably have other people involved who take care of your equipment, your uniforms, or the field where you play. Somebody has to help you if you get injured and somebody has to drive you to the away games. You may have student “team managers,” parent volunteers, or other coaches or school staff members that handle these tasks.
If you perform in a school play, you have a director to tell you what to do. But other people are involved as well—a crew who runs the lighting and sound equipment, people who make the sets or the costumes, people who sell tickets and concessions, people who take care of the auditorium or theater where you perform, and even the person or people who wrote the play. You may have students, parent volunteers, or teachers and school staff members that handle these tasks.
Give students a minute to think; then ask student volunteers to share an example of someone who works in this capacity. Invite a few students to share their ideas. Then ask:
If you have a job like this—say you’re a ball boy or ball girl for the local professional baseball team—who are your customers? Are you providing a service for the people watching the game? Or for the players? Or both?
Invite a few students to respond. Point out that while a ball boy is, to some extent, serving the people watching the game, the players are also customers. Tell students that this is called internal customer service. Internal customer service is employees helping other employees.
Ask students:
Can you think of an example of internal customer service at a hospitality company?
Give students a few minutes to think. Invite students to share examples or provide the following example:
A tour company uses computers to book people on their tours and someone needs to take care of those computers. This computer person may not ever interact with someone who is booking a tour, but he or she needs to provide service to the tour schedulers so they can provide service to the customers.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.3
Presentation Notes: Internal Customer ServiceBefore you show this presentation, use the text accompanying each slide to develop presentation notes. Writing the notes yourself enables you to approach the subject matter in a way that is comfortable to you and engaging for your students. Make this presentation as interactive as possible by stopping frequently to ask questions and encourage class discussion.
Today we’re going to look at internal customer service in more detail, focusing on the following questions:
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
A customer is anyone who receives something from someone (as in a product) or somehow benefits from someone’s work (as in a service). In the broadest definition of a customer, money does not have to be exchanged in order for a person to be considered a customer.
A provider is the person providing the product or service. In the reading you did earlier in this lesson, Mai and her employees are the providers.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
These are the individuals most people think of when they think of the word customer: the ones placing the orders, standing in line for the cashier, and waiting to be served in restaurants. The satisfaction of these customers makes or breaks a company; without them, most companies have no purpose. They are the people whom most organizations are aiming to please.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Internal customers are the people inside the organization who are helped or otherwise affected by the work of others within the organization. They all receive their paychecks from the same company. With internal customers, no money changes hands, but they are still very important.
For example, a hotel’s housekeeping staff may have little direct interaction with the guests. They are serving the guests, but they are also serving the other staff members—they need to communicate to the front desk which rooms are ready for use and which aren’t. If they clean the rooms, but don’t tell the front desk which rooms are clean, they are providing poor internal customer service.
Similarly, the front desk needs to confer with housekeeping on a regular, frequent basis to keep operations running smoothly. For example, the front desk must tell housekeeping which rooms have been booked and which ones have been given early check-in. Housekeeping staff plan their day around these key pieces of information.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Employees provide internal customer service to each other, both within their own department and to colleagues in other departments. They also may provide it with suppliers in order to get their own jobs done. Many companies believe just helping out a fellow co-worker, in any capacity, is internal service. When one employee asks a colleague for help, the colleague then transforms into the role of provider and the employee needing help is the customer.
Unlike external customers, internal customers don’t have a choice. If the accounting department is chronically late with producing important reports, the people in the other departments can’t fire everyone in that department and hire a new accounting team.
You’ve learned a lot of customer service skills, like verbal, nonverbal, and written communication skills, and it’s important that you use those skills with internal customers, too. You need to work hard to communicate effectively and be professional with everyone in your company, from the janitor to the CEO. You’re all in this together. And even if you have a job you think is unimportant, you are still contributing to the overall success of the company.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Technology makes it possible for companies to communicate more with their employees, no matter how far away they are. An executive at a multinational hotel chain can “visit” properties in other countries without ever leaving her office. A front desk clerk working at a large resort can text a colleague in another building to get an answer for a guest’s question. Restaurant managers at different locations can chat online to share tips for managing employees or handling the busy holiday season.
Part of having good internal customer service is knowing how to use those technologies effectively. You might chat online or text with a friend, but if you’re texting with your boss, you need to “talk” or type differently. The man pictured above might use slang or abbreviations when texting with his girlfriend (“c u l8r”), but it wouldn’t be appropriate to use these shortcuts with his boss. You need to code-switch when using technology, just as you would if you are talking to someone in person.
It’s also important to remember that if you are given a phone or computer at your job, it is the property of your employer, and anything you do with it can be tracked by your employer. So snapping goofy selfies with your work phone is definitely not a good idea.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Using the broad definition of internal service, any employee in any company can play the role of provider or customer at some point.
In the examples above, the IT department, maintenance department, and human resources department are the providers. These departments do not interact directly with external customers; their whole purpose is to keep the company running smoothly, and their customers are internal—the other employees.
When a new employee is hired, she usually plays the role of customer as her boss and fellow employees are helping her get started in her job:
She is the customer of human resources, the department in charge of finding, hiring, and paying the people in the company.
She is the customer of the accounting department when she is learning about finances on her new job.
She is the customer of the IT department when she is getting her computer and email address set up.
Her manager, trainer, and mentor are providing her a service when they teach her what she needs to know in order to do her job properly.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Poor internal service can lead to serious problems with external service. Suppose you work at a hotel. You are on the phone with a customer who wants to arrange a special trip for his wife’s birthday. He wants to book a specific suite in your hotel and have flowers and fancy chocolates waiting in the room when they arrive. You know that suite was being renovated, so you put him on hold while you check with the hotel’s maintenance staff. The maintenance staff tells you that the suite will be ready for that guest. You tell the guest; he books the trip. But when he and his wife arrive, it turns out the suite isn’t ready, and the rest of the hotel is booked up because of a conference. Now the guest and his wife are in a strange city with nowhere to stay. He’s furious with you and complains about your customer service to the hotel’s manager. Is that fair? Well, he doesn’t know that the maintenance people made a mistake. As far as he can tell, you made the mistake. So the poor internal service of the maintenance staff caused poor external service for this guest.
Several of the common customer service mistakes we have learned about could be a result of poor internal service. For example, “give incorrect information” was one of the mistakes we discussed and, as we just saw in that scenario about the hotel, that could be the result of poor internal service. “Not following through on a promise” could also be a mistake caused by poor internal service. “Blaming another person for a mistake” may happen because of poor internal service, and that’s an important one. In the situation above, you could blame the maintenance staff. But the customer doesn’t care who made a mistake—he just wants it resolved. So by blaming the other people, you aren’t solving his problem—and you may make him angrier.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
By helping others in the company, employees help the company succeed. Quality internal customer service improves employee morale. It makes them work harder and stay at their jobs instead of leaving for another one. And, it makes money for the company. Most importantly, in a service industry like hospitality and tourism, excellent internal customer service leads to external customer service.
Think about going out to eat at a restaurant. You want your table clean, your food delivered quickly, and you want to get what you ordered. You will interact with the waiter or waitress, but there will be lots of other people involved in giving you a good experience. If the busboys or busgirls don’t clean the table quickly or the chef makes a mistake with your order, you will not have as good of an experience. So the chef and the busboys and busgirls need to give the waiter good internal service by doing their jobs right and providing good internal service. That allows the waiter to give you good external service, and everybody’s happier.
You can also compare internal customer service at an HT business to internal customer service on a high school group project. If each person in the group doesn’t do their part, communicate effectively, and compromise for the sake of the project, the project will get a bad grade. This is true even if everyone worked hard except one member of the group.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.4
Guide: Fishbowl Discussion
What Is a Fishbowl Discussion?A fishbowl discussion is one type of Socratic Seminar. A Socratic Seminar is a form of classroom discussion based on the teaching methods of Socrates. Socrates engaged his students by responding to questions with questions, rather than answers, thus teaching them to think for themselves.
In a Socratic Seminar, students are asked to read a piece of text and develop questions about it. They then discuss those questions and other questions posed by the teacher. The discussion is held by seating students in a circle. Students are expected to talk to each other, not to the teacher. They should respond to each other respectfully and to listen carefully without interrupting.
The fishbowl format allows large classes to implement the Socratic Seminar. In a fishbowl format, one group of students forms a small circle and discusses with each other. The rest of the students form a second circle around the group that is discussing. The students in the outside circle listen and make notes, preparing for their turn to speak. The inner circle students have a set amount of time to discuss; then the students trade places. When both groups have spoken, you can finish with a brief whole-class discussion.
Ideally, the teacher’s job is to get out of the way and let students talk. The teacher should observe the discussion closely and assess students on their communication skills, their knowledge of the topic, and the appropriateness of their behavior. The teacher should keep the conversation flowing by contributing a discussion question or suggesting that students change to a different question if the conversation has lagged. But the key to a Socratic Seminar is to allow students to discover answers rather than providing them; so the teacher should make an effort not to summarize, answer questions, or solve the problems students raise in the conversation.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
AssessmentWhile students are talking, the teacher can assess student participation and knowledge of subject matter. Teacher Resource 10.5, Rubric: Fishbowl Discussion, provides a detailed means of assessment; Teacher Resource 10.6, Chart: In-Discussion Assessment, offers a format for taking notes during the discussion, which can be used in the assessment product after the activity.
Assessing students during the discussion can be difficult, especially for teachers who have not previously utilized the Socratic Seminar approach. Some teachers find it helpful to video or audio tape the discussion so that they can review it again at their leisure. However, this is not recommended unless you have previously used video or audio equipment to record your students. In many cases, students will freeze up when they know they are being recorded.
The Process for This Assignment1. Students review Student Resource 10.5, Guide: Fishbowl Discussion. This will familiarize them with the process of the discussion.
2. Students review Teacher Resource 10.5, Rubric: Fishbowl Discussion, so they are aware of how their work will be assessed.
3. Students read Student Resource 10.7, Reading: Internal Customer Service in Action.
4. As they read, students develop discussion questions based on the reading, using the prompts provided in Student Resource 10.6, Reference: Discussion Starters.
5. Students participate in the fishbowl discussion, using the questions they have thought of and the discussion questions provided for them by the teacher.
6. Teacher assesses students during the discussion, using Teacher Resource 10.5, Rubric: Fishbowl Discussion, and/or Teacher Resource 10.6, Chart: In-Discussion Assessment.
General Questions to Use in a Fishbowl Discussion Who has something they really want to say about this topic?
Who has a different perspective?
Who has not yet had a chance to speak?
Can you clarify what you mean by that?
How does that relate to what (another student) said?
Is there something in the reading that was unclear to you?
Has anyone changed his or her mind?
Specific Questions for This Lesson Why would this be a good article for business owners to read?
Would you want to work at this business? Why or why not?
If you owned/managed a business, would you run it this way? Why or why not?
Why do you think more businesses aren’t run this way?
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Do you think teenage employees have different needs than older employees? Why or why not?
Provocative Statements The following statements can be used to get students talking: The management style described in the reading is the best style to use.
The management style described in the reading is being too “nice” to employees.
The management style described in the reading wouldn’t work with an entire workforce of teenagers.
The management style described in the reading is how teachers should run their classrooms.
All content is accurate; student shows a complete understanding of the topic.
Most of the content is accurate and student shows mastery of the topic.
Content is somewhat flawed; student makes some omissions and illustrates only partial knowledge of the topic.
Much of the content is inaccurate and confusing. Student communicates very little understanding of the topic.
Vocabulary Exhibits skillful use of new vocabulary that is precise and purposeful.
Exhibits proficient use of new vocabulary that is purposeful.
Exhibits minimal use of new vocabulary, and new vocabulary is not precise.
Lacks use of new vocabulary. Language is simplistic or vague.
Speaking Skills Participant speaks clearly and at an appropriate volume. Participant explains ideas clearly and thoroughly and engages other participants directly and appropriately.
Participant speaks clearly and at an appropriate volume. Participant is mostly clear and thorough when explaining ideas.
Participant sometimes struggles to speak clearly or at an appropriate volume. Participant may make unexplained statements or struggle to explain ideas thoroughly.
Participant consistently does not speak clearly or at an appropriate volume. Participant makes inappropriate statements or engages other participants in a rude or inappropriate way.
Listening Skills Participant is actively attentive to other speakers and demonstrates complete courtesy to all participants.
Participant is usually attentive to other speakers and is mostly courteous to all participants.
Participant is attentive to other speakers sometimes and/or shows a consistent lack of courtesy toward some participants.
Participant is often inattentive to other speakers and is discourteous to most/all participants.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Exemplary Solid Developing Needs Attention
Participation Participant is actively involved in the conversation, initiating multiple new topics and/or building off of comments made by other participants.
Participant is involved in the conversation, initiating one new topic or making general reference to other participants’ comments.
Participant is involved in the conversation, but does not initiate new topics or refer to others’ comments. Occasionally a comment may seem “out of place” or disconnected from the current topic of discussion.
Participant is noticeably uninvolved in the conversation, making no or few contributions or making several comments that are “out of place” or disconnected from the topic at hand.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.6
Chart: In-Discussion AssessmentThe chart on the next page can be helpful to track student assessment during the discussion; these results can be used to complete a rubric for each student later. You can fill in each box with a score of 1-4, with 4 representing exemplary work and 1 representing poor work, or you can use some other assessment system (check, check plus, and check minus; scale of 1–10; etc.) that works for you. You can complete this chart during the discussion and use it as a reference when you fill out individual student rubrics after the fishbowl discussion is complete.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.7
Key Vocabulary: Managing Excellent Customer Service
Term Definition
customer A person who benefits from another person’s work; the customer may or may not receive something tangible and he or she may or may not pay for the service/product.
external customer A person who is outside the organization and someone who usually pays for the service.
external customer service Service provided to a customer who is outside the organization; this is what people commonly think of when they think of “customer service.”
internal customer A person who is employed by the organization and someone who benefits from the output of work from another employee.
internal customer service Service provided by an employee to another employee; it happens “behind the scenes” and is not generally visible to external customers or the general public.
manager A person who plans and directs the work of a group of other people. The manager is typically a more experienced employee and may be a business owner. The manager is frequently responsible for hiring, supervising, and correcting and/or firing employees as necessary.
morale The attitude of a person or group of people toward a specific task or group of tasks; good morale is characterized by confidence, cheerfulness, discipline, and willingness to perform the task(s).
profit-sharing A system in which employees receive a share of the net profits of the business.
service provider A person providing a product or service.
AOHT Delivering Great Customer ServiceLesson 10 Managing Excellent Customer Service
Teacher Resource 10.8
Bibliography: Managing Excellent Customer ServiceThe following sources were used in the preparation of this lesson and may be useful for your reference or as classroom resources. We check and update the URLs annually to ensure that they continue to be useful.
PrintBurlingham, Bo. “Lessons from a Blue-Collar Millionaire.” New York: Inc. Magazine, 2010.
Davidoff, Donald M. Contact: Customer Service in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994.
Martin, William B. Providing Quality Service: What Every Hospitality Service Provider Needs to Know. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.
OnlineBrown, Darwin. “What Makes a Good Manager.” Career-Coaching Central, http://www.career-coaching-central.com/what-makes-a-good-manager.html (accessed November 27, 2014).
Earl, Donna. “What is Internal Customer Service? A Definition and Case Study.” Donna Earl Training, http://www.donnaearltraining.com/Articles/InternalCustomerService.html (accessed November 27, 2014).
“How to Be a Good Manager.” WikiHow, http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Good-Manager (accessed November 27, 2014).
Miller, Scott, and Kirk Miller. “Internal Customer Service: Getting Your Organization to Work Together.” Entrepeneur.com, http://www.entrepreneur.com/humanresources/managingemployees/motivationandretention/article51804.html (accessed November 27, 2014).
