Often front-line service personnel fail to deliver good service simply because they don't know what to do or how to do it. If you want your front-line workers to be great at customer service, you'll have to teach them.

The number one source of customer service lessons is the day-to-day real lessons -- good or bad -- each individual learns in real time with real customers. These lessons are your informal training curriculum. You recognize successes, reinforce learning, offer reminders, and provide coaching, support, and guidance. These one-on-one interventions are key because the bottom line is this: Customer service training is an integral part of your supervisory responsibility -- every day.

Number two is building fifteen-minute mini-training sessions into regularly scheduled team meetings. Keep the team focused on customer service by keeping customer service training on the agenda all the time. These are our guidelines for doing mini-training sessions in customer service:

(1) Focus on the fundamentals. Organize brief lessons around simple techniques for paying close attention through observation, careful listening, how to say the right things, how to execute basic transactions with ease, how to solve small problems quickly, how to use prepared materials to answer customers' frequently asked questions, and so on. Keep the lessons focused on one technique at a time and keep them brief, straight and simple.

(2) Hammer away at the fundamentals in as many different ways as you can. Each week, choose a topic, build a mini-training into your team meeting, and then, all week long: Talk about it, make posters, show slides, hand out t-shirts, send emails, hand out information cards, tell great stories, show videos, and so on.

(3) Repetition is key. Make your point and then make it again, ten times, inside of ten minutes. Down the road, when you've cycled through all the basics, start over again with the first lesson. And do it again.

(4) Get service personnel involved in the learning, but don't turn over the session. Control the time and the content, but engage people with directed questions: "Are you, [NAME], great at this tactic? If so, tell us a success story." "What will you, [NAME], do today to practice this tactic?"

(5) Encourage them to practice. End every lesson with a very clear assignment to implement the lesson of the day with real customers. "Go out there right now and practice this tactic." Finally, when appropriate, turn the lesson into a contest or creative activity with prizes and recognition.