Building Effective Service Teams

Business Issue - Financial institutions striving to build a high-performing sales and service environment as a means to retain and expand business often neglect the most important success factor—sustaining and enhancing effective team performance to meet organizational goals. Many organizations find that their front-line and support staff members are not working together on common goals. Training and development of front-line sales and service teams can leave the service support staff even more detached.

Omega Performance’s Solution - Building Effective Service Teams helps managers and supervisors of support staff define and develop high-impact management activities that focus their teams and individual staff members on key performance activities. These management practices include clearly communicating service performance expectations, formal coaching, building the team through departmental meetings, and resolving service obstacles through team problem solving. The consistency of management activities, especially coaching, produces a common sales and service culture that allows support staff to respond to business challenges more aggressively as a unified team.

In the two-day workshop, managers learn to re-examine their role as leaders of the organization’s evolving sales and service culture. Building Effective Service Teams helps them make a personal commitment to implementing and sustaining service management routines. Workshop activities and materials provide the systems, tools, and practice that managers need to effectively lead their service teams.

What Is Included

Building Effective Service Teams is a highly interactive, two-day workshop in which managers identify everyday service management challenges and review key service goals and activities. In the workshop, they address these challenges and opportunities, improving on approaches that are already working well and discovering strategies for issues that have been difficult to resolve.

In Introduction to Building Effective Service Teams, participants discuss the organization’s current service environment, identify the internal customers they serve, review the organization’s service standards and practices, and review their role in the organization’s service initiative.

Understanding Your Team teaches participants about both team and individual performance. They learn how teams function and change over time, how to evaluate and influence the performance of individual team members, and how to define and communicate service performance expectations. Participants identify service performance measures and determine observation and measurement opportunities in the service environment.

In Coaching, participants recognize the value of coaching in a service environment and are introduced to the Coaching Model—a simple, powerful framework for all coaching conversations—along with the high-impact skills that complement the coaching process. Service coaching skill practices and balanced feedback enable participants to practice the skills and processes needed to effectively coach individual team members. These practice sessions are highly interactive with participants learning not only from their own situations, but also from seeing their peers in action.

Conducting Effective Team Meetings teaches participants how to unify the value and importance of turning high-performing individuals into high-performing service teams by providing instruction around planning and conducting service team meetings. Participants also learn how to identify key challenges faced in the service environment and apply the Removing Obstacles Process, a step-by-step guide that helps teams work together to resolve service problems.

In Planning for Success, participants apply the skills and practices learned in the workshop to a plan for on-thejob implementation.

Delivery Options

Omega Performance facilitators are prepared to conduct Building Effective Service Teams, or leader training will prepare internal bank or credit union facilitators to conduct the sessions.

Results You Can Expect

Building Effective Service Teams helps your managers and supervisors:

Assess the current service performance of their team and individual team members
Establish and communicate service performance expectations using the Support Services Position Profile
Identify opportunities for observation and measurement in the service environment
Observe service interactions and plan effective coaching sessions that focus on service behaviors
Use quick coaching to reinforce or redirect service behaviors
Manage team performance through focused, motivating service team meetings
Identify critical obstacles to service success and ways to remove them

Who Should Be Trained

Building Effective Service Teams is appropriate for all managers and supervisors in the service environment to whom service staff directly report.

Prerequisites

None. However, prior to attending the workshop, Omega Performance recommends participants either attend the same skills-related workshop as their direct reports, or identify the high-impact service activities they will be supporting through coaching.