Staff Writer
The Northern Maine Development Commission (NMDC) held a customer service seminar on Nov 18; it was the first of many customer service related assistance the commission plans on providing Aroostook County businesses. About 30 businesses attended the seminar.
“I was hoping for more than that, but I was pleased with the people we had there,” said Mike Eisensmith, director of Economic Development Division for NMDC, “I was pleased with the response of those that attended; they were a very active and supportive group.”
“The conference dealt with two major themes,” said Mike Eisensmith, director of Economic Development Division for the Northern Maine Development commission, “One of the two presenters spoke about what customer service has meant in the past, what it means today, how it’s being delivered, the difference between customer service and customer satisfaction, and how to approach customer satisfaction and customer service.”
“The other presenter talked about the impact customer service and customer satisfaction has on bottom line business activities and economics,” Eisensmith added, “she talked specifically and gave examples of the issues around what happens if you retain five more customers that you normally might have lost in the course of a year of operation and what that really means in relation to your income. The second component of that is the cost of getting back a customer that you’ve lost versus retaining a customer that you have.”
Eisensmith hopes that the businesses that attended the seminar will pay even more attention to customer service and customer satisfaction training.
“My goal here,” Eisensmith said, “is to make it just as easy as possible for them to do that; obviously the easier it is, the more people will participate. One of the underlying themes of getting the grant and delivering the grant has been an awareness that tourism has been a major economic driver in the area and has potential to be even more of an economic driver.
Eisensmith continued to add that a lot of the worth that NMDC does is with Aroostook County Tourism is to try to bring in people from outside of Aroostook County.
“To get them to come to the region, we need to provide them with the absolute best and most surprising experience that they can have,” Eisensmith said, “we want to be able to have the gas station attendant, the convenient store clerk, and the hotel receptionist all providing superior customer service so that people go ‘wow, I never expected that,’ and ‘I want to come back again because of that’”
Though NMDC provided the informative seminar for businesses and their employees, the NMDC learned almost as much as the seminar participants did.
After the seminar sessions wrapped up, participants were then engaged in a dialogue session, where NMDC asked participants specific questions about what they had learned, how they thought they would go about applying it, and what additional resources they would be interested in using.
It turns out that local businesses were interested in the availability of numerous resources that were previously either unavailable or unknown to businesses.
Some of the resources that the NMDC discovered that Aroostook businesses are interested in items such as customer service training videos that businesses could either borrow from a local library or their local Chamber of Commerce, web based employee training, and a higher education hospitality certificate.
“We brought in Adut Ed. and Continuing Ed,” said Eisensmith, “and those organizations already have course in components of customer service, so they actually have the training capacity to do, for instance, pieces on problem customers, or what good customer service means. I think a lot of people were surprised to hear about that at this conference.”
Another way that NMDC is thinking of helping businesses further educate themselves on customer service would be to train customer service specialists, who would then help local businesses by providing customer service seminars.
“Companies may have to pay a small amount for the time of the training individual to be there, but it would be dramatically less that they would ever have to pay for an effective workshop to be presented in their own business individually,” Eisensmith said.
