Customer Service tips for your ministry

In all my years of ministry service I have never had any formal customer service training.  It wasn’t until I served as a volunteer parking attendant at a Funeral that I saw the value of customer service.  On a day of sorrow and loss, people were leaving the car park after the funeral thanking the volunteers for their wonderful help and service.  It seems that the little things like saying hello to people as they drove into the car park made a difference.

I don’t know a lot about customer service, perhaps if I had more jobs in the retail sector I would have received better training in customer service.  I do know that when it comes to the church, we don’t think of people as customers or consumers.  We aim to treat people as members of a community or a family.  Whilst this is how we should treat members of the Church, some ministries have high number of visitors or new members, so how can we include them. 

Here are a few customer service practices that every Church or Ministry could learn:

1. First Impressions – if people are visiting you for the first time what do they see?  Try to think and see as they would, not what you want them to see or think.  Whenever you visit a shop or retail store for the first time, you get an impression of the company behind the shop front.  The same is true of your ministry, the first time someone visits you they get an impression of your ministry and the parish. 

How can you improve people’s first impression of your ministry?

2. Visitor Friendly – do people feel that they can visit your ministry?  Does your ministry feel like a club for a select group of people?  When I enter a retail store I know if they want my service by how the staff treat me.  So how can you make sure that visitors feel welcome, do you have a person who greats visitors and answer their questions?

How can you make your ministry more welcoming to visitors?

3. Building your Brand – have you noticed that Apple products have a similar look or style?  They have one of the most respected “brands” of any company.  The golden arches is recognised anywhere as McDonalds have built their brand.  Whilst you don’t have the same marketing budget, does your ministry have a “brand” or style?  If you want people to start to recognise your ministry then they have to identify the brand.  The brand can be a name or style or a logo but it is more than that.  For example Soul at Pittwater parish have brand that goes deeper than their logo.

How can you build the brand of your ministry or group?

4. Repeat business – why do you return to your favourite restaurant?  Many people return to their favourite café because they know the coffee is good or the staff are friendly.  How can you get visitors to come back to your ministry?  Perhaps you need to develop some flexible predictability in your ministry.  Your ministry has to be predictably good so that if people turn up again they know what they are getting.  Yet you should be flexible enough that you change things before it becomes stale.  This is a hard balance to achieve but many aspects of ministry are hard to balance.

How can you generate repeat business in your ministry?

Maybe your ministry looks a little different that this; please adapt it to your situation.  Whilst we can’t start treating members of our church purely as consumers of our ministries, it is important to learn from the customer service principles that our church members have come to expect from their shopping experience.