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Do not assume new hires communicate with customers as well as you might like.  Train them.  Tell them what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.  You take great care in selecting a new person in your customer service area to take care of your customers.

Train new hires.  Everyone knows how to hire someone.  Few know how to train those very people.  Companies hire personnel and lay them off within two or three months wasting a lot of time and money simply because they were not determined to train these new people.

Invest the time to evaluate and steer new hires into good practices.  Given how important this job is, take the time to train these new people.  To maintain your integrity with customers’ valuable buyers, review what your new people are saying to them.  See how they treat the individuals that order from your firm.  Make sure your customers are cared for and get your company’s best level of service.  Review the level of writing for all new employees regardless of the method of communication.

Guidelines for reviewing new hires’ communications skills:

• Blind copy emails for review:  New hires should blind-copy their supervisors on all emails sent to customers.  For at least one or two weeks, you need to review emails of your new employees that are sent or replied to your customers.  You want to know for sure whether your new hire truly knows how to treat customers and does not come across harshly, rudely or seem too blunt in written response.  A week or two is enough to get a good sense of his or her capabilities.  Have them blind copy all emails to their supervisor that they send out to customers.
• Make suggestions now – new hires more receptive:  Review their work and make suggestions, now, while the employee is new and open to critical review.  You do not need to risk relationships with customers with someone you just hired off the street.  You do not want to find out a new hire speaks well on the telephone but then turns around and ruins that great relationship because of lousy writing skills that show up in their emails.  Find out who cannot write early on, versus six months from now when your customer is fed up and angrily tells you to either give him a representative that can read and write or he’s going somewhere where they hire only people who are literate.
• Do your new hires sound professional?  Review employees’ demeanor with your customers through their words.  Review the new employees’ approach in their written correspondence.  See how polite or courteous they are or are not with your customers’ buyers.  This is important to find out because all new hires are initially open and responsive to your corrective ideas.  Announce to the recipients on the bottom of all of these emails that the emails are temporarily being monitored to improve customer relations and service.
• Provide new hires guidelines. What can the new hire do and what can he not do, yet?  Give the new employee feedback immediately.  Tell your new employee he writes well or tell him where and what he needs to improve.  If he writes a response email poorly, give him ten example letters to emulate.  If he chooses the wrong terms when speaking with customers, give him a list of terms for your company or industry to study on his own time.   Let him know what he can offer customers and what he cannot.  Teach him through your review of his correspondence what he needs to do or improve or what his limits are when negotiating prices or deliveries with customers.  Have him discover the spell-checking attachment in the email package.  Your new people need your feedback and they need it as soon as they start, so make sure they represent your firm as you intended.  You cannot afford any other outcome.
• Provide new hires feedback ASAP on emails and work ethic.  You owe new hires feedback so give it to them without hesitation.  Tell them now how to act…catch their errors early. Tell them what time to get to work, how to dress properly and where they are allowed and where they are not allowed in your facilities.  You need to tell them the proper way to address customers, what to offer free and how to charge pricing, how to handle rejected parts. Address bad service or listen to and carefully resolve touchy complaints about other employees or issues expressed about the company’s products or service.  Tell them specifically what is wrong with their emails after you have reviewed them.  Instruct them when to apologize to customers or to take firm stands on price quotes.  They need training and this is an excellent time to do it.
• Use standardized procedures:  Not everything needs to be re-written from scratch.  Some standardized procedures can be cut and pasted into return emails to answer questions (i.e.  Return policies, freight policies, warranties and guarantees, etc.).  Other correspondence requires a direct and specific response to some questions.  They need to be well written being your new hire so he needs to improve at being trainable.  If not, hire up a level.  Remember they are talking to your best customers.  Can you afford not to have your best people talking to your buyers?
• Check their writing abilities:  Can they write effectively?  Does the new employee come across as rude or does he or she seem polite and professional?  Does he handle difficult situations with an admirable approach or fail repeatedly to answer the customers’ issues?  If most of the job involves writing emails and your new person cannot write, you need to make a change, and do not delay on this decision.  This is not your mailroom guy you are replacing.  This person accepts $1M orders.  You need to know now before you invest more time and money, and more importantly, prevent the ruin a relationship with a customer.  Find out now.
• How does your new hire sound on the telephone?  Are your employees rude or do they seem uneducated?  Is your new employee naïve or does he seem lost when writing instructions back to customers?  Does he need more training or is it a waste of time?  Is he in a position which is currently beyond his capabilities?  Maybe the employee is pleasant on the telephone but seems to ruin his approach when writing emails?  Does he appear through his email responses to be uneducated exposing poor grammar, bad spelling or poor choices of words and phrases that can turn off or worse yet, even anger your customers?
• Your new hire is the face of the company: good or bad?  Your company’s reputation is as good as the worst employee.  Deficiencies in writing skills reflect poorly on your company if allowed to continue.  Some buyers may disregard a few minor mistakes if the assigned representative is technically good on the telephone and resolves problems right away.  Other buyers may be turned off by your selection of someone who seems to be clearly lacking a proper education.  You need to discover this deficiency now with your new hire before this gentleman ruins or risks your company’s valuable $10M/year account.
• Upgrade hiring procedures. Use an outside agency if necessary.  If necessary, upgrade your hiring procedures for the selection of inside sales and customer service personnel.  If you discover your new employees cannot write effectively, you may need to revamp your interviewing methods and hire an outside firm or agency that can qualify candidates first.  They can successfully sift through and test people first in order to find better qualified candidates for your firm to hire for internal customer relations.  These firms are specialized in testing and have the means that most companies do not.  They are especially good at identifying solid and attractive candidates for your sales, marketing and customer service departments.

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