Chapter 12.

Teaching TeensHow to Serve Your Customers:How Well Are You Doing?

THE LAST MULTIGENERATIONAL OPPORTUNITY at your disposal has to do with young Gen Yers and the most valuable skill set any business can teach them: customer service. Since young workers are disproportionately represented in frontline customer service positions, and study after study shows that customers complain most often about this generation’s service inability, we wanted to find out what managers were doing to prepare the next generation of workers to become customer service experts.

We talked with high school students working part-time in customer service jobs, as well as college students who remembered what it was like to be “the new kid” on the block. These older ...

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