Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Standard of Excellence: Training Your Team to Excel in Customer Service

People often consider technical capability and delivery speed as the gold standards in manufacturing, but customer service is a powerful differentiator. Advanced technologies and rigorous certifications may open doors, but the way a company treats its customers determines whether those doors stay open. It’s essential to train teams to deliver exceptional customer service, from top-level leadership to every point of customer interaction.

Culture Starts at the Top
Customer service excellence reflects an organization’s culture, and culture begins with leadership. When executives and senior managers demonstrate a consistent commitment to a customer-first mindset, it resonates in every department. Leaders should reinforce this commitment with action, be it stepping in to resolve a customer issue, empowering teams to prioritize long-term relationships over short-term gains, or building customer-centric goals into company-wide metrics. We shape culture through behavior, accountability, and training.

Customer Service Is a Teachable Skill
Too often, we treat customer service as a soft skill that people either “have or don’t,” but it’s a discipline just like soldering, engineering, or logistics. Like any discipline, it requires structured development, repetition, and feedback. Organizations should build training programs for those who engage with customers: sales, support, engineering, or front-desk personnel. These programs should focus on building active listening, empathy, conflict resolution, clear and respectful communication, and effective follow-through. Training should be continuous. Single workshops or onboarding sessions may introduce the principles, but ongoing reinforcement builds mastery.

Simulate Tough Situations
In the high-stakes electronics manufacturing industry, the pressure on the provider and the customer can be intense. Delays, technical misunderstandings, and last-minute changes are part of the landscape. Prepare teams for these realities using role-playing and simulation exercises that mimic real-world challenges, such as responding to an upset client, handling complex technical objections, or navigating unclear expectations. Rotating roles between departments (e.g., having engineers play the role of customers or account managers) also helps build cross-functional empathy and understanding. Preparation reduces panic. The better trained your teams are for high-pressure moments, the more confident and consistent their responses.

Treat Customer Service as a Team Sport
Customer challenges are rarely one person’s responsibility, yet in many organizations, service still operates in silos, where they pass an issue from one person to the next without resolution or ownership. Foster a collaborative, team-based approach to service. When an issue arises, see it as a company-wide opportunity to demonstrate responsiveness and care. Engineers, quality managers, account reps, and production leads all have a role to play in diagnosing the cause and developing a timely solution. Shared communication platforms, cross-departmental huddles, and collaborative issue-tracking tools can ensure involvement by the right people early and that everyone stays aligned through resolution.

Empower Your People to Make the Right Call
Training isn’t simply to improve performance, it’s increasing confidence. Empower team members to make customer-focused decisions without needing constant managerial approval. However, have clear guidelines. Employees should know when they have the autonomy to act, when to escalate, and how to document actions for internal learning and improving quality. By empowering and preparing employees, they won’t simply follow scripts; they’ll solve problems.

Recognition Reinforces the Right Behaviors
Recognition reinforces a service-first culture. Acknowledging employees who perform excellent customer service—whether through formal awards, public praise, or a personal thank-you from leadership—signals that customer care matters. It’s not about extravagant incentives; timely, sincere recognition helps build pride and reinforce the behaviors that set your company apart. Additionally, sharing customer service success stories across departments serves as real-time training, providing valuable insights others can learn from.

Make Customer-centric Thinking a Daily Practice
The best organizations treat customer service as a strategic discipline, nurture it daily, and reinforce it through leadership actions, team collaboration, clear decision-making authority, and consistent training. Companies must also build systems for collecting customer feedback, analyzing service trends, and acting on what they learn. This creates a feedback loop that drives ongoing improvement and ensures they meet or exceed customer expectations.

Final Thoughts
In an industry that often measures success in specs, yields, and lead times, it’s easy to overlook the human element, but customers remember how you made them feel long after they’ve forgotten your price or your turnaround time. Customer service is about being responsive, respectful, and reliable. A timely follow-up call, a proactive update, a well-handled complaint—these are the moments that build trust, loyalty, and reputation. Train your team to deliver those moments, because in a competitive market, people also measure excellence by how you show up for your customers when it matters most.

Anaya Vardya is president and CEO of American Standard Circuits; co-author of The Printed Circuit Designer’s Guide to… Fundamentals of RF/Microwave PCBs and Flex and Rigid-Flex Fundamentals. He is the author of The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to... ™ DFM Essentials, The Companion Guide to DFM Essentials, Thermal Management: A Fabricator's Perspective and The Companion Guide to Flex and Rigid-Flex Fundamentals .Visit I-007eBooks.com to download these and other free, educational titles.