Customer Service Breakthroughs

Detailed Synopsis:

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The Customer Service Breakthroughs program will give you the ability to deliver an experience your customers will enthusiastically respond to. You will learn how to maximize every “moment of truth” opportunity, and deliver on service promises to exceed their expectations. Enhancing your skills is an integral part of the program. You will learn many aspects of customer service: face to face and telephone communication; managing service quality and standards; handling information, requests, and complaints.

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You will improve your management of your own and other's time, attitudes, and stress. We do all this through a fast-paced mix of information, discussions, workshops, case studies and skills practice. Your customers demand and deserve the best human service experience — you will make it a reality for them.

 

Unit 1: The Value of Customers

Every point of contact with a customer is a “moment of truth” for them. You will appreciate why each contact is a memorable event for them, and how they want to be treated by us. We will overview the importance of customers to your organization. As we all are, and all have internal customers, we will recognize their special needs. We will illustrate the impact customers have on sales and profits and study the things we can do to build customer loyalty. You will understand the actions that make them satisfied and come back, and what turns them off. Finally, in this unit, we discuss how we learn, and keep learning.

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Unit 2: Quality Service

We will discuss how we can improve the quality of our service, why we need to set certain standards, what servicing activities require standards, and how to measure whether they are met. You will learn what “all customers are not equal” really means, and be able to calculate the worth of each customer. We will explore the ideas of perception and reality, and learn ways to manage our customers' expectations about our products and services. Finally, we look at the dangers of over-promising and under-delivering, and how we can avoid that trap.

 

Unit 3 Communication

Whenever we communicate with our customers — face to face, on the telephone, or in writing, we are exchanging information, ideas, and feelings. Whatever the medium, we need to do it exceptionally well! You will learn and practice the skills of questioning, listening, getting feedback, verbal behaviours (the words we use and how we say them), and non-verbal behaviours (the way we come across, our body language). You will understand why first impressions are very important, and how you can continually build rapport with your customers. We also spend some time on telephone etiquette and techniques — how we 'behave' on the phone, and how we apply our skills and knowledge. For those of you who use email as your main communication, there are some useful tips on giving customer service by email. At the end of this unit, there is an opportunity to put all these skills together in simulated case studies.

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Unit 4: Self Management

We start this unit by examining the relationship between attitudes and behaviours. Once we understand how they interact, we are better able to manage our own, and positively influence our customers. We will also learn that our attitudes are significantly more important than our aptitudes, and how to control how we feel. As a substantial part of our product and service knowledge is to educate our customers, you need to understand their learning process, and adapt the way you 'teach' to each individual customer. Many of you will be required to cross-sell or up-sell - some all the time, others only on specific occasions. We will review the skills you need to do this. We end this unit discussing several important aspects of self-management. First, how we value and use our time, and how we manage our priorities. Second, how we recognize the warning signs and manage stress. Third, how we develop our personal power and continually gain in confidence. And finally, how we develop new skills, learn how to improve old ones, and learn from mistakes and experience.

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Unit 5: Complaints and Conflict

Through understanding how we and others feel when having to make a complaint, we are better able to understand the feelings and behaviours of customers when they make a complaint or are in a conflict situation. You will learn a process that will help you deal objectively with every complaint and conflict situation, and use a problem-solving process to achieve resolution. You will learn how to respond instead of reacting. You will learn the skills required to assertively deal with customers in any situation and will be able to positively influence their aggressive or passive behaviours to an appropriate two-way communication. We conclude this unit, showing you how to deal with the customer who thinks they are right, but are not!

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