Customer Service Training Courses:
Our customer service course teaches by doing with less than 15% lecture and 85% hands on
activities. Participants learn by Doing and not by being told. Exercises are
practical, realistic, fun and are skill based.
To maximize your customer
service teams effectiveness we suggest our custom, private
customer service courses offered in house at the location of
your choice, usually in groups of 6 or more.
Contact
us for a free consultation on how we can best service your
training needs in a customer service training course customized
for you!
Course Objectives:
In our Exceptional Customer Service one-day
course
participants will:
- Understand how to handle inquiries and/or complaints in
ways that create improved, lasting relationships with your
customers or clients.
- Learn to promote positive "chemistry" between
your company and your clients by recognizing and
responding to the needs of each individual.
- Learn how to handle doubt, misunderstandings, and
objections.
- Acquire techniques for seeing issues from clients'
perspectives, creating value-adding options for clients,
and making sure clients recognize the added value they are
getting.
- Learn how to gain agreement from clients and reinforce
mutually satisfying long-term relationships.
Customer Service Training:
3 Exceptional Customer Service Course Secrets
You can have a business, even a good one, but you'll never have a great company without first understanding and implementing customer service. What does this look like? I'll share with you some secrets that I've learned after having owned businesses most of my adult life.
Secret Number One: Don't expect your customer to have loyalty to you unless you develop loyalty to him. What do I mean by developing loyalty to the customer? I'll give you an example. One of my businesses is a telecommunications business. I design and sell customized automated answering services and I'm a telecommunications consultant. In my town, I'm the go-to girl for anything related to the subject. If I don't have it, I know where to get it, and at the best price. I've given my customers a private number where they can reach me if they need to. I've also given then access to me by email and they have my cell phone number in case of emergency. And they know not to use that unless it's a last resort, if their entire network is down, for instance. They don't abuse it. I typically don't lose business unless they go out of business or if they merge with another company who uses another solution.
They know me and I've taken the time to know them. I'm loyal to them in terms of giving them personal service, and I send business their way when I can. I send cards of congratulations when I read about them in local business journals or see their name in the paper. They know I have their best interest at heart and they don't ever question my commitment to them, not only to give them excellent service, but to use their services when I need something they have to offer. It's a win-win situation. The loyalty works both ways. If you own a local business, find ways to demonstrate your loyalty to your customers. They'll stick with you even if someone else comes along with a cheaper widget (well, most of the time).
Secret Number Two: Let your customer be right almost all the time. If someone comes to you with a complaint or asking for help with something that really isn't your responsibility, be very careful how you handle it.
I'll give you an example from my own experience. If a doctor's office calls on Monday morning and the office manager says, "Dr. Jones didn't get his pages this weekend - your system is not working," the first thing I'll do is login to the remote switch and look at the programming. About 99.9% of the time, it's something silly they did - turned off the paging feature, for instance. Or let the battery die in the pager instead of keeping a fresh supply of Double A's handy. Oh, it would be so easy to say something that would be defensive. However, I don't do that, even on my worst day. I work through all the logical steps and try to let them figure it out, hoping that I'll look like a hero for helping them figure it all out. And I always try to end the call with, "Now you just let me know if there's anything else we can do for you - and have a great week!" I want them to feel good about having called me, and that would not happen if I told them what I really thought sometimes! I remind myself that they are paying me regularly and for that, I'm very grateful for the opportunity to serve them. And that's the truth.
Secret Number Three: Be honest with your customer. If your client or customer even slightly suspects that you are less than honest or that you're trying to pull something over on him, you can wave goodbye, usually permanently.
Again, I can only relate something from my line of business - telecommunications. Sometimes, we've had network or signaling problems that affected service. I could make up stories and blame it on their major phone carriers, or the weather or any number of such things. When you're dealing with something as complicated as a VoIP network, you could shift blame in all kinds of directions. But, when I'm honest with them when it's my problem, or a mistake I made in programming, then when it really is someone else's issues we're dealing with, it's totally believable. I've developed a culture of honesty with my clients and they know they'll hear the truth and if I don't know, they trust me not to make up stuff.
One final bit of advice - if you don't care for your customers, your competition will be happy to take over that job for you.
Source:
Jeanne Kolenda:
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Article Content: Customer Service Course
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