Customer Service Training Classes:
Our customer service class 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 classes 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 class customized
for you!
Class Objectives:
In our Exceptional Customer Service one-day
class
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 Class:
The 5 Biggest Customer Service Blunders
While howls of protest over poor customer service continue to fill the air, there remain some businesses that manage to consistently deliver superior customer service year in and year out. These are the places where turbo-charged customer service employees pursue customer delight with a passion, places that ignite a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm in customer service employees and customers alike. Foremost among the lessons to be learned from such flashpoint businesses are the blunders to avoid--those fatal mistakes that trip up just about everybody else.
First Blunder: making customer service a training issue.
Businesses of all kinds invest huge amounts in training programs that do not--and simply cannot--work. The function of such training is to identify the behaviors workers are supposed to engage in, and then coax, bully, or legislate these behaviors into the workplace. At best, this is almost always a recipe for conduct that feels mechanized and insincere; at worst, it intensifies worker resentment and cynicism.
Instead of dictating what workers should be doing to delight customers, the better approach is to give workers opportunities to brainstorm their own ideas for delivering delight. Management's role then becomes to help customer service employees implement these ideas, and to allow workers to savor the motivational effect of the positive feedback that ensues from delighted customers. This level of customer service employee ownership and involvement is a key cultural characteristic of virtually all flashpoint businesses.
Second Blunder: blaming poor service on customer service employee demotivation.
Businesses looking for ways to motivate their workers are almost always looking in the wrong places. Customer service employee cynicism is the direct product of an organization's visible preoccupation with self-interest above all else--a purely internal focus. The focus in flashpoint businesses is directed outward, toward the interests of customers and the community at large. This shift in cultural focus changes the way the business operates at all levels.
The reality in most business settings is that customer service employees are demotivated because they can't deliver delight. The existing policies and procedures make it impossible. Instead of "fixing" their customer service employees, flashpoint business set out to build a culture that unblocks them. Workers are encouraged to identify operational obstacles to customer delight, and participate in finding ways around them.
Third Blunder: using customer feedback to uncover what's wrong.
Businesses often use surveys and other feedback mechanisms to get to the causes of customer problems and complaints. Customer service employees come to dread these measurement and data-gathering efforts, since they so often lead to what feels like witch-hunts for customer service employee scapegoats, formal exercises in finger-pointing and the assigning of blame. Flashpoint businesses use customer feedback very differently. In these organizations the object is to uncover everything that's going right. Managers are forever on the lookout for "hero stories" - examples of customer service employees going the extra mile to deliver delight. Such feedback becomes the basis for ongoing recognition and celebration. Customer service employees see themselves as winners on a winning team, because in their workplace there's always some new "win" being celebrated.
Fourth Blunder: reserving top recognition for splashy recoveries.
It happens all the time: something goes terribly wrong in a customer order or transaction, and a dedicated customer service employee goes to tremendous lengths to make things right. The delighted customer brings this customer service employee's wonderful recovery to management's attention, and the customer service employee receives special recognition for his or her efforts. This is a blunder?
It is when such recoveries are the primary--if not the only--catalysts for customer service employee recognition. In such a culture, foul-ups become almost a good thing from the workers' point of view. By creating opportunities for splashy recoveries, foul-ups represent the only chance customer service employees have to feel appreciated on the job. Attempts to correct operational problems won't win much support if customer service employees see these problems as their only opportunity to shine.
Flashpoint businesses celebrate splashy recoveries, of course--but they're also careful to uncover and celebrate customer service employee efforts to delight customers where no mistakes or problems were involved. This makes it easier to get workers participating in efforts to permanently eliminate the sources of problems at the systems level.
Fifth Blunder: competing on price.
It's one of the most common (and most costly) mistakes in business. Price becomes the deciding factor in purchasing decisions only when everything else is equal--and everything else is almost never equal. Businesses compete on the perception of value, and this includes more than price. It's shaped by the total customer experience--and aspects such as "helpfulness," "friendliness," and "the personal touch" often give the competitive advantage to businesses that actually charge slightly more for their basic goods and services.
Those businesses that deliver a superior total experience from the inside out (that is, as a product of a strongly customer-focused culture) are typically those that enjoy a long-term competitive advantage--along with virtual immunity from the kinds of headaches that plague everybody else.
Source:
Paul Levesque:
link
Article Content: Customer Service Class
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