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:
Customer Service Class: How You Can Help Companies Develop Great Customer Service Skills
Every company says it's customer-focused. Every mission statement promises great customer service. All executives claim they want close customer relationships. Don Peppers knows how to put the rhetoric to the test. "Do you know who your customers are?" he asks. "If a regular customer came into your store, would you recognize him? Are you tracking your regular customers on a regular basis? Do you have membership cards for your retail customers and email addresses for your business customers?"
According to Peppers, great customer service happens only when you relate to your customers "one to one." To do that, you have to identify your customers, differentiate them, interact with them, and finally, customize your products or services to meet their needs. It's a process that Peppers spells out with coauthor Martha Rogers in two best-selling books, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (Currency/Doubleday, 1993) and Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age (Currency/Doubleday, 1997). As an evangelist for this new approach to customer service, Peppers maintains a full speaking schedule and, through his consulting firm Marketing 1:1, advises such blue-chip clients as AT&T, PaineWebber, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, and EDS.
When Fast Company asked Peppers how he would evaluate a company's customer service performance, he offered four simple questions: Do you treat different customers differently? Do you create a learning relationship with your customers? Do you keep your customers? Do you organize around customers?
To complement Peppers's answers to these questions, Fast Company interviewed key innovators at four operations with cutting-edge approaches to customer service: the Willow Creek Community Church, Hitachi Data Systems, General Electric Medical Systems, and PeopleSoft. These profiles offer tools for delivering great customer service that you can apply today. Your own customers will benefit from these tools -- after you customize them, of course.
Do you treat different customers differently?
Some customers are simply worth more to you than others are. And different customers also need different things from you. The rule is, treat different customers differently.
You should differentiate customers first by their value to you and then by their needs. It's simple: you don't want to waste time differentiating low-value customers by their needs, because you don't want to create a high-cost relationship with a low-value customer. Once you know who your highest-value customers are, you can differentiate them according to what they need.
You can even differentiate customers who seem to need the same thing. Simply expand your relationship into needs that aren't so uniform. For instance, if you're a phone company, you might think that all customers need the same thing from you: a clear, immediate connection. And in a way that's true: you can't do much to customize a phone call. But you can customize the bundle of services that surround the phone call.
Take invoicing. If I'm a business customer of a phone company, every month I get an inch-thick pile of paper -- the phone company's invoice. What if the company gave me the invoice on a disk or if I could download it from a Web site? My accounting department could allocate the costs a lot faster and a lot more efficiently. Then we would return the information to the phone company with our own notations. Next month the invoice comes from the phone company with the costs predistributed the way we want them. Each cycle, the billing process gets faster, easier, more accurate, more customized.
That's the fundamental principle of the customer service relationship: the more each customer teaches you about what she wants, the more you can make it or deliver it that way, and the more difficult it is for her to take her business elsewhere.
Do you create a learning relationship with your customers?
Here's the underlying idea: the customer teaches the provider how to give him the service he wants, and that installed base of knowledge makes the bond extremely tight. That's a learning relationship -- a relationship that gets smarter with every interaction. It's the linchpin of customer loyalty.
To make that happen, you have to find the most cost-efficient and effective ways of interacting with your customers. That's how you learn what they want and how valuable they are to you. The people at Dell excel at this. When you order a computer from Dell, they start by asking you what you need the computer to do. Is it your first computer? Are you going to use it only at home, or is it for home and work? Will kids use it? Do you want to do presentations on it? Do you have a printer? Do you need a printer? Will you be doing graphics? Are you ever going to be on the Internet? Then they recommend a particular configuration based on your answers.
They don't start out by saying, Do you want 133 MHz or 200 MHz? They start by asking what you need to do. That's fundamentally an interactive process.
You can create this interaction any number of ways. The trick is to find the one approach that works best for you. The phone, for example, is very effective. The bandwidth is high, you can read voice inflection, and data capture is good because a customer service agent punches everything in. But the phone is also a very expensive tool.
The Web offers an increasingly effective way to interact. When you interact on the Web, the cost to the supplier is zero. Nothing. Compare that with the phone: Every time you call Federal Express and ask them to track your package, your call costs them $2 to $3. They lose money on that package. But when you go to their Web site and track the package yourself, they make money. The more people use the Web site, the more cost-efficient the business becomes.
Do you keep your customers?
You never want to turn a customer loose. If you're a home builder and I come to you to build my house, you know that I'm also going to need an architect, a realtor, a lawyer, an insurance agent. You can't deliver those services. But it would pay you to have alliances with other high-quality companies and professionals who could deliver those services. That way you continue to own the relationship.
You have to be on top of what the customer wants. Customers are diverse and dynamic -- their tastes and needs change from day to day and even hour to hour.
The more you customize your product or service, the more marketing becomes part of customer service -- and the more customer service becomes part of marketing. You erase the distinction between getting a customer, keeping a customer, and growing a customer.
If you want to do a good job of acquiring new customers, you can hire a marketing director or an ad agency. No problem. But if you want to do a better job of keeping your customers longer and growing them into bigger customers, there's nobody you can hire to do that. It has to permeate your organization. It has to become a way of doing business.
Do you organize around customers?
Most companies aren't organized for this new way of working and don't have anyone in charge of making it happen. But the firm of the future will be organized around individual customer relationships.
You may not be able to make that change overnight. But you can start by identifying your highest-value customers and putting somebody in charge of them. That's an incremental step, but it speaks to three issues: organization, time, and money. As long as no one is responsible, no one is going to have the money or find the time. But if you put someone in charge, you'll make more money, and suddenly you'll also find the time.
Some people ask, Do our customers really want this? That's really old thinking! The fact is, customers want different things. Some really want this kind of individualized service. Others don't. Some will always award contracts strictly according to bids: they don't want a relationship with you. Others will gladly off-load functions to you if you perform them competently -- and will remain loyal to you forever.
You have to think of customers as individuals. Once you start to think that way, you realize that your business is your customer, not your product or service. A great customer relationship gives you long-term business. The simple truth is, any company that can't identify its customers individually is going to be history.
By Alan M. Webber, Heath Row http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/11/helpthem.html
The Human Face of Online Customer Service Skills
As the daily headlines keep reminding us, most e-commerce companies are having trouble making money delivering books, toys, and CDs by mail. If they think that's difficult, let them try delivering a fresh tomato in a blizzard.
That's the task faced by online grocers, arguably the toughest e-commerce category of all. Given the expensive infrastructure needed to operate an Internet delivery service and the notoriously thin margins of the grocery business, it's not hard to understand why they've suffered mightily. The valuations of two giants in the grocery-delivery space have deflated as investors have fled: Peapod's stock price has plummeted from nearly $15 to under $1; Webvan, which traded at more than $20 earlier this year, sank as low as 28 cents recently. Most analysts expect that only one or two Internet grocers will survive. That said, the market they're competing for could be considerable. Forrester Research has predicted that grocery customers will spend $27.1 billion online by 2004.
Webvan believes the key to bagging that market is customer service.
"Our mission is to be the last-mile leader of Internet commerce, and we own the whole process from order to delivery," says Amy Nobile, manager of public affairs at Webvan. That mission is getting tougher all the time as brick-and-mortar grocers start to get into the online order-and-delivery game. But the ability to bring the world to customers' door differentiates Webvan from other e-commerce companies. If nothing else, Webvan will never be another faceless virtual company.
Mike Gonzales, Webvan director of customer service, says it's all about the human touch. The company has given its couriers mobile field devices, empowering them to take returns on the spot and record customer comments and complaints. That feedback is routed back to delivery centers the same day. "Our couriers get rave reviews from customers," Gonzales says. "Right now, we're on an initiative to train them to seek customer feedback more actively. We train them to help customers make orders online, to explain the variety of products we offer, and to offer advice on specialty products, like custom-cut meats. If they can't answer a question on the spot, our customer service folks call the customer back from the office."
That's the kind of service that Anthony Parks, Webvan's original customer service director, always envisioned for the company. Parks left Webvan in April 1999 due to differences over customer service strategy. But while he's no longer with the company, Webvan seems to be moving closer to his original plan.
"My goal was to duplicate the shopping experience for customers in every way," says Parks, who now runs his own consulting company, eCustomer Service. "Grocery shopping is generational. It's a tradition. My mother took me shopping, and her mother took her." Parks believes that preserving that emotional link is crucial to the success of all e-commerce. He thinks people want the convenience of the Internet without losing the feel of the neighborhood butcher or produce person. "And when you're ordering over the Web," he says, "the courier is the only point of human contact."
Building a new tradition is crucial to Webvan's success. The company now focuses less on marketing to new customers and more on retaining old ones and getting them to order more frequently. Gonzales underscores the challenge. "We call up customers who've used Webvan before but stopped," he says. "Mostly, we're looking for specific feedback -- what went well, what didn't -- but we also ask why they stopped using Webvan." The number-one reason for disappearing customers? People just haven't gotten into the habit of shopping for groceries online.
It's Still the People, Stupid
With tough times ahead, a lot rides on the people who provide Webvan's customer service. Couriers and phone bank operators are key to keeping customers. Webvan needs to squeeze great people out of an already tight labor market. (See sidebar Getting the Goods on Customer Service Candidates [1] to get tips on interviewing for good service.) That costs. "Labor is always the highest expense in good customer service," Parks says.
And customers are willing to pay for excellent service. Parks says, "Customers may squabble over price. They say, 'I can buy this for $1 or less on the Internet than in a store.' But they're willing to shell out $5 for delivery," he says. "What's appealing to them is the convenience. Webvan is now improving its customer service by offering a greater breadth of products -- including books and DVDs -- that will save people even more time."
Consistency Breeds Content
In any service business, consistency is key. People know that a Big Mac will be the same whether they eat it in Manhattan or Marrakech. So, too, in the grocery delivery business. "We go to hotel chains and fast-food chains because we know what to expect," says Joe O'Leary, partner and U.S. leader for the Customer and Channels Group at Arthur Andersen. "Consumers are looking for a consistent level of service." Customer service representatives provide that consistency on a day-to-day basis, but behind the scenes, all departments must remain on the same page to guarantee long-term success. "Customers expect that they are dealing with the same company -- whether they're there in person, on the phone, or online," O'Leary says. "At both the shallowest and deepest levels, companies must be consistent in their focus on the customer."
For Webvan, consistency means extensive interdepartmental training and a strong mission. "You can stop any employee in the hall," says Nobile, "and they'll tell you Webvan's mission. Not word for word, but the essence is there. Everybody's on the same page."
Technology Isn't Everything
Technology has made customer service more efficient in some ways, but not always as expected. "Take instant messaging," says Gonzales. "It works, but not the way people thought it would. We thought chat would be a really efficient way of communicating with customers one-on-one, but it didn't turn out that way." Individual chat sessions between a service rep and a customer just aren't economically viable, Gonzales says. But instant messaging becomes efficient if a rep can have multiple chat sessions up at once. Even with tweaking, instant messaging cannot compete with a tried-and-true old-economy technology -- the telephone -- which is still the most common vehicle of communication for Webvan customers.
The future will be different. Parks and O'Leary insist that more companies will use integrated systems that will allow customer service reps to access all kinds of information about a customer's past complaints, spending, and interests. That's the kind of information infrastructure that Webvan is working to build now.
Technology, a company-wide commitment to customer service, and the best possible people form the keystone of Webvan's quest for success. Like all e-commerce business plans, the delivery market is very much a work in progress. The Holy Grail for the entire industry is to deliver on the promise of better service and greater convenience, and still make a profit. Despite its stock market woes, Webvan is one of a few pioneers making progress toward that goal. It's impossible to say yet if Webvan will become profitable. But if the company manages to institute its plan, it will do so having developed a new benchmark for service.
Source:
John Hoult: link
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