Duration 5 Days

Introduction

The course is designed to help you handle difficult customers and situations and to make the most of every customer contact. It will give them the skills to develop customer loyalty and will teach how to take care of yourself and enable you to gain in confidence in any customer situation.

Better, faster, service is what will keep your customers coming back. This is what will give the Company the competitive advantage which it needs to survive in a tough business climate. In today’s customer-orientated business environment, ‘people skills’ are critical for personal and organizational success. How you handle your customers can directly affect you individual goals as well as your team’s and Company’s performance.

Who Should Attend?.

• Anyone who provides a service or product to external or internal customers including customer service representatives, technical and support personnel, field service representatives, account managers, credit and billing specialists, small business owners – as well as managers who want to reinforce their skills and train their staff.
• Staff who deal with customers on a daily basis face to face
• Telephone sales and service advisers
• Helpdesk operators

Course Objectives

By the end of this course participants will be able to:

• Deliver better, faster service and increased customer satisfaction
• Explain why giving good customer service is so important to corporate objectives
• Learn how to gain repeat business
• Assess the current value of your organization’s ‘customer experience’
• Know what customers expect
• Increase your credibility with customers – and your value to your Organization
• Manage stressful situation more effectively
• Develop interpersonal skills to a higher level
• Explain how to turn complaints into opportunities
• Recognize the signals of customer irritation and how to respond appropriately and assist in quickly finding a workable solution to your customer’s problem
• Highlight the value of asking for and giving feedback to customer regarding service
• Be able to define good customer service
• Calculate what customer service skills do you already have?
• Dealing with difficult, rude or indifferent customers
• Achieving real excellence in customer service
• Implement personal motivation techniques to create excellent first impressions
• Advanced listening and responding skills
• How to make the customers point of view work for you
• Developing new customer relationships
• Caring for yourself as well as your customers
• Handling complaints with empathy and efficiency
• Gaining confidence in your customer service role .

Course Outline:

1. The Benefits of Excellent Service
   • Focus on Customer Service success, principles and purpose
   • Understand how Customer Service creates revenue, healthy
   • organizations and attractive employee benefits
   • Appreciate how delivering excellent Customer Service reduces
   • your personal stress at work.
   • Establish a ‘Customer Care Plan’
2. Professionalism Under Pressure
   • Understand how emotions are created
   • Serving the internal customer
   • Develop mental strategies for remaining optimistic and calm under pressure
   • Use body language to control your emotional state
   • Honour negative emotions positively
   • Change your emotional state to avoid negative emotional carryover
   • Internal customer service
   • Appreciate that internal customer service is just as important as external service
   • Understand the two levels of
   • customer service
   • Have influence over issues that you can’t control action plan.
3. Managing Customer Expectations
   • Appreciate that customer expectations is based on perceptions
   • Identify your customers’ top two expectations
   • Recognize that you can save time and reduce stress by focusing on the top two expectations of customers
   • Consider the merits of establishing a ‘Customer Care Forum’
   • Prepare yourself to handle customers by knowing how and where they get their expectations
   • Managing customer expectations by personality style
   • Understand and identify the personality style of others
   • Avoid taking things personally
   • Expand your communication skills to get along easily with more customers
4. Active Listening Skills
   • Build on your listening strengths
   • Reduce your listening liabilities
   • How to perfect your listening skills
   • Identify your customer’s and your own listening style
   • Questions – if you don’t ask, how do you know
   • Create rapport with customers more easily to have more influence
   • Vocabulary, telephone manner, and email communication
   • Appreciate the power of words
   • Remove any communication constraints
   • Avoid creating a negative impression with words
   • Use persuasive language patterns
5. Dealing with Difficult Customers
   • Recognize and respond effectively to specific customer behaviours
   • Distinguishing ‘difficult’ from ‘different’
   • 12 reasons why customers appear to be difficult
   • Understand the psychology of anger
   • Listen to an angry customer so that they can calm down
   • Customer loyalty chain
   • Turn an angry customer into a happy repeat customer using a recovery system
   • Remain calm during interactions with angry customers by applying emotional management tools
   • Anger management
6. Measuring & Monitoring individual customer service
   • Encouraging feedback from customers
   • Encouraging feedback from colleagues
   • Observation and monitoring
   • Coaching & mentoring
   • The four principle rules of customer care
   • Empowerment & customer service
7. Handling complaints
   • 6 hints for pacifying angry customers
   • Analysis of common complaints
   • Analysis why customers don’t re-order
   • What does the company vision tell you about customer service?
   • Provide and environment which supports effective customer service
   • Leadership principle in relation to customer service
   • Employee relations and customer relations
   • Company culture created with ‘The voice of the customer’
8. Getting closer to the customer
   • The seven customer satisfaction elements
   • The three ‘r’s’ of customer satisfaction
   • The product or service element
   • Questions the customer may ask
   • The sales elements
   • Benchmarking
   • Measure, measure, measure
   • Walk the talk
   • The only thing that matters
   • Customer centering
   • Creating customer value
   • The psyche of your customer
   • Calculation of standards of excellence in customer service.