Customer Service: Partners for Excellence

Impact on the Organization

Companies that provide world-class customer service have a powerful and systemic advantage over companies that provide merely “adequate” service. By keeping customers loyal, service excellence reduces turnover and marketing costs, and establishes a solid foundation for consistent, profitable growth.

Learning Objectives

• Strengthen your abilities and maximize your effectiveness as a Customer Service Representative (CSR): your company’s frontline representative, and often the only view of your company that customers will ever have
• Recognize your impact on the company’s success, and help your company achieve its most important goals
• Take excellent customer service to an even higher level
• Work as a member of a highly-professional, high-performance team, by:
  • Aligning/managing internal and external customer expectations and perceptions
  • Creating a professional environment through all your communications and actions
    

Program Description

In this six-part, three-day series, your Customer Service Reps and field engineers will learn skills and techniques for serving external and internal customers more effectively, and successfully partnering with the companies you do business with.

Participants will practice using simulations, case studies and class discussion of real-life situations – preparing specifically for the customer issues they will actually encounter in the field.

Below is a list of topics covered in this series, with specific Learning Goals for each topic.

Time Investment

3 days.

Customization

This program can be customized to reflect your organization’s procedures, policies, cases, examples, and terminology. Please inquire about these optional consulting services.

Topics and Learning Goals

Role of the Customer Service Rep

• Identify the critical skills needed by an effective CSR
• Make the connection between possessing excellent interpersonal communication skills and accomplishing critical tasks

Taking Ownership

• Apply empowerment techniques to your support team
• Develop methods to reach your team’s objectives
• Communicate with others to inspire trust, cooperation, and commitment

Effective Communication

• Construct clear, concise messages
• Create messages that interest the receiver
• Use non-verbal techniques to reinforce the intent of your messages
• Improve communication through “active listening”
• Use feedback to overcome barriers to communication
• Identify behavioral/communication styles
• Learn how personal behavioral communication style affects communication
• Understand how people learn

Negotiation

• Understand today’s rapidly changing corporate environment
• Understand the role of influence in today’s work environment
• Recognize and utilize the Win/Win and Give/Get philosophies of negotiating
• Identify and apply effective tools and techniques to improve your negotiation skills
• Relate the Six Steps in Negotiating to a current situation
• Practice the Six Steps in Negotiation

Conflict Management

• Explore potential areas of conflict
• Identify actual sources of conflict
• Identify and apply nine approaches to conflict resolution
• Master a systematic process for dealing constructively with disagreement

Voice of the Customer

• Identify your internal customers
• Determine customer needs and expectations
• Identify priorities for action on behalf of the customer
• Learn better ways to lead your support team in collectively solving external customer problems

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