Do-It-Yourself Customer Service Training: Get Success Now!
One of the joys of delivering Achieving Excellence in Customer Service has been and continues to be the “aha” moments that the participants take away. Most of the time when I have delivered this course, the participation has been mandatory, prescribed by top management. Delivering a mandatory course is different from delivering an “optional” course: It’s a tougher sell to the participants. That said, one of the key themes of the course is that participants can manage the customer’s experience and that, by doing so, manage their own service workloads better, gaining additional control over the service encounter, and reducing a lot of repetitive or just plain “nuisance” work that comes from customers who lack confidence that they are actually going to get what they came looking for. Participants like the idea that by managing the customer’s experience, they get a better handle on managing their own workloads and this increases job satisfaction at the same time that it raises customer satisfaction. That’s a pretty good bargain.
Another thing that participants enjoy is the idea that they can “turn this course inside out” and use it to gain better customer service for themselves when they are off the job and functioning as consumers.
Sometimes participants will say, “management wants us to work harder and faster and we are already maxed out.” This is where the power of setting customer expectations so you underpromise and overdeliver comes to be understood. If you can’t change the reality and perception of service speed and responsiveness because you are already maxed out, you can change the expectations of the customer so that you can exceed them and cause customer satisfaction.
In other cases, participants report that their customers call them often to find out about the status of a solution that they are seeking–whether it’s a decision to be made or a product to be delivered. This course teaches that if you want to avoid those customer follow-up calls on a schedule that suits the customer, then you can manage the customer by committing to provide periodic status updates. Seems simple enough, but think about your own experience as a customer and how infrequently it happens.
Finally, there is a tendency for those of us delivering service to become a bit robotic, particularly when we are having the same transactions or encounters over and over again. A case in point is picking up the prescription at the pharmacy: The question is always asked: What is your address? When you provide your address in anticipation of the regularly-asked question, 9 times out of 10 the person at the counter will ask: What is your address?
When this happens, we can often forget to see the encounter and experience from the customer’s point of view. Turning service “inside out” so that the person providing the service sees it clearly from the customer viewpoint is another power tool that this training imparts.
There are also phrases and techniques that the course provides that are very powerful in shaping the customer’s experience and which boost job satisfaction as well. Fact is, the tie between customer satisfaction and job satisfaction is huge. It’s pivotal. This course emphasizes this link in a big way..
Based on decades of success delivering our “Achieving Excellence in Customer Service” to a wide variety of audiences in the private and public sectors, we are now offering a Do-It-Yourself course.
This is a course that is fun to deliver, full of straightforward principles and skills that can be put to work immediately. Even if you haven’t trained before or have only trained a few times, we have scripted the training in a way that will have you performing as a customer service training virtuoso in no time.
For more information, please see detailed product information.
