Advanced Customer Service Management

An Introduction to Customer Service

• The core principles of customer service excellence
• Understanding of the different types of customer and the value of customers and their loyalty
• The costs and impacts of poor customer service
• How measuring customer relationships can enable greater business success
• Understanding unpleasant experiences

Essential Customer Service Communication Skills

• The language and communication skills for successful interactions
• The message drop-out
• The three elements of effective communication
• Building rapport with verbal communication
• Adapt your behaviour to meet customers’ needs or expectations

Dealing with stress and calming upset customers

• Understanding what makes customers upset
• Contrast successful and difficult customer relationships
• Strategies for calming upset customers; face-to face over the telephone via email
• Understanding the stress of customer services roles
• Managing or eliminating stress

Maintaining a positive and customer-friendly attitude

• The individual in customer service activities
• 10 Tools to help you manage your time in customer services
• Maintaining a ‘can do’ approach
• Techniques for asking questions
• Strategies for adding genuine value

Development of a toolkit to build stronger and long lasting customer relationships

• Why the telephone is so important to customer service
• Recognising the customer’s preference and adapting accordingly
• Mastering the telephone
• Understanding the signals you send out to customers
• Identify and negotiate the best deal/outcome possible

Main components of a Complaints Management Process

• Identification of the elements of an effective complaints management process
• International standards – ISO 10002
• Social technological political and economic factors that are changing customer’s expectation
• Why complaints are important to an organisation
• The risks and benefits inherent in complaints

What Customers Look for When They Complain

• What makes best-in-class complaints handling
• Setting a strategy for complaint management
• The positive power of effective complaint handling
• What is important to customers when they complain
• Understand the justice customers are looking for when complaining

People Issues

• Why customers choose to complain
• How complaint handlers choose to respond
• Communication styles and emotional intelligence
• Build rapport

Skills and Behaviours Needed for Dealing with Complaints

• Empathy and positive reactions
• Listening and questioning skills
• Dealing with difficult customers and problem behavior
• Taking a future outcomes approach

Learning from Complaints

• Data capture and analysis of complaints – the complaints cycle
• Case Study – UK Ofcom – Consumer Complaints Procedures Review
• Customer service and culture change
• Course summary and close