Customer Service Excellence

This course will enhance your ability to handle customer and client interactions with confidence by implementing best practice customer service techniques, delivering customer satisfaction and developing customer loyalty. For those of you who are in frontline service and sales roles, this customer service course will provide you with learning opportunities on the essentials for dealing with complaints and difficult situations, whilst maintaining a strong focus on customer satisfaction and the total customer experience.

Aims

This course aims to:

highlight the importance of serving customers as an integral element to the success of an organisation
provide robust and detailed steps for delivering high standards of customer service, including challenging situations across any work environment
build confidence and achieve positive outcomes with the most difficult customers by managing emotions, asking good questions and delivering acceptable outcomes with available resources.

Course Key Learnings:

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

greet customers with confidence and ease, creating a positive first impression
build rapport by using body language and voice effectively
manage customer emotions and expectations before delivering a solution
ask good questions to identify customer needs; as well as build your listening skills to discern these needs
allow the customer to feel in control whilst generating options within available resources
set healthy boundaries with difficult customers to generate respect whilst working to an acceptable solution for both parties
identify the impacts of poor customer service
deliver effective customer service across a range of channels – face to face, phone and online, following a disciplined process to meet customer expectations and then achieve excellence
build customer loyalty by delighting the customer, resulting in a low cost to the organisation and your personal contribution to the success of the organisation
handle customer complaints and misunderstandings in a positive and effective manner
work towards customer service metrics that denote the required level of satisfaction from customers.

Course Content

Defining your customers (internal and external) and how they perceive you and your brand
Defining excellent customer service
Creating a positive first impression
Rapport building
Initiating conversations that can generate sales
How to read clients’ body language and how to use your body language and voice flexibly and effectively
Allowing the customer to express their feelings
Communicating clearly
Identifying the customer’s needs
Helping to meet the customer’s needs
Understanding customer expectations
Moments of truth that lead to customer loyalty
Telephone etiquette: answering, holding, transferring calls
Online skills for accurately identifying needs, then asking good questions for generating outcomes leading to customer acquisition, retention and advocacy
How to remain calm in a heated situation
Generating positivity and optimism
Dealing with objections/complaints
How to use questions effectively
Using your competitive advantage for building loyalty
Methods of collecting customer information, whilst making your customer feel singularly important
Defining and delivering against your service metrics
Appreciating the link between outstanding service and your organisation’s success
Creating a positive last impression by delighting the customer at low cost to your organization

Intended audience

Suitable for anyone who has responsibility for serving internal or external customers. This can be across any sector – commercial, government, not-for-profit and the education sector.