Customer Service Excellence Course: Foundation Skills

Sales and customer service. Make happy customers.

Exceptional customer service does not just meet your customers’ expectations – it exceeds them. Every time. Whatever service you provide or product you sell, every customer interaction is an opportunity to make or break your organisation’s reputation. Stand-out customer service starts before your customer walks through the door, picks up the phone, or sends the email. It continues well beyond the initial touchpoint, and influences sales and service delivery, as well as customer retention and advocacy.

In this one-day customer service excellence course, you will learn what distinguishes exceptional customer service, and what it takes to set your organisation’s customer service performance apart.

We will answer the five Ws and one H of customer service excellence:

• Who are your customers?
• What is customer service?
• When is it achieved?
• Why is it important?
• How do you navigate challenges?

Aims

This course aims to help you:

• understand the importance of customer service excellence for your organisation’s development, growth and reputation
• connect with your customers, and build trust and loyalty
• use effective verbal, non-verbal, and written communication to identify your customers’ needs and personalise their experience
• learn how to anticipate and respond to your customers’ needs and defuse difficult situations
• develop your conflict resolution and problem solving skills.

Outcomes

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

• know what exceptional customer service looks like, and identify the impacts and costs of poor customer service
• make a good first impression and build immediate rapport through positive body language and voice skills
• build strong customer relations through active listening and effective interviewing techniques
• anticipate customer needs, manage customer expectations, and identify mutually acceptable solutions
• use effective conflict resolution skills to contain emotions
• identify difficult customers and use early intervention strategies
• confidently deliver exceptional customer service in a broad range of settings and across different communication channels – including face-to-face, phone and online
• build customer loyalty by ‘going the extra mile’, at a low cost to you and your brand
• handle customer complaints and misunderstandings use upward referral effectively
• track and attain desired customer service performance metrics.

Content

The course will empower participants using the following framework:

Connect with customers + Manage expectations + Overcome and review challenges = Exceptional customer service.

The first part of this course will focus on connecting with your customers.

We will consider:

• Who are your customers?
• How do you make a positive first impression and build rapport?
• What is customer service and how is it different/similar to stakeholder relations?
• Why is it important for your organisation?

The second part will delve into effectively managing customer expectations by using critical communication and interpersonal skills.

This will include:

• Determining your customers’ immediate needs and anticipating future needs.
• Developing active listening skills, and using and reading body language.
• Speaking clearly, adjusting tone, pitch, and volume to suit the conversation (verbal communication).
• Having a positive attitude, tact, and patience, and developing empathy and emotional intelligence.

In the third part of the course, we will prepare you to overcome and review challenges.

We will discuss:

• How to deal with complaints.
• How to manage difficult customers.
• How to hone your conflict resolution and problem skills.
• How to ‘go the extra mile’ at low personal and organisational effort.
• How to use upward referral effectively.

Intended audience

This course is suitable for a range of participants, including frontline workers and experienced team leaders whose roles demand customer service excellence. We will consider customer service fundamentals in a range of sectors and contexts, from health, community and emergency services; to call centres and digital media management; to administration, project and change management, to stakeholder engagement and leadership roles. This course is suitable for anyone who interacts directly with internal or external customers and whose role has responsibility for enhancing the customer journey. Participants are encouraged to come to class with a specific scenario in mind which can be workshopped and discussed in the session.

Prerequisites

None

Delivery mode

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught training
• Online training via the platform Zoom

Delivery style

Interactive workshop which includes facilitator training, in-class exercises, case studies and workshop-style activities.

Materials

All course materials are provided electronically (via Dropbox). Printing services are not provided. Please bring laptop or iPad, and pen and paper.