Customer Service Excellence Course: Foundation Skills

Sales and customer service. Make happy customers.

COVID-19 update: arrangement of our courses

We are now delivering courses online and in-person. Please check the delivery format of each class before enrolling.

Please note that course materials (excluding prescribed texts) are shared electronically within 48 hours of course commencement. Printing is not available.

Key to business success is excellence in customer and client service. By completing this customer service excellence training course, you will gain the knowledge and skills to ensure customers’ expectations are met in the selling of products and provision of services.

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.

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.

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.

Outcomes

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.

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 organisation

Intended audience

Suitable for anyone who has responsibility for serving internal or external customers. The course covers foundational content and is designed for those who are in the formative stage of their customer service-oriented career.

Delivery modes

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

Delivery style

Delivered as a one-day, interactive lecture with key concepts and skills workshopped, providing you with an opportunity to put these skills into practice.