Customer Service Skills

1-Day Course Introducing Principles of Outstanding Customer Service

Includes many Scenarios and Role Plays

Training Course Description

"As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principle, is sure to have trouble."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every time you offer your service or products to another person, you become a customer service representative and that person is now your customer. Anyone involved in business or organisation therefore needs to know the principals of effective customer service skills. Knowing how to deal with customers in difficult situations, how to response to their requests or concerns or simply providing a positive and memorable experience for your clients helps you and your company to rise above the competition. Customer service is a skill which can be learned and mastered through practice and persistence.

This course introduces delegates to the core principles of customer services. By employing these values and adopting the correct attitude, delegates will be able to handle the vast majority of customer interactions with ease no matter how unusual or complicated they are.

The focus of the course is to teach handling customer service scenarios through a variety of examples as this is the quickest way that delegates learn. Examples are provided for many environments such as retail, face-to-face customer service, help-desk, client meetings, call centre support, medical support and so on. Delegates also explore a number of methods to handle customer complaints, learn how to say ‘no' and discover how to tackle different challenges professionally.

In addition, related communication skills are also covered. Topics such as body language, correctly structuring sentences for maximum effect and communicating on the phone are discussed and best practices are shown.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Customer Service Principles
• What are the fundamentals of customer service principles?
• How to interact with different types of customers and different personalities?
• What customers want and how to satisfy them?

Questioning Techniques
• How to encourage a customer to give you more information by using correct questioning techniques?
• How to use leading questions?
• How to sequence your sentences for maximum effect?

Emotional Intelligence
• How to empathise with customers and maintain rapport?
• How to show you understand the customer and care about their problems?

Customer Service Scenarios
• What does it mean to handle a customer professionally?
• What are the common challenging customer service scenarios and how to handle them?
o How to handle angry customers?
o How to handle swearing customers?
o How to handle mistrustful customers?
o How to handle demanding customers?
o How to handle a developing long queue?
o ...

Handling Complaints
• How to handle complaints?
• What are the principles of handling unhappy customers?
• How to deliver a "Soft No"?

Telephone Skills
• How to handle phone calls?
• How to put a customer on hold?
• How to refer a customer to a colleague?
• How to end a phone call?

Body Language
• What body language signals are most critical for a great first impression?
• What gestures put customers at ease and let you establish rapport with them?
• How to spot the lies through body language?

Audience

Anyone

Prerequisites

None

Course Duration

1 day

Course Level

Beginners & Intermediate

Delegates will learn

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Apply the essential principles of customer services to anyone who wants your 'output'
• Ask effective questions from customers to get results
• Use empathy to maintain rapport with customers
• Professionally respond to a customer's demands & requests while maintaining rapport
• Sequence your sentences effectively to get maximum results
• Handle phone conversations professionally
• Read and interpret body language signals and use them to enhance your communication skills
• Defuse uncomfortable interactions with customers and professionally respond to any problems as they arise

The Philosophy Behind the Development of Customer Services Course

Learning

This course is designed based on the latest research in psychology and proven methods in effective teaching. Our training materials are designed based on one central entity; the learner.

The course is designed from the bottom up based on many practical exercises that the leaner will need to go through to learn the topic of the course. The objective of this approach is to make sure that the learner will learn everything on the day, not later. Repeatable exercises will help the leaner to memorise the content much more rapidly than traditional teaching allows. The learner will go back to the real-world armed with the lessons learned and can quickly implement the ideas in the field.

Customer Services

The nature of Customer Services demands a lot of interaction. As a result, this course contains many group activities and one-to-one exercises, case studies and scenarios that address the most common situations encountered by Customer Service Representatives. The scenarios make the course entertaining as well as educational. The learners are encouraged to be creative and come up with solutions themselves.

The latest research in training methodologies show that learners who participate in the learning process, as opposed to being told how to do something, are much more likely to remember and apply the skills later on. This increases the efficiency of the learning activity as well as the productivity of the learners, not to mention that employers will benefit greatly from their ‘trained' staff whom can use their training effectively on the job.

Presentation

As in any training environment, the trainer may present a number of slides. Training is not giving a lecture or presentation. Instead it is more about facilitating the learning process with interactive teaching. As a result, we design the presentation slides with this need in mind. The slides are deliberately designed to be highly visually and minimal at the same time. We are all too familiar by death-by-power point. Latest practices in giving presentations show that use of novel imagery, along with engaging captions, presented with lots of stories are much more likely to ‘stick' than the traditional bullet point presentations.

However, there is a balance to be made. A new trainer, who purchases these courses from Skills Converged, will be more interested to get slides that contain material he or she can read and understand than some symbolic emotional images intended for the end-delegates.

We achieve this balance by providing both the textual and visual content necessary to make a state-of-the-art training. In addition, comprehensive scripts help the trainers to master the content in a short time and get ready to deliver the training as quickly as possible.

Unlike many in this field, we constantly update and monitor our methods and practices and align them with the latest cutting-edge research. Our passion is to understand the human nature and learn how to get the most from the skills we learn.