GREAT diplomacy – How to reduce the heat in a challenging conversation
This session is designed to help your people build their diplomatic skills to enable them make better choices when supporting an impassioned customer, helping to reduce the customer’s emotion and collaborate on finding a solution. When the customer is upset, angry or disappointed conversations can get heated, and we inadvertently make it worse through the innate human response of fight or flight, the wrong choice of words or mismatched energy. But, if we can make it worse, we can also make it better.
How will it help?
This workshop will help your people to:
- Recognise their own response to a situation and when it might be helpful or unhelpful
- Choose non-confrontational language to reduce the heat and regain control
- Demonstrate collaborative behaviours to show the customer you have their back
Who should attend?
Anyone in a customer-facing role who has attended the GREAT customer service workshop.
What happens in it?
A highly interactive and practical session, using real scenarios relevant to your people in their role. Your people will learn three key strategies that will help them diplomatically to reduce the heat in challenging conversations with customers.
How’s it delivered?
Option 1 – Face-to-face
A half-day session for a group of up to 12. The session is approximately 3-hours and each participant will receive a printed take-away summarising the three strategies.
Option 2 – Virtual
A 90-minute session for a group of up to 12. The virtual option is just as interactive and each participant will receive a PDF take-away summarising the three strategies.
Session outline
This is the overview for the half-day, face-to-face session. Timings are approximate and will flex depending on the needs of the group. Virtual delivery follows the same content and sequence but with different timings and excludes the additional practise section.
1 Welcome to GREAT Diplomacy (40 mins)
- What will you learn? Session overview and objectives
- Activity: What gets your back up?
- Our human response to challenging situations – fight or flight
- How this can show up in customer conversations and the impact each has
2 Three strategies (90 mins)
- Recognise your reaction
- The Success Principles – choosing your response
- Activity: Recognise your reaction and choose your response
- Mind your language
- Choosing accountable language
- Activity: Mind your language – building trust with your customer and demonstrating that they are in safe hands
- Collaborate
- Collaborating with the customer to find a solution
- Activity: Collaborate – examples of how this would sound in a customer conversation
BREAK (15 mins)
3 Practise (F2F only – 60 minutes)
- Activity: Practise reducing the heat – apply what you’ve learned to real situations that you face every day
4 Action plan and close (15 mins)
- Reflect and prepare actions
- Activity: surprise!
- Close
To check that this is the right programme for you, just give us a call on 01582 463464 and we’ll be happy to talk it through with you – we’re here to help!