Helping your people deliver GREAT customer service
GREAT customer service
The main programme
A unique one- or half-day programme – ‘virtual’ or ‘classroom’
Our ‘flagship’ one- or half-day programme is firmly rooted in emotional intelligence, focused on helping your people build the emotional connections that we all know customers want, making them feel listened to, reassured and valued.
The GREAT modules
The half-day masterclass (‘GREAT skills’) is an optional follow-up to ‘GREAT customer service’. The others are all stand-alone modules:
GREAT skills – The customer service ‘masterclass’
Practice makes permanent; practice only makes perfect if your people are practising the right things. Research shows that we quickly forget learning if we make no attempt to practise and retain it. This Masterclass gives your people the opportunity to revisit, refresh and refine their GREAT Customer Service Skills so that they are consolidating what they have learned so far, practising what good looks like and building greater proficiency in having GREAT customer interactions.
GREAT complaints – How to resolve a complaint
Complaints are a gift… if they are properly unwrapped. This session will help your people to see complaints through a new lens, turning what can be a heart sinking moment into a positive experience for your customers and themselves. When people hear the words ‘I want to complain’ they can become defensive and this can make the situation worse for the customer and break their trust in your organisation. But what if your people welcomed complaints and saw them as an opportunity to deliver a GREAT experience and strengthen their customer’s loyalty to your organisation?
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.
GREAT empathy – How to challenge with empathy
There are times when your people will need to challenge their customer, not in a rude or disrespectful way, but in a way that helps the customer see a situation in a different light. This session will help your people to challenge with tact and with empathy, protecting the relationship with their customer.
GREAT hand-overs – How to seamlessly hand over your customer
Customers want service that is easy and effortless. But sometimes we have to hand our customers over to a different colleague or department; that’s often where the customer can fall through the cracks and trust is broken. GREAT handovers mean that you hand your customer over in a seamless way, maintaining a trust-building experience.
GREAT money talk – How to be confident discussing money with customers
They say that money talks, but we often don’t like to talk about money! Money conversations with customers can feel uncomfortable whether you are talking about price in a sale or compensation in a complaint. This session will help your people to be comfortable and confident having money conversations with customers.
GREAT phone calls – How to have GREAT customer conversations over the telephone
Despite the many ways of contacting companies digitally, telephone support is still the go-to choice for many customers. With easy service, fast resolution and direct contact with a human being a priority for many, it’s no surprise that 62% of customers still prefer to call an organisation. This session explores the specific skills that can make, rather than break, a telephone-based interaction.
GREAT resilience – How to be buoyant in customer service
In a customer facing role, resilience is key to success. When speaking with lots of customers every day, the chances are there will be a few ‘No’s’, or maybe complaints and challenges. Over time, resilience is eroded, diminishing positivity, performance and the service your people provide. Buoyancy is being able to stay afloat, enabling your people to give GREAT service, regardless of the outcome of the previous customer interaction.
GREAT sales talk – How to unlock sales through service
Many people view sales and customer service as different skills and different roles. Whilst there are distinctions, simply dialling up the core GREAT customer service skills can lead to a value-add, solution-focused conversation with the customer. This session helps your customer service people to unlock sales opportunities in their interactions with customers.
GREAT writing – How to write engaging customer communications
It’s easy to slip into auto-pilot, writing stock responses to customers in formal, emotionless language. Yet customers want to know that organisations understand them and value them. This session explains how to write engaging and high impact communications that leave a positive and lasting impression on the customer, building trust and creating advocacy through the written word, whether that be by letter, email or chat.
Coaching skills
To complement the training, or on a stand-alone basis, here’s a great one-day programme for your managers and team leaders to help them develop their teams’ delivery of GREAT customer service:
Coaching for GREAT customer service
Organisations delivering best-in-class for customer service have one thing in common – they’ve left ‘structured’ coaching behind and have adopted an ‘integrated’ coaching approach instead. Rather than finding an hour a week to review or observe customer interactions and give feedback (which can be seen as corrective, disconnected and ‘processy’), they weave coaching into their daily conversations with their people. Instead of coaching being ‘another thing managers have to do’, it’s become a mindset and a way of ‘being’ as a manager.
Research by Harvard Business Review shows that the most effective managers spend 75% of their coaching time ‘in the moment’ with their people and that this leads to double-digit improvement in team performance. Would that make a difference to your levels of customer service?
Delivered face-to-face or virtual.
Specialist programmes
The following programmes can be delivered ‘off-the-shelf’ or you can take the outline simply as a starting point for a conversation with the specialist trainer and they can develop a more tailored version for you.
Call coaching skills in the customer service environment
Perfecting the call-handling skills within a team requires a style of coaching which brings out the best responses and reactions. Giving feedback and facilitating improvements requires motivational and positive input. Coaching is an art which requires a high degree of skill and communication techniques if it is to achieve the right result: this programme focuses on an approach to feedback which contains all the best practices combined and provides the opportunity for practice in a supportive learning environment.
Call control with confidence
The cost to an organisation of mis-handled calls is very often out of all proportion to the root cause of the initial call. Yet the skills required to control customer calls are well-known and can be successfully taught and mastered. This programme shows how calls can be controlled and dealt with swiftly, efficiently and to total customer satisfaction.
Challenging client conversations
Sometimes, if you’re working on a project for a client, you need to deliver bad news. If it’s a high value project, this can be quite a challenge. You need to be prepared. This programme will help.
Delivered virtually or face-to-face. Optional use of actors.
Communicating with the bereaved
From time to time, anyone dealing with customers will have challenging situations to deal with. It just goes with the territory. It’s inevitable.
Properly prepared, however, dealing with a challenging situation doesn’t have to be a stressful, difficult or negative experience. Competence, courtesy and confidence are ‘all’ it takes. Perhaps ‘all’ sounds like quite a lot? That’s where this workshop comes in.
Customer engagement
Step back for a moment.
Does your typical customer’s buying journey with you make for a compelling brand experience? Do they feel connected with you? Or that you are connected with them?
If not, perhaps you’ve got some work to do. This workshop could be a good starting point.
Best delivered face-to-face but could be virtual if you prefer.
Customer service team identity day
All teams – and customer service teams are no exception – need to step back periodically and think about direction, where they have been and where they are going.
If a team is giving cause for concern, whether subjectively in terms of perception or more objectively in terms of its performance metrics, it may well be that the team is not functioning as well as it could with its existing resources. If there is no shared sense of purpose – no vision, no mission – then it is all too likely that energies are not being properly directed, that inefficiencies are arising and that the team is failing.
Equally, a newly formed team – or a recently restructured one, or a rapidly expanding one – needs to focus first on the bigger picture before it can get down to the job of service delivery.
In situations such as this, a team identity day can be invaluable, helping the team establish a sense of direction, of purpose, of identity.
Emotional intelligence for customer service
The age profile of those operating in customer service roles in the United Kingdom is between 18 and 40, yet the customer bases they serve can range from 16 (or less) to 80 (or more). And a customer’s age is just one of many differentiators that can affect their requirements and expectations. Having the dexterity to accommodate the different expectations, preferences, styles, needs and behaviours of the full range of customer types requires emotional intelligence. This programme starts participants on a programme of awareness of the impact of their own interpersonal interactions and their plans for development in dealing with the everyday situations they encounter with customers.
Helping people buy
It’s increasingly difficult to separate customer service from selling. Not that you’d want to. But some customer service staff find it difficult to cross what they see as the line.
This highly participative one-day workshop helps them by re-positioning the challenge.
Delivered virtually or face-to-face.
Live Chat – beyond the basics
You’ve nailed the basics – now it’s time to get the best out of your live Chat and create a great customer experience! You’ll be building on your skills so you can Chat with confidence and personality when responding to your customer’s enquiries.
A one-day ‘classroom’ workshop, or virtual if preferred. Either way, the programme can be tailored if required.
Reception perfection!
The often-used phrase, ‘just the receptionist’, completely misrepresents the role. An excellent receptionist is a most valuable resource for any organisation.
This popular programme covers all the essential skills necessary to represent the organisation to the best possible effect.
Best delivered face-to-face.
Resilience in customer service
This three-hour virtual programme is designed for front-line staff who need to develop their resilience. It is a highly practical session, full of tips and techniques that will enable participants to develop their ability to ‘bounce back’ and to improve their coping skills.
Successful IT / technical support
This practical one-day workshop has a simple objective: to raise IT and technical service and support standards. This is done by focusing on the standards, systems and skills needed to delight customers every time they use the technical support team.
From our colleagues…
Our sister companies have a wide range of programmes that might interest you. Here’s a small sample:
Coaching moments
It shouldn’t really be too difficult to have better conversations every day – should it?
In practice, it’s not as simple as it seems. But what stops us? And what would start us?
This short, but not too sharp, session is designed to inspire managers to ‘just try it’!
Coaching skills deep dives
If you use the ‘Coaching moments’ session as a quick dip, then follow up with the deep dives for the full immersion experience!
These sessions expand on how to get the most out of the coaching moment and how to develop and use each of the four key skills.
Coaching skills for line managers
One of our most popular ‘modules’.
Managers leave this programme with lots of tools and techniques they can use immediately – together with increased confidence in their ability to develop people effectively.
There’s even a learning reinforcement app to go with it.
Dealing with change
Change happens! It’s pointless trying to ignore it or resist it – neither of these is an effective strategy for making your life easier or furthering your career.
We all need to embrace change positively. But that’s easier said than done. This workshop will help. It’s an opportunity to understand how we’re all affected by change in different ways.
You’ll leave the session with practical tools and techniques that enable you to embrace change in a way that promotes and sustains success, both organisationally and personally.
Emotional intelligence
Another one of our popular ‘modules’.
- Get to grips with the different elements of emotional intelligence and appreciate their importance
- Identify your own emotional intelligence ‘blind spots’
- Learn how to use emotional intelligence to bring out the best in others
- Be able to cope with disappointments, challenges and obstacles more effectively
- Know how to demonstrate empathy in a wide range of situations
- Discover how to ‘read’ the ‘silent messages’ other people send out and know what they’re really saying
- Find out how to give emotionally intelligent feedback that people can take on board more easily
Again, there’s a learning reinforcement app to go with it.
Management essentials
The most common reason for leaving a job is dissatisfaction with one’s manager.
This practical workshop explores ideal manager behaviours, helping you get the most out of your team by giving clear direction, coaching, cheerleading and delegating effectively.
This is an opportunity to explore management dilemmas and hone your managerial abilities – and to ensure that you’re not the manager everyone wants to get away from!
Stress, resilience and mental toughness
How to develop true grit!
We all need to be able to manage different stresses and pressures if we are to think clearly, make the right decisions and avoid unnecessary stress and worry.
This workshop explores the best way of doing that, giving you a range of strategies to use, based on a number of proven models and approaches. It will help you understand your stress and pressure points, develop your resilience and move towards mental toughness and ‘grit’.
Team member to team leader
Managing people can be the best job in the world, or the worst. No-one tells you what it’s like until you find out for yourself. ‘You’ll be fine’ is all you may get.
This programme is your opportunity to find out in advance what you might be letting yourself in for and whether it’s right for you – whether at this stage in your career, a bit later, or perhaps never. This can save you and your organisation time, effort and heartache.
It’s a very practical programme which will boost your confidence in managing people and help make the learning curve a little less steep as you transition from team member to team leader. It will help you develop the skills you will need for the rest of your career – it might well be the most useful programme you ever attend!