Art of Amazing Service — A 2-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Course Synopsis

• Are you striving for customer excellence: not just satisfaction?
• Need to make your service stand out from your competition?
• Want to learn creative skills to create a new, customer-centric way of doing things?
• Do you have internal or external customers who you need to impress?
• Want to learn to deal with difficult people and conflict?

If the answer is "YES" - this is the course for you!

Create a loyal base of adoring customers. Sound like a dream?

Go on - we double dare you to be different.

Good customer service and relationship management lie at the heart of customer delight and are the key to obtaining a competitive edge. Surveys reveal that customer care skills are a major concern to the buying public who rightly expect service excellence not just satisfaction.

You will practice and develop your personal skills in providing superior customer service. We concentrate on the need for excellent face-to-face communication techniques, so that even under pressure a professional and confident manner is always portrayed. You will be taught creative thinking skills and use them to imagine new ideas for creating awesome customer service for your area of the business. This should be visible to those inside and outside of the company.

Course Objectives

On completion of this training course, delegates will be able to:

• Identify what excellent customer service really means
• Think and feel like a customer
• Establish what the customer expects now
• Develop enhanced customer care skills
• Deal with difficult situations
• Understand how you are motivated
• Learn to spot conflict signals different to your own
• Use listening skills
• Adapt your communication skills
• Build rapport quickly

From the Practical Workshops, students will:

• Think and feel like a customer
• Establish what the customer expects now
• Feel confident in dealing with difficult customers
• Learn creative thinking techniques
• Improve your communication skills
• Create your own version of amazing service for your job
• Learn how to think from a different motivational viewpoint
• Tailor your message for maximum impact for the customer

Intended Audience

This course is intended for:

• Anyone who wants to create customer excellence and be part of a culture focused on brilliance.

Benefits for your Company

Staff who feel valued and given first class support are more productive, create stronger relationships with others and spend less time feeling stressed. Customers who are focused upon and treated as individuals with human interaction will form relationships that are hard for a competitor to challenge. Combine this with a journey through the buying and acquisition process that is fast, friendly (and dare I say fun) and they will talk more frankly about their needs. This in turn means they are more likely to receive better targeted service, which makes them like what they get and want more of it.

The great news is that by focusing on the customers, you tend to make fewer mistakes and if something unusual happens and the process fails, you will be forgiven. As long as the relationship is sound, customers will help you make your business better.

Benefits for You

By understanding how to delight your customers you encourage recognition and reward for serving them well. This in turn makes you feel more valued, as well as breathing new life into your job, with the kind of challenges you have designed. The skills you learn around motivation and influencing will benefit your personal relationships as well as your work ones.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Outline Course Contents

Introduction and welcome

You will meet like-minded people and define what excellence in customer service means to you. An experienced, friendly trainer will help you visualise where you want this course to take you.

Customer Experience

Service extremes - you look at what makes good and bad service. You discuss your values plus - integrity, honesty, responsibility and respect. We look at 'Moments of Truth' - what are they and what does it mean for us and our customers?

Customer Focus

• Who are the customers?
• What is care?
• What does customer focus mean in your role / your team / your company?
• Who are difficult customers? What makes them difficult? Reframing behaviour.

Controlling Communications

Preparation is vital!

You learn and practice the 3 Golden Rules of communicating and the Power of Active Listening and Good Feedback.

Telephone Game - demonstrates what is 'lost' and what extra questioning techniques are needed when conducting telephone conversations. You spot signals of conversations going well / badly.

Creative Thinking

A number of creative thinking tactics will be introduced to allow you to think away from obvious answers and avoid limiting your ideas by judging them too soon. We therefore split the creative process from the analysis and pragmatic implementation phase.

We use techniques such as; thinking outside the box, problem inversion, checking and busting assumptions, paradigm shifting to create lots of wild ideas about how to make amazing service in your specific job.

Creating Your Art of Amazing Service

We use De Bonos 6 Thinking Hats to weigh up all the alternatives in a structured manner and come up with a short list to work up into suggested new practices.

Visualisation / coaching / action planning around committing to these new practices and creation of Action Learning Sets to help each other take their ideas forward and measure your own success.

Relationship Management

Work out what relationships matter and how long you spend with them? What are the barriers to creating successful relationships? Dealing with new and existing relationships using work association - Joining & Belonging, Role & Control, Sharing & Caring.

Influencing Techniques

Discussion of push and pull styles of influencing and the 8 sources of power. You look at the connections between power, influence, persuasion, negotiation and manipulation.

Completing the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI)

We introduce you to this simple and powerful tool and its relevance of it to relationship building and customer service. You complete your own motivation audit.

Assessing the SDI: What does it tell you about how you & others interact?

The SDI triangle and colours are explained to you and we discuss the difference between motivation and behaviour. You learn how others may see your behaviour based on their position on the SDI triangle. Exercise to identify the behaviours to adopt and to avoid when working with the various SDI 'behaviour colours' in their team.

Handling Conflict

Interactive session which draws on conflict theory and picks up learning from SDI to understand how conflict in teams and between customer and supplier can arise.

The effects of conflict and tactics for managing it.

Making Amazing Relationships

Looking at what you have learned today, integrate your new ideas for amazing service with new ways to make amazing relationships - full of exciting, fast tips on creating an impression and making it last.

Action Plan

In small groups you create a picture / poem / song / newspaper front page to summarise your learning: as well as being good fun it cements your main points in your memory.