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Customer Service  >  1-Day Course

Essential Customer Care

Training course in Essential Customer Care

Master the skills needed to provide outstanding customer service

One-Day Course

Course Brochure Download
Essential Customer Care brochure
  • Appreciate what it takes to delight customers
  • Understand how to set “service standards”
  • Learn skills that help you to engage with customers and handle complaints

Overview

This one-day programme aims to provide managers, team leaders and front line staff with the skills needed to provide high quality customer care. The course begins by analysing what customers want by way of good service and then goes on to cover the specific communication tools that are needed in order to deal with customers in a courteous and professional manner. This will involve participants learning how to listen fully, so as to understand the customer’s point of view and how to state their own position clearly and succinctly.

Learning objectives

By attending this highly interactive one-day course you will:

  • Appreciate the core values and beliefs associated with delivering excellent customer care
  • Understand how customers experience your product or service
  • Discover a powerful procedure for meeting and exceeding customer needs
  • Acquire an insight into how to control the flow of a conversation
  • Learn simple but powerful tools to handle complaints

Who should attend?

People who have regular customer contact and who want to have a thorough refresher course on how to deal effectively with customers. Also, those employees who have had little formal skills training in this area and who wish to acquire a methodical and professional approach to providing friendly, efficient and effective customer care.




Day 1

The inner game of customer care

The phrase the ‘inner game’ is a term borrowed from sports psychology. It is a reference to the fact that what is going on inside a person’s head (their state of mind) is crucial to good performance. Here we consider the role perception and beliefs of experts in customer care.

  • Examining your current beliefs
  • Reviewing expert beliefs
  • Making changes that you feel are appropriate for you

Exercise: applying the ‘affirmation’ technique

Moments of truth

‘Moments of truth’ is the name of a procedure for planning to meet (and exceed) customer expectations. The moments of truth idea comes from a book written by Jan Carlzon, the former head of Scandinavian Airlines. Carlzon defined a moment of truth as:

“Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business it is an opportunity to form an impression.”

Using this simple methodology we define the service standards that we need to adhere to in order to provide good levels of customer service.

  • Putting yourself in the customers’ shoes
  • Identifying moments of truth
  • Assessing current standards
  • Specifying new standards

Exercise: writing service standards

Understanding Transactional Analysis

In the 1960’s Eric Berne developed a model of personality, which he called Transactional Analysis [TA]. We can use Transactional Analysis to recognise and understand our own thoughts, feelings and emotions and these insights can develop an understanding of how habitual thought patterns affect the way we communicate. This is particularly useful when dealing with awkward or difficult customers as it helps to avoid conversations becoming defensive or confrontational.

  • Understanding ego states
  • Charting transactions
  • Ulterior transactions - the hidden message

Exercise: assessing ego states and charting transactions in customer care scenarios

Working with assertiveness

One important aspect of applying transactional analysis in order to achieve good customer care is by using assertive techniques.

A person who is assertive has the confidence to be himself or herself and to say what they think in any given situation, while taking other people’s feelings into account. Customer care employees need this ability to be able to deal with complaints in a way that respects the customer while standing up for what they believe to be right.

  • Assertive listening
  • Assertive enquiry
  • Three Step assertive technique (verbal application plus use in letters and emails)
  • Owned messages
  • Workable compromise
  • Fogging – the power of empathy
  • Broken Record

Pairs exercise: using assertive techniques to handle difficult customers

Case study: participants discuss their real life scenarios and think about how applying assertive tools might have helped



Feedback

Feedback is based upon peer review using a Boulden assessment checklist. Completing the assessment checklist is not only valuable to the people involved in a given case study, it also helps those completing them to gain an in-depth understanding of the building blocks that make up outstanding customer care.


Remote Training

All of our workshops can be delivered as Remote Training via e-learning modules plus Zoom based virtual workshops. Please see our Virtual Training page for more information.


Contact

To talk to us about our range of courses contact
Boulden Management Consultants:
via our Contact form
Tel: 0844 394 8877