Telephone Skills for Customer Service

Do you sometimes hear yourself, or your staff, or customer service teams, on the telephone dealing with unhappy customers and cringe a little, wishing they had handled the situation better?

Customer service is vital to a business's reputation. It’s not just a question of reacting to customers, it’s about understanding and defining what they really want, even when they’re not sure themselves.
This workshop develops the outstanding customer service standards today's customers expect.

Customer Service in Business: Here we look at the benefits of being customer-centred. Focusing on how we perceive customers now in order to understand the importance of customers for the business.

Understanding Customer Needs: Service is a very personal thing, and our opinions about the service we receive are individual to us. To be in with any chance of succeeding, we at least need to know what our customers expect from us.

How We View Things: Understanding that everyone’s reality is different. Responding to the needs of our customers without letting our own emotions cloud our judgement.

Being Assertive: Focusing on how assertive we are and recognising that being assertive is the key to dealing with customer situations. Looking at five steps to assertiveness.

Three Key Communication Skills:

• Rapport – Identifying how to build and maintain it.
• Active Listening – What are the barriers? How do we overcome them? Testing our ability with a fun exercise.
• Effective Questioning – Moving away from Open/Closed and looking at four key questioning methods.

Voice and Language: Looking at ways to improve our tone of voice over the phone.

Words and Recognition: Identifying ‘Negative’ statements we use and hear day-to-day and reframing them.

Different Types of Customer: A chance to look within ourselves and examine our behaviour with customers and adapt it to improve communications.

Meeting Customer Needs: Using the three steps to recommendation.

Not Another Complaint: Examining the reasoning behind complaints through discussional activities.

A Pig of a Complaint!: A fun exercise with an important message. This part of the session is summarised with a specific process for dealing with complaints.

Objectives:

At the end of this Customer Care training course participants will be able to:

• Explain the importance of being customer-centred
• Understand the needs of customers and how to meet them
• Build and maintain rapport with customers
• Reframe negative statements into positives
• Follow three steps to meet customer needs
• Explain why complaints occur and identify methods of dealing with them

New Dates to be advised.

Contact me with expressions of interest.