Course Description

IT departments are very often the face of an organisation. This means that individuals who work in technical disciplines also have to demonstrate excellent customer service. This course will help participants to develop great customer service. The course will not only improve the level of support you provide for your internal and external customers but also improve your own working life.

This facilitated course will create an awareness of the important role that excellent customer service plays in any organisation. It will offer practical guidance which will enable you and your team to meet the daily challenge of consistently providing excellent customer service.

Target Student

This training is aimed at anyone who works in a technical environment.

Delivery Method

Instructor led, group-paced, classroom-delivery learning model with structured hands-on activities.

Performance-Based Objectives

By the end of the training participants should be better able to:

• Describe the importance of positive customer service
• Identify good and bad experiences of customer service
• Explain Moments of Truth
• Identify a process for answering the telephone in the workplace
• Demonstrate positive verbal and non-verbal communication
• Demonstrate how to deal with challenging situations
• Create and implement a customer service charter for use in the workplace

Course Content

We start off by creating an awareness and understanding of the importance each individuals job role plays within the organisation. This sets the scene and enables individuals to start to recognise why they need to demonstrate excellent customer service.

The 'Love Story/Horror Story' session will focus on good and bad examples of customer service that we have received when we have been a customer. Highlighting the words and behaviours that led to that experience leaving a positive or negative lasting impression, we are then able to develop a set of good practice behaviours.

The 'Stages in your telephone conversation' session will focus on the telephone conversation and the organisations processes for dealing with customers on the telephone. We examine each stage and develop a common understanding of what the standard greetings should be. This will lead us into discussing the typical aspects of telephone calls that irritate and annoy customers and what we can do to reduce the possibility of these arising.

The next part of the course will focus on the specific skills and behaviour required to make the telephone conversation a positive experience for the customer. We develop skills and behaviours for building rapport; responding to the customer and taking action. This will include skills associated with verbal and non-verbal behaviours. Examples of this include tone of voice; questioning; listening and building rapport.

In the 'Words can mean more than we say' session we look at examples of positive, negative and neutral words. We also spend some time focusing on why we often use negative rather than positive language and round this session off by changing some negative phrasing into positive statements.

The 'Customer Charter' section gives the group an opportunity to develop a team charter based on everything we have discussed during the day, what are the actions that the team can commit to, in order to improve customer service? The team agrees to commit to the actions. This charter will be taken back to the workplace so that the team can continue to strive to achieve it.