Effective Customer Care and Dealing With Different Customer

After completing the program, delegates will be equipped with the tools, models, skills and confidence to improve and enhance current practices, develop new processes and monitor their success.

This program will help delegates become customer service champions and equip them with the appropriate confidence, skills and tools to turn any department into a world class service provider and the envy of all other internal customers.

## Course Objectives

• Describe how to use Quality Management tools and methods
• Build strong customer relationships
• Help influence and set customer expectations
• Measure their own degree of customer focus and be able to apply a variety of methods to get closer to the customer
• Implement improved people skills to enhance customer service
• Improve service to internal customers as well as external customers
• Use skills to build effective relationships
• Make direct customer encounters more positive, productive, and profitable
• Discover innovative ways to cope with client demands and complaints
• Utilize strategies that can help develop a rapport with all types of "prickly personalities."
• Resolve complaints quickly — and to everyone's satisfaction
• Repair soured relationships with customers who otherwise would have been lost forever

## Course Outline

Introducing Quality Management and Customer Services

• Introduction to Quality Management
• The history of Quality in business
• Basic Quality concepts
• What is it that Customers want
• How can we calculate the total cost of Quality
• Customer satisfaction is a perception and can be managed
• Setting customer expectations
• Changing internal perceptions
• Getting closer to customers
• Understanding customer needs and expectations
• Commitment starts at the top of the organization

Service Quality - Tools and Techniques

• Five steps to Effective Quality Management
• Beginning with measurement
• Then we need methods of Control
• Continuous Improvement
• Service Quality Tools and Techniques
• Questionnaires
• Pareto Analysis
• Nominal Group Technique
• Cause and Effect Analysis
• Solution Effect Analysis
• Selection Grid

Managing Customer Expectations

• Exceeding customer expectations every time
• Determining how to exceed expectations
• It’s the little things that matter - increased satisfaction at minimal cost
• Asking for feedback on performance
• Ongoing evaluation of effectiveness to ensure satisfaction
• Maximize the value you deliver
• Understanding different customer styles

People Skills to Deliver Excellent Customer Service

• Back to basics - communicating with our customers
• Identify Listening Styles for you and your customer
• Building Rapport
• Influencing skills
• Persuasion techniques
• Dealing with Difficult Customers
• Understanding Customer Behaviors
• Understanding where Anger comes from
• Developing Emotional Intelligence

Making it happen

• A look at Quality Management Systems
• ISO, Balanced Scorecard, Six Sigma
• Producing a Plan of Action
• Improving customer Satisfaction in 5 quick steps

Understanding behavior and what makes behavior difficult

• What is behavior
• Current behavioral challenges
• What causes difficult behavior
• Factors affecting our behavior and how attitudes are formed
• Communication misunderstanding
• Presentation, small group exercise, facilitated group discussion

Building a toolkit for dealing with difficult behavior

• Introducing the ‘Difficult Behavior’ Toolkit
• Current behavior management strategies and techniques
• Facilitated group discussion

Different behavior types and how to deal with them

• Appreciating the impact of the different styles of behavior on each other
• Strategies for responding to different behavior styles
• Resolving conflict in a constructive way
• Facilitator presentation, small group exercise, facilitated group review

Using assertive communication

• Steps to becoming more assertive
• Using assertive language
• Finding ways of saying ‘no’
• Importance and impact of our non-verbal language
• Facilitator demonstration, pairs exercise, Metaplanning exercise and facilitated group review

Handling and defusing conflict and emotions

• Our reactions to conflict and difficult behavior
• Conflict styles questionnaire -Thomas Kiln Model
• Summary of conflict styles
• Defusing difficult emotions, particularly anger
• Individual questionnaire, presentation, pairs practice exercise, facilitation

Giving Constructive Feedback

• Importance of feedback
• Guiding principles for giving feedback
• Group exercise, presentation, pairs practice exercise

Practice sessions

• Review of ‘Difficult Behavior’ toolkit
• Selecting behavior management strategies and techniques for participant’s own difficult situation
• Group review, small group practice sessions with feedback

Action planning and reflection

• Review of learning and action planning, course feedback
• Individual reflection and action planning exercise, facilitated group review