Service First

Here's one we made earlier - Make your customers just plain delighted. We put UK2 in their customer's shoes.

Service First

In April 2007 we visited UK2 to help them improve on confidence and competence when dealing with customers.

What did we do?

The challenge was to equip a young dynamic team with the skills needed to deal with customers on the telephone in as helpful a way as possible, when sometimes the messages they need to convey are not what the customer wants to hear.

We tweaked our "Service First" programme for UK2 adding some specific tools and techniques to ensure the training was focussed to the individuals attending. The workshop was interactive and directly involved each individual for maximum personal impact.

How did we do it?

What is customer service?

Building on participants own experience we looked at the impact of poor customer service, when we’ve experienced it and how it made us feel. We then took a look at excellent customer service, when we’ve had a positive experience and how it felt different. Next, we invited participants to put themselves in their customer’s shoes and decide which type of customer they wanted to deal with - satisfied, happy or just plain delighted. We then looked at how customers might be different and might require different types of information and how we might deliver that.

Setting personal intention

As with all our workshops, we invited participants to think about their "intention" and what it is they really want to get out of the session. By encouraging personal engagement we could deliver individual benefit to attendees as personal intention ensures that participants take responsibility for their learning.

Delivery techniques - Needs, Wants, Desires

The key to excellent customer service is in understanding the needs, wants and desires of our customers. Once this is understood we are in a position to provide them with the appropriate level of service. We identified and then examined the needs, wants and desires of the UK2 customer’s and thought about how it felt to be them, setting realistic actions to help participants get the customer’s they want.

Delivery techniques - understanding people and ourselves

We looked at the importance of understanding our customers and why some are easier to get on with than others and how we can improve our communication skills with the trickier ones by thinking about our body language and our tone of voice.

Delivery techniques - Just say no!

Delivering great customer service is not all about saying yes. One of the most challenging aspects is learning the art of saying No. We can all articulate the word "no" but some find it really difficult to get the message across. We spent some time looking at those things that stop us saying no, and then worked on how we can become better at doing it.

The real situation

We then looked at some of the difficult customers the team had dealt with recently and thought about some of the techniques we had learnt in the workshop. Looking back, we examined how we could have approached them differently to get a different response.

Top Tips - The Magnificent Seven

Next we shared our 7 steps to service excellence. Armed with these tips and with a plan to take them forward, participants decided on the actions they were going to take straight away.

Buddies

Finally we encouraged attendees to partner with a "buddy" who they arranged to meet 3 weeks after the workshop. Setting up this simple support structure with a pre arranged meeting time to ask questions and swap experiences promotes action and helps to embed the learning.