The Art of Delivering Excellent Service
Poor service causes potentially loyal customers to slip away, creating a leak in your organization. In other words, poor service costs your organization money. Lots of money. You incur this cost in two ways. First, when your customers don’t come back. Second, when your customers don’t recommend you to anyone.
All this occurs primarily because the employees neither understand the concepts and benefits of excellent service nor the implications of poor service. So they simply do their best and on the average make their customers merely satisfied. And merely satisfied customers are not loyal.
Independent studies from both Motorola and Xerox confirm that completely satisfied customers are four times as likely to buy again from same company within the next six months as customers who are merely satisfied. And conversely, those customers who are merely satisfied were five times as likely to purchase from another source. Hence customers who are loyal are those who are completely (highly) satisfied.
The importance of retention is obvious. It equates to lower acquisition costs, greater word-of-mouth referrals, more stable and predictable customer interactions and generally improved organizational morale.
And considering the fact that the cost of acquiring a new customer is on the average five times greater than the cost of retaining an existing customer, wouldn’t you rather invest in the maintenance stream for retention?
The return on service investment is clear: Complete customer satisfaction leads to customer retention, which creates increased market share that relates to lowered costs and increased profitability.
So how do you make customers completely satisfied so as to retain them? That is what this course is about. It offers a unique opportunity for you to build your business around the element that matters most – loyal customers.
Course Overview
This course is designed to help participants master how to use consistent excellent service to produce completely satisfied customers who will return repeatedly.
Unlike the typical customer service training, this one goes beyond learning the niceties of front desk service to explore the concepts and culture of service excellence and how to translate them into every behavior and action that employees understand. It is not designed just for those who have direct interaction with external customers but also for those who contribute in producing service outcomes.
Participants will learn how to build and exceed service standards that are aligned with their organization’s strategic objectives.
They will learn service processes which are the lifeblood of the service operations and how to optimize them to improve service outcome. Also, they will learn ways of building positive rapport with various types of customers and then apply those skills in activities and exercises throughout the course. Further, they will learn how to handle customer complaints and take advantage of it to increase loyalty.
Delivered in one day using the principles of Accelerated Learning, this course offers an optimal blend of all the key skills required to deliver excellent service and begin to build a service culture.
Course Outline:
1. Extraordinary Service: Working Definitions
-Defining extraordinary service
-Who is your customer?
-The Service Concept
-Service Operations
-Building and exceeding service standards
2. What Constitutes Extraordinary Service
-“Moments of truth”
-Legends of service greatness
-Personal effectiveness: Critical in service delivery
-Personal effectiveness systems
3. Return on Service Investment
-Service transactions
-Lifetime value of a customer
-What is the cost of poor service?
-Why customers leave
-The service-profit chain
4. Service Processes
-Service processes and their importance
-Understanding the nature of service processes
-Controlling service processes
-Repositioning processes to optimize service outcome
5. Building Customer Rapport
-Treat the customer as a unique person
-Active listening skills
-Combining words and tone of voice
-Match communication style
-Assertive communication
-The APA model
6. Handling Customer Complaints
-The nature of complaints
-Why people complain
-The opportunity in complaints
-Recovery strategies
-Seven steps to resolving customer complaints