Customer Service Champions Program
Help your call centre staff become customer service stars
This program is suited to any industry where the organisation has a customer service call centre (this is not a sales program). The aim of the program is to take call centre staff who are often undervalued – and turn them into the stars of your organisation.
The program consists of several modules which can be rolled out progressively throughout your contact centre teams. It begins by laying the foundation of customer service and then moves to specifics of telephone service.
Duration:
4 full-day sessions
Session 1: Introduction to Telephone Customer Service
- What a customer is
- What they want
- Why they're important
- Customer experience
- Customer expectations
- Customer service attitude
- Internal/external customer service
- Basics of dealing with difficult customers
- Why is telephone customer service different?
- Questioning skills, listening skills
Session 2 - Advanced Telephone Customer Service
- Recap of what a customer is and why they’re important
- Four types of customer conversations
- Communication skills
- Questioning
- Call framework
- Call control
- Following up
- Stress management
- Dealing with difficult callers
- Exceeding customer expectations
- Creating customer advocates
- Where are the limits of our discretion in going above and beyond for customers and how do we exercise it
Session 3 - Customer Experience Immersion Workshop
- What is the customer experience?
- What impact does it have on the customer/us/the company?
- What impacts on the customer experience?
- Who are our customers?
- What do they expect?
- What do they experience?
- How can we make it better?
Notes
The aim is to develop an understanding of what their customers experience and to then develop their own improvement ideas to implement in order to improve this experience. The first part of the workshop sets the scene for customer experience generally. The middle part is essentially a mystery shopper exercise tailored to their company, where learners experience what the customer experiences. The last part of the workshop is reflection on the results of this and development of improvement ideas to take back to their teams.
Session 4 - Customer Service Stars Workshop
- What did we come up with as ideas after the customer experience immersion workshop?
- List, prioritise and set up working groups to implement
- What does our team do
- Who are our customers
- What do they want
- What do we aspire to
- What behaviours will get us there
- Develop team charter
- Celebrate and sign at a later date
Notes
This workshop can only be done in-house with complete teams. The aim is workshop ideas from the customer experience immersion workshop, and develop an aspiration team objective. You then develop a team customer service charter stating the aspiration of the team and the behaviours that will get them there. They then develop a team charter poster with these on them, with space underneath to sign. This is then displayed in an area available to all staff to view. Also displayed should be a compliments wall for customer feedback. You can also develop an intra-team recognition program around nominated “stars” in customer service each month. Workshop duration depends on the size of the team. This can be linked to your organisation’s culture/behaviour standards.
Program Next Steps
- Once all staff have completed this program, it is important to link it to reward and recognition. This reinforces desired customer service behaviours, and publically supports staff who exceed customer expectations.
- When new staff join a team, part of their team induction will be the explanation of the team mission and behaviours, and they will be asked to sign the poster. This creates a living document.
- There is an opportunity to extend the customer service charter poster to be organisation wide – perhaps at mission statement level and all staff must sign the banner to commit to it at the end of induction.