Customer Service Essentials
Course Overview
This Exceptional Customer Service Essentials training increases the confidence of your team members so that they can consistently deliver an exceptional customer service experience. Customer Service Essentials reflects the best when it comes to proven, reproducible communication techniques that empower your team members to make every interaction a productive and successful one. With these proven communication skills and customer service skills, your team will learn to transform customers into loyal and enthusiastic advocates for your company.
Using customized, real-life examples that go beyond theory, your team will learn how to apply these techniques to any situation. By integrating them quickly and easily into their daily routine, they’ll see immediate results your customers will notice and appreciate.
With Customer Service Essentials, your team will know how to transform every interaction into a positive customer service experience. They will learn to talk to customers in a relatable, authentic, and professional way. The end result is a consistent, top-tier service model that creates a spark throughout your company’s culture.
Exceptional Customer Service Builds Great Companies and Teams
Every time you communicate with someone, you form an impression of yourself: a positive, negative, or neutral one. Ideally, you want your customers to form a positive impression of your organization whenever they connect with you. Your goal is to create memorable experiences that leave your customers and team members feeling great while resolving interactions positively through excellent customer service.
Your team members are on your front lines, creating memorable experiences. Whenever a customer thinks of your company, they think of your customer service professionals: their faces and their voices. It’s your people’s abilities and confidence in providing high-quality service that lead to more satisfied customers.
If you’re seeking to improve your customer satisfaction — and, by extension, customer loyalty — it starts by equipping your frontline staff with the skills, techniques, and support to turn them into confident and capable professionals using essentials customer service. Through essentials customer service training, staff members learn about transactional and interactional skills and how they apply those in a positive manner with every customer to create great experiences. Many positive impressions combine into a stellar reputation with your customers that keep them coming back!
Learning Outcomes
Customer Service Essentials covers the most important skills and techniques your customer service professionals need to succeed in their roles through essentials customer service. After participating in our exceptional customer service training, your people will know how to:
- Convey positive voice tone and word choices
- Consistently create positive first impressions
- Guide and control every conversation
- Understand when and how to use empathy
- Build and maintain rapport
- Transform negative messages to aid in customer cooperation
- Skillfully handle difficult customer interactions
- Apply standards for internal and external communication
Business Outcomes
Customers should walk away from every interaction satisfied with your service. That’s the key to building customer loyalty.
After they participate in the Customer Service Essentials course, your team members will understand how their actions build customer loyalty and feel empowered to represent your company effectively. Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty set your organization apart from the competition — and transform one-time customers into repeat advocates through essentials customer service.
Within your company, your focus on providing exceptional customer service will help you establish and reinforce high customer service standards. Those standards travel enterprise-wide, and they relate to everybody in the organization — regardless of their position. Overall, this commitment to excellence enhances your company culture and creates a place where people are excited to work.
Through our Customer Service Essentials course, you can realize these crucial business gains, as well as:
- Improved Team Morale
- Fewer Customer Complaints
- More Self-Reliant and Empowered Employees
- Breaking Down of Internal Silos
- Consistency of Exceptional Customer Service
Program Format
We offer the Customer Service Essentials course as a one-day onsite instructor-led session that can be split into shorter sessions to accommodate schedules. We present our course in a multimedia, fun, interactive manner with group exercises to engage participants. You also receive materials and job aids to support additional learning reinforcement of essential customer service.
Part I: Customer Service Fundamentals
The first part of the Customer Service Essentials course focuses on fundamental knowledge for customer service professionals, such as:
- How to greet a customer
- How to manage your voice tone
- Concluding a phone call
- Properly transferring a customer to another team member
We also cover the expectations that team members set every time they speak with a customer. The goal is to discover the importance of building a positive reputation that precedes every customer call through essentials customer service.
Part II: Leading Productive Conversations with Customers
The second part of the Customer Service Essentials course addresses how your people can lead productive conversations with customers. That includes working with dissatisfied customers — who don’t always present as your team members may expect! Many people expect dissatisfied customers to vocalize their issues, but studies show that only 4% of customers will voice their concerns that way. The rest don’t often show outward frustration until they leave your organization for a competitor.
Dissatisfaction shows itself in many ways, and our training helps your people identify when that customer sentiment arises. Your team members then know how to demonstrate empathy, de-escalate frustrated customers, and keep customers cooperative — which all contribute to effective and positive outcomes through essentials customer service.
From the Customer Service Essentials course, your team members will gain skills like:
- How to foster active listening skills to really understand your customers
- How your team members can communicate most effectively with customers
- Methods for your people to de-escalate upset customers
- Maintaining a positive attitude focused on the resolution of a customer’s challenges
The session also covers how your people can lead these conversations in multiple media, from email to phone calls to online chat. These skills are relevant no matter what form an interaction takes, and we tailor our program to meet these many different channels.
By the full session’s end, your customer service professionals will cultivate a strong and capable mindset and know how to bring that mindset and skill set to work every day. From initial greeting through issue resolution, your people will provide thoughtful and positive interactions that leave a lasting positive impression on your customers!
Who Should Attend?
Any department or team looking to improve communication skills with internal and external customers. This session is valuable not only for supporting your team members’ communication with customers but also for encouraging interdepartmental cooperation. Learning together creates many opportunities to connect within your organization and build camaraderie.
Bottom line: if you talk to people anywhere for any reason, we can help you!
Contact us to explore how we can meet your customer service training goals:
Remote and Online Training Available
Do you have a distributed workforce? Are there people who you’d love to take this course, but they work in a different office location?
We offer Live Remote Training so all of your team members can receive exceptional customer service training. Contact us today for more information.
Are you struggling to figure out how you can commit a full day to this session? Or do you simply want to start improving your customer satisfaction immediately?
We offer the Customer Service Essentials course as an online module as well. Our online, on-demand session is designed to give you high-quality and concise training you can watch in one sitting. Learn more by viewing a preview of the course.
Sustain the Training and Its Benefits
Once you’ve finished the Customer Service Essentials course, you and your team will see immediate improvements in your customer interactions and team members’ abilities. But maintaining those benefits over time requires an organizational environment committed to consistent exceptional customer service training.
The excitement around new training and lessons learned lasts for only so long. In fact, research shows that people can forget 75% of what they’ve learned within 24 hours of learning it! Without proper reinforcement and encouragement, your people may not recall the important lessons they’ve just learned and slip back into old habits. And that could affect the gains you’ve made in customer satisfaction and loyalty!
For sustained customer satisfaction growth and company culture enhancement, it’s best for training to be done as a sustainable activity. That’s how leadership can best encourage their people to learn more and continue growing and developing their customer service skills.
Our Customer Service Essentials course lays the foundational knowledge and skills for customer service professionals. When you’re ready to build upon that foundation, our Sustain the Training: Customer Service Essentials course gives your leaders the tools they need to create sustainability and consistency of standards. This holistic approach to training continually refreshes your team members’ skills and enthusiasm. You’ll continue to realize improvements to your customer satisfaction and maintain an excited and knowledgeable workforce.
Do you have in-house trainers? We offer a Train-the-Trainer & Licensing program to equip your trainers with tools and solutions to deliver great training to your people. Through them, you can extend the value and benefits of training!
