Learn Customer Service Skills

Working at a customer support center or help desk environment can be challenging. Customers can sometimes be demanding and unreasonable, leading to conflict and stress. The customer service representative (CSR) who aims for service excellence can improve customer relationships by understanding the emotional needs of each customer and adapting to how they communicate. In this course, you'll learn how to identify and resolve conflict, negotiate with customers, and develop strategies to better manage time and stress, and you'll explore how a positive approach and attitude can benefit client service (CS).

Because a company’s customer data can be among its most valuable assets, it is essential that all employees become familiar with their role in protecting it from loss, theft, or other misuse. This course was developed with subject matter support provided by Gordon Dadds LLP. Please note, however, that the course materials and content are for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice and may or may not reflect the most current legal developments. Nothing herein, or in the course materials, shall be construed as professional advice as to any particular situation or constitute a legal opinion with respect to compliance with legal statutes or statutory instruments. Gordon Dadds LLP accepts no responsibility for their contents and the reliance on the contents is prohibited and at the user’s risk. Transmission of the information is not intended to create, and receipt does not constitute, a solicitor-client relationship. Readers should not act upon this information without seeking independent legal advice.

Failing to realize the importance of customer service and effective complaint handling leads to increasingly dissatisfied customers. Organizations must be able to address the needs of customers in an effective manner to succeed. This course is intended to show the proper procedures and processes needed to provide an efficient client service (CS). It covers how to improve customer relationships to reduce conflict and enable service excellence. You'll also learn how to provide accurate documentation for incident reporting.

Achieving service excellence is very challenging when dealing with angry customers. By following a few simple techniques to avoid confrontation, you can manage difficult customer relationships and project a high-quality client service (CS). In this course, you'll learn about typical trouble spots in dealing with angry customers and guidelines for avoiding conflict. You'll also learn how to handle a customer complaint by defusing the tension, investigating the problem, and coming to an agreement on a solution.

The ability to support a customer is keenly enhanced by a greater understanding of the customer’s mood, communication style, and knowledge of the product or service in question. From the first moments of interaction, the customer will be giving cues in each of these areas. Interaction with customers requires planning, active listening, and a conscious effort to adjust your communication and support approach based on your customer's cues. In this course, you'll learn how to recognize and read customer cues, and how to use them to adapt your support strategy to each individual customer. You'll also explore how to overcome common pitfalls customer service agents face in assessing their customer’s cues.

As a customer service representative (CSR), creating a support culture that focuses on your customers' needs is key. In this course, you'll learn how to enhance your interactions with customers to project service excellence. You'll explore how to establish effective customer relationships that involve customers in problem solving. Finally, you'll discover how to improve communication for a better client service (CS) in a cross-cultural customer support center or help desk environment.

Understanding analytics across a variety of functions enables you to be more creative and pragmatic in applying analytics in your own function and enterprise. In this course, you'll learn about the benefits of analytics, and effective applications of analytics and big data in marketing, sales, customer service, manufacturing and supply chain, and human resources functions. This course was developed with subject matter provided by the International Institute for Analytics. (www.iianalytics.com)

Developing emotional intelligence is a key to successful leadership. Leaders with a strong mixture of emotional awareness, self-management, and social skills are able to relate better to those around them. Emotionally intelligent leaders navigate relationships more effectively and are more likely to be successful in their personal and professional lives. This course provides an understanding of why emotionally intelligent leadership is important. It also provides practical, positive techniques for promoting and improving emotional intelligence as a leader within your business environment.

There are several defining moments, or moments of truth, that can make or break every service transaction. To successfully navigate these moments of truth in customer relationships, it's important for service organizations to add value to a customer's experience by creating and implementing strong, clearly defined client service (CS) standards. In this course, you'll learn about techniques used to shape the direction of customer service in an organization, including mapping, researching, taking action on, and evaluating moments of truth. You'll also learn how to develop and implement a customer service strategy to achieve service excellence.

There are several defining moments or moments of truth that can make or break every service transaction. To successfully navigate these moments of truth, it's important for service organizations – and specifically customer service leaders – to add value to a customer's experience by creating and implementing strong, clearly-defined service standards. To implement effective standards and strategies, it's crucial that you stay attuned to customer needs and expectations, building a dynamic, adaptive service strategy based on input such as market research and customer feedback. This course explores strategies used to shape the direction of customer service in your organization including defining moments of truth, the creation and implementation of quantifiable service standards and methods of evolving your customer strategy to meet the changing needs of your customers.

Today in the Age of the Customer, competitive advantage has been redefined. Customers are in control. They have more choices than ever before resulting in sky-high expectations. The only source of competitive advantage is the obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with and serving customers. Organizations need people who are customer obsessed. People who are so interested and committed to the people they are creating and designing for that they are willing to spend time, take risks and admit that they personally might be wrong. People who are so customer obsessed that they never settle but are continually trying to understand what else they can do for their customers.

Strong customer relationships are key to projecting service excellence. Building rapport is essential and requires knowing your customers, understanding their situations, and providing an empathetic ear for them to voice their concerns. In this course, you'll learn how to improve client service (CS) by building rapport with customers. It covers paying close attention to customer needs, connecting with the customer, and being positive. You'll also learn how to empathize with customers by relating your own experiences, reflecting their emotions back to them, and normalizing their difficulties.

When you do things to help other people within your company do their jobs better, you are providing internal customer service. The quality of that service often has a huge impact on the overall quality of client service (CS) delivered to external customers. In this course, you'll learn about types of internal customers and how to identify internal customer relationships. You'll also learn about the importance of getting to know your internal customers, identifying their expectations of you, and taking action on those expectations. Finally, you'll learn guidelines for providing internal customer service excellence.

Any time two or more people are gathered in one place, conflict will inevitably follow. The workplace is no exception. It’s how you manage workplace conflict. There are many valid approaches to managing conflict, but ignoring it is the one guaranteed not to work. Resolving conflict is an important interpersonal skill that, with practice, can diffuse difficult situations at work. In this course, you’ll learn some of the major sources of workplace conflict. You’ll learn how to recognize your own conflict style and how to work toward conflict resolution. You'll also learn strategies and approaches to conflict management and working with difficult people.

Effectively communicating with customers is essential to the success of any customer-oriented business. Adapting to the different communication styles and emotions of customers will help you build customer relationships through better customer conversations. Improving conversations with customers enables an efficient, high quality client service (CS). This course explains how to adapt to the different communication types and identify the common emotions that customers experience when contacting a support center. It also explains how to adapt your writing skills to communicate through e-mail and to document incidents.