 Becoming A Customer Service Star
Objective - To identify customer service strengths and weaknesses
Intended For - Customer service staff and management (all levels)
Time Required - 1 hour
Each Program Trains - Any number of participants
Everyone has a favorite customer service story, but few people can identify the specific behaviors that will result in outstanding service. Executives, managers, and employees all have different, pre-conceived ideas of what constitutes great customer service. And since each person, with his or her personal values and ideas, impacts the customer, the need to change behaviors associated with customer service must begin with the individual.
With Becoming a Customer Service Star, employees and managers evaluate their behavior in 5 critical service areas, examine their attitudes about service, and learn ways to boost their customer service performance.
Learning Outcomes
- Create a profile of individual customer service strengths and weaknesses
- Recognize the opportunities to improve customer service and retention
- Identify an individual action plan to enhance attitude, encourage customer feedback, improve problem response time, and develop and sustain a positive relationship with customers
The Five Points of Customer Service
Five categories of excellent customer service have been identified based on current theories of customer service, as well as the author''s personal experience in consulting with customer service personnel. These categories comprise the five points on your Customer Service Star.
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Feel Positively Toward Customers. Good customer service begins with a positive view of customers. Individuals who enjoy dealing with customers exhibit this attitude in their customer interactions. These individuals provide contact and friendly relationships with customers.
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Encourage Customer Feedback. In order to provide excellent service to customers, you must know what your customers need and want. Encouraging customers to provide you with both positive and negative feedback is crucial to fulfilling their needs.
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Respond to Customer Problems. Making every effort to respond to customers'' problems is an essential part of good customer service. A customer''s problems can serve as an opportunity to improve overall customer service.
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Develop Repeat Relationships. Long-term customer relationships pay the largest dividends because the value of a customer increases over time. In order to develop repeat relationships, individuals should take positive actions, such as remembering customers'' names and keeping records of customers'' personal needs.
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Seek to Exceed Customer Expectations. The greatest opportunity to satisfy and retain customers is to find ways to exceed their expectations. Doing more than a customer expects makes that customer''s experience a memorable one, which can spark future business.
How It Works
The assessment presents 25 statements (see Sample) about customer service. Individuals transfer their assessment scores to corresponding points of a star-shaped graph. When these points are connected, a star emerges — and it’s usually lop-sided. The varying lengths of the star’s points create a clear picture of individual strengths and weaknesses. Discussion questions help spark creative new ideas for improvement.
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"We use Becoming a Customer Service Star as a front-end assessment for customer service course development because of its excellent documentation and the ease with which our participants can follow it.
The instrument also provides our employees with the unique opportunity to develop action plans that are linked to their performance expectations."
Diane D. Rentfrow, NCC
Corporate Dean
Southern California
Water Company | |
Uses for Becoming a Customer Service Star
Becoming a Customer Service Star can be used for individual analysis, as a measure for personal development, a picture for building a service team, or as an opportunity to identify changes needed in policies or operating procedures. As with all our tools, the assessment is effective when used alone or as a part of a larger training program.
What to Order/Product Contents
Order one Facilitator Guide per facilitator and one Participant Guide per participant.
Facilitator Guide includes:
- Suggested training designs
- Theoretical background
- Normative data
- Blank training outline
- CD-ROM containing Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation and reproducible masters including Certificate of Achievement, Training Evaluation, as well as overhead transparency masters
Participant Guide includes:
- 25-item assessment
- Pressure-sensitive response form
- Diagram for plotting scores
- Explanation of the 5 Points of Customer Service
- Discussion questions
- Action planning
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