When we think of vulnerable customers it’s common to think of those who are elderly or have a disability. However, there are many more types of vulnerability, some of which can be temporary. Types of vulnerability can include (but are not limited to):
Customers that are:
Elderly, on low income, carers, lone parents, leaving care, suffering from a bereavement, recovering from a relationship breakdown, living alone, recently released from prison.
Customers that have:
Low literacy or numeracy, learning disabilities, cultural barriers, physical disabilities, mental health issues, English as a second language, health problems, lack of internet access, loss of income.
Telephone sales can be tough, and whilst some people relish the challenge, many find the reality of the selling over the phone disheartening at times.
This course will give practical solutions and tips for getting past those gatekeepers, getting calls returned and boosting sales results.
Participants will learn everything from what to do in the first 10 seconds of a phone call, how to use their voice to double their success rate and how to close a sale with confidence. They will leave this session feeling energised and inspired – eager to make calls.
Whether it is to increase sales, improve service or handle complaints more effectively, contact centre professionals need to hone their communication skills.
This course will give participants practical tips on how to be a great communicator and keep customers delighted over the phone. Whether customers are internal or external, the principles of outstanding customer care are the same. To be successful, customers must feel taken care of and their expectations need to be consistently exceeded.
This course unwraps what it takes to display a genuine service attitude, even when dealing with the most awkward customers or working under extreme pressure. With practical tips and examples, delegates will leave the training feeling inspired, motivated and capable of delivering outstanding customer experience.
The way businesses communicate with their customers in public, on social media is a little different to the way they communicate with customers over the phone.
In this bespoke workshop agents learn to interact with customers via Twitter, Facebook and any online communities that are relevant to our client, driving results and only going viral for the right reasons!
In this bespoke workshop customer service agents will be trained to interact with customers via Twitter, Facebook and any other relevant online communities.
We work closely with our clients before delivering this training to establish the brand voice and collect examples that our clients do and don’t want agents to follow. With lots of practice activities, examples and advice from industry experts, this training is a vital step to avoiding mistakes in social customer service. We take teams online in the session and review tweets and posts from our client’s live feeds and practice writing answers and replies with prizes for the most creative, humourous, witty or helpful responses.
This session is engaging and interactive and participants enjoy the hands-on approach. They leave feeling clear and committed to delivering a consistent and professional social customer service experience, following our client’s style, brand guidelines and online policies and procedures.
This course covers the principle of ‘sales through service’, in other words, building rapport with the customer and talking about the product or service in relation to how it benefits them (and not just its features) with the end result being increased or new sales.
Participants learn how to listen and ask questions so they can tailor the offering to the customer and make relevant suggestions to cross and up-sell without being “pushy”. They learn how to overcome any fear or embarrassment, deal with objections and bounce back from rejection. Participants leave feeling inspired, motivated and capable of gaining more sales than ever before whilst delighting, not alienating, customers.
This engaging and interactive course works well even in regulated environments and can be made bespoke with industry relevant examples to give delegates context to their learning and practical suggestions to take away and try.
When individual people respond to customers it is inevitable that each brings their own style to the responses they give.
Yet when an organisation wants to deliver an outstanding customer experience a large element of this success is based upon delivering a consistent customer experience.
We work with clients to implement a robust quality monitoring process. This includes scoring, providing feedback and recording conversations with customers. It also links into the wider organisational workflow processes and procedures for rewarding or managing performance.
We can also work with clients to review or design new processes for quality monitoring. We implement the process, communicate changes and train all those conducting the quality monitoring to achieve a consistent approach across our client’s customer contact centre.
Stress within contact centres is not only widespread but costly. Stress causes half of all absenteeism and 25% of all voluntary turnover within the industry. Working in a front-line role can be very demanding, and at times, unpredictable.
The unknown is stressful in itself, and if a contact centre is multi-skilled and/or handling different call types then this is exacerbated.
When a traumatic, negative or argumentative call is completed, it can be challenging not to take the defensiveness, annoyance or down-right defeated exhaustion into the next call. In these situations some `shut up & move on` (SUMO) wisdom can be helpful to learn to ‘shut down’ faulty thinking and ‘move on’ to deliver a better result on the next call.
In this session we explore that it’s ok to feel mad, bad or sad. A short wallow is fine, but when someone gets stuck there it will become a problem. In this workshop we focus on practical strategies to enable delegates to know how to quickly recover from stressful conversations and try again.
When teams of advisers go through this training together we have observed cultures change. Advisers support one another and start to think about what they can control (i.e. themselves) rather than what they can’t, delivering better service, improved performance and a better work/life balance.
Live chat (or web chat) is one of the fastest growing communication channels and is loved and used by customers on both mobile and desktop interfaces.
It’s crucial that advisors who speak with customers over live chat are able to type quickly and accurately, to hold multiple sessions with style flexibility, and to be able to chat in the tone and style of the organisation they are representing.
In this workshop we experiment on how to engage conversationally on live chat and we teach delegates how to avoid spelling and grammar mistakes by using proofreading techniques. Delegates will have the opportunity to practice with real life examples as we go through best practice to be a successful live chat agent.
The skills of planning experts in contact centres can massively impact employee engagement, and therefore also customer satisfaction.
The ability of planners to influence stakeholders to make the right decisions for promotional activities, communicate the impacts of seasonal demands, new products and even deal with crisis responses, can make or break operational performance.
This workshop will help contact centre planning experts to engage, motivate and influence stakeholders at all levels. It will teach participants clear strategies for de-escalating conflict and how to spot small things that can massively impact individual motivation. Participants will also learn how to make the most of systems and technology already in place to increase efficiency.
With the advancement in technology over the past decades, `call centres` have been revolutionised. Complicated IVR menus with press 8 for this and 9 for that have been reduced to a few simple steps and caller identification means the dreaded ‘Can I take your name please?’ can be replaced with ‘Hello Mrs Smith!’.
With continuous technological advancements, every contact centre manager now needs to know where to go for help and support from the community whenever the need may arise. Managers need to understand the professional bodies, resources and tools available and how to use them to their advantage. This course will give managers the tools they need to stay up to date with technological & industry advancements going forward and it will help them understand key metrics and the impact of measuring and using data in the contact centre. Managers will also learn how to create a culture that engages frontline staff and Team Leaders to deliver a positive performance.
This course can be delivered online or in-person and can be added to other modules such as Coaching Skills or Courageous Conversations to create 2, 3 or 4 days’ programmes that include people management skills.
Call centres sometimes receive calls that are ‘difficult’ to handle, and the way these calls are handled by agents can often make the situations better or worse.
Agents not only need to know how to best handle these calls but also need to be able to ‘recover’ to avoid carrying negativity through to their next call.
In this course we take time out to recognise how the customer’s view often is different from ours. We use video, discussion and audio to make this course interactive and refreshing for agents and advisers to help them stay calm and in control.
Letters, email and social media are useful tools to communicate with customers.
But if the communication is handled poorly by the customer advisor, it can leave a negative of the entire business they are representing. It is vital to get the communications correct in writing as they are a lasting record, unlike spoken words that disappear after they have been said.
This workshop will improve customer advisors’ confidence and provide them with the skills needed to produce modern, positive and professional written communications that will never unintentionally offend, and are in the right tone for the channel and organisation they are representing.
Asking for payments can be a little daunting at times, especially when customers may sound like they are not in a position to pay.
However, by deliberately asking for payment the chances of getting paid increase by 100%. It is vital to be able to negotiate effectively, whether it is a partial payment or a payment plan, getting the customer’s agreement and commitment is necessary.
This course gives delegates practical solutions and tips for getting the results they need, including tips on what to say in the first 10 seconds of the call and how to use their voice to double the success rate. They will leave this session energised, inspired and eager to make calls and collect monies, feeling positive, confident and in control.
In a busy contact centre, regular coaching sessions with managers are crucial to address both the up-skilling of current roles and the ongoing personal development of co-workers. It is so important to spend quality time with them on an individual and team basis. However, in many contact centres it is often inconvenient to take agents off the floor, especially in busy periods.
Call coaching is an alternative means to address current issues and risks, and can be carried out while the agent is online as well as offline.
This course will give delegates an insight into the practical skills and advice on how best to plan, arrange and carry out call coaching sessions that will deliver immediate results, improve quality and increase customer satisfaction.