Service Excellence is for managers who are responsible for how customers experience a service, whether they meet customers face to face, on the phone or online. It is less about service standards and scripts than about designing the work so that good service is the easy path for your team.
Over three days you will map a real customer journey from your own organisation, find the points where it breaks, and redesign one of them. You will also look at how measures shape behaviour, and how to give frontline staff the authority to put things right for customers without referring upwards.
Delegates who complete a short post-course assignment receive a certificate accredited by the Centre for Customer Practice.
Managers and senior team leaders of customer-facing teams, including contact centres, branches, claims, customer relations and front-of-house services. It suits people who have led a team for at least a year.
Service Excellence is delivered through these modules:
How to find out what customers value in your service, using complaints, contact reasons, survey comments and short conversations with customers. You will compare what customers say they want with what your organisation measures, and see why the two are often further apart than anyone expected.
Building an honest map of a real journey across every channel and team involved, marking where customers wait, repeat themselves or have to chase. You will estimate what each of those moments costs in contacts, complaints and staff time, and choose one to redesign during the course.
Which measures encourage good service and which encourage the wrong behaviour, with examples from contact centres, claims teams and customer relations. We look at handling-time targets, satisfaction scores and first-contact resolution in practice. You will draft a small set of measures for your own team and test them against real scenarios.
Designing clear guidance that lets frontline staff resolve problems on the spot, including goodwill payments and sensible exceptions, with light checks after the event instead of approval before it. We cover how to agree limits with finance and risk colleagues, and how to review decisions without undermining the people who made them.
Practical coaching techniques for team leaders, including listening to contacts alongside team members and giving specific, timely feedback. You will practise turning difficult cases into learning for the whole team, and leave with a simple weekly coaching routine you can start the following Monday.
Case study
A mutual insurer wanted to know why its customers kept calling back. We walked the claims journey with them and redesigned the steps that caused most repeat contact.
Find out how we did it: Understanding the customer journey at a mutual insurer
Case study
Complaints at a regional water company were rising and taking weeks to close. We helped frontline teams resolve most at first contact and fix the causes behind them.
Find out how we did it: Improving complaints handling at a water utility
White paper
Most service firms treat regulation as a cost to contain. This paper argues that outcome-based rules give operations leaders a strong case for simpler processes and less rework.
Download white paper: How to make regulation work for you