Wychwood Consulting offers training courses, workshops and consultancy including sales training, customer service training, competency based interviewing skills, management development, leadership development, appraisal skills, team building, recruitment services, and train the trainer.

Creating excellent Customer Service

As competition increases, margins are squeezed, costs (of sales and service) need to be contained or reduced, product and service differentiation is eroded, customer expectations increase Customer Service comes to the fore, and is usually one of the top criteria in the mind of the customer.

Many departments and functions were originally established on a functional or operational basis. Sales sold. Service department serviced. Complaints department dealt with complaints. Credit Control controlled credit.

Then they were, rightly, encouraged to consider who they were there to serve who their 'customers' were, internal and external, and what those customers required. 'We're all customer service people now!'

The next step has been, and continues to be, encouraging all those in customer service roles not just to delight the customer, but to take an active role in increasing sales. 'We're all sales people now!'

The Customer Service Conundrum

How do you ensure high and consistent standards in your customer relationship management without imposing a level of central control and prescription which can often:

(a) appear standardised, impersonal and insincere to the customer

(b) be inflexible, treating all customers as if they were the same

(c) undermine your people's tendency to feel empowered and to take personal ownership

Is it a trade off? Our experience says it does not have to be

Our Approach

Customers are people, of course, and so are as varied as your own staff in their motivations, attitudes, desires, concerns and fears. They are more diverse than perhaps we would wish, and are best each treated as the individual they are, within the realistic constraints of your structure, processes and resources.

Therefore, our customer service programmes give your front line people the skills and techniques to rapidly appreciate, and best handle, the different objectives, behaviours and values of each customer, and to give the customer the best that can be achieved for them and for your business flexible, personal and sincere. This is what today's sophisticated customers demand, and respond to.

So, our focus is upon consistency of results rather than consistency of the precise behaviour, wording, manner and style of your people.

In addition, we design all of our customer service programmes to take account of where the relevant departments and people are at in their stages of development the mix of operational, customer service and sales focus. And as with all of our work, we ensure that we understand where the objectives of your customer service programme fit in to the overall development strategy of your business.

The Benefits to you and your organisation

• Improved customer retention and loyalty
• Increased business and reputation
• Reduction in complaints, returns and compensation
• Increased motivation of front line people
• Increase in your people's assertiveness, decrease in their defensiveness
• Decreases in adversarial and stressful customer encounters

Our Expertise

All of our customer service training consultants have both managed significant customer service operations and most importantly have much experience in providing front line customer services themselves, both telephone based and in person.

To this real life experience they bring the study of customer behaviour and the range of customer service approaches and techniques which are practiced across many organisations and sectors.

As with all of our services, we are therefore able to design and deliver the programme which you require as individual as each of your customers.

Our Services

• Face to face customer service
• Telephone based customer service
• Operational to Service conversion programmes
• Service to Selling conversion programme

Copyright © 2008
Wychwood Consulting.

"Objectives wholly met."

"The course certainly made me think differently about situations I have come across, and how I could have dealt with them"

"Well run course. Worked my brain hard!"

"I have learned a lot of new skills"