Chart Learning Solutions

What are the core customer-facing skills and behaviors that you need to be successful when working with customers, clients and prospects? Our service cycle management curriculum focuses on the skills needed to achieve excellence when working in a customer-facing role. The topics covered include first impressions and rapport building, questioning and listening, problem solving, difficult situations, follow-through and project management.

The Primacy Effect influences lasting impressions, determining the quality of the relationship in the future. Moments of Truth are “touch points” in time that a customer evaluates when giving you a service “score.” Understand the ten tips for great greetings and introductions. Choose your opening words wisely and we will show you how to balance professionalism with “personalism.”

First Impressions: Greetings and Introductions

Implement areas that could use improvement, based on your service assessment. Courteous behavior determines how customers perceive the quality of your goods and services. Understand how to apply the customer care courtesy model that includes being right, ready, recommending solutions, and resolving problems. Discover how you can go beyond the basics of courtesy behaviors.

First Impressions: Customer Courtesy

Your professional image should reflect not only your business’s social norms, but also allow you the freedom to express yourself as a person. Understand the five professional image strategies and what makes each one unique. Discover how a professional image also includes good grooming, upright posture, being punctual, word articulation, effective listening, reliability, responsiveness, respect, and courteousness.

First Impressions: Professional Image

Words can make or break or break a good first impression. Choose them carefully. Discover why it is important to use positive language, expressing what you can do, not what you can’t. Understand how to be specific in your written and spoken communication and how to end your sentences appropriately. Be careful how you express yourself. You may not be preventing wars, but one word can save or lose a valued customer!

First Impressions: Word Choices

Understand the importance of holding the receiver properly to maintain energy and vocal quality and how to vary your rate of speech to maintain listener interest. Adjust your voice to match the purpose of the call. Lowering your vocal range sends a more controlled image. Listen to learn the purpose of the call. Don’t interrupt. Ask questions to clarify understanding. Learn how to flawlessly place calls on hold or transfer like a pro. Your customers will appreciate you!

First Impressions: Telephone Skills

First Impressions

Etiquette is a set of social behavioral requirements, created over time to give structure to the way to interpersonal rapport and manners are the core of etiquette. Discover the various behaviors involved in mastering manners and we will share the golden rule with you. Go above and beyond customer expectations by using the 6 F’s.

Building Rapport: Business Etiquette & Customer Care

There are two levels of rapport: transactional and relational. Discover the three skills for building instant rapport and the goal of transactional rapport. Discover the technique to turn small talk into SMART talk and increase the emotional connection. Understand how to maintain good relations for long term business.

Building Rapport: Instant Rapport

Trust is our confidence in the integrity, strength, and competence of someone to meet our expectations. Discover the four keys to building a professional “trust fund”. We will guide you how to deliver and receive feedback while maintain trust. Understand the behaviors that feed trust and those that starve trust.

Building Rapport: Building Trust and Respect

Confidence is a situational expectation of positive outcomes while developing strengths and managing weaknesses.  We will help you to identify your strengths and four ways to develop them. Manage your weaknesses to get the job done right.

Building Rapport: Confidence in Any Situation

There are four relationship styles. Understanding them helps improve how we relate to ourselves and others. Each style has value and strengths. People rarely set out to be difficult. Discover the four styles and how you can identify and manage each one.

Building Rapport: Building Positive Relationships

Moments of Truth are “touch points” in time that a customer evaluates when giving you a service “score.” Apply our 10 tips for great greetings md introductions. Discover why it is important to choose your opening words selectively. We will show you how to strike the perfect balance between professionalism and “personalism”.

Building Rapport: Greetings and Introductions in Sales

Building Rapport

Understand the pull and push energy that are two forms of interpersonal power. Questions gain their power from pull energy, directing others to move with you. Understand when and how to use open-ended and close-ended questions. We will show you how to help buyers make decisions by taking a storyline approach using STeR questions.

Questioning Skills: Introduction to STēR Questions

Learn enough facts about a buyer’s current status to advance the conversation purposefully. Discover how to ask relevant questions about necessary information designed to keep the prospect talking for the sake of conversation. Understand how to mix open and close ended questions but ask close-ended questions which are likely to be answered with a “yes”.

Questioning Skills: Pinpointing Needs with STēR Status Questions

People will not buy unless they feel some level of dissatisfaction or trouble. Discover how to ask questions that reveal points of dissatisfaction, building an awareness of less-than ideal results.Use this technique to find the pain and fix it.

Questioning Skills: Finding Problems with STēR Trouble Questions

Evaluation questions help move people from being unaware of their trouble, into awareness and a desire to change. Evaluation questions help buyers explore the extent of the damage their trouble is causing. Understand all the benefits of evaluation questions and when to use this the most effectively.

Questioning Skills: Building Needs with STēR Evaluation Questions

Recommendation questions enlist buyers to tell you the benefits, increasing buy-in. They hear the benefits twice—once from you and again from themselves. Discover how to increase acceptance in your solution and how you can help teach buyers to convincingly present your solutions to others.

Questioning Skills: Closing Sales with STēR Recommendation Questions

Questioning

Understand why concentration, curiosity and clarity is so important in communication. Understand the many pitfalls and benefits to listening. The bottom line is that it builds effective relationships—the heart of earning and keeping customers. Use listening to increase understanding in any situation you experience.

Authentic Listening: Introduction

Concentrating to hear messages is the first phase of authentic listening. Understand why verbal, vocal, and visual messages need to be congruent in order to be believable. Discover how to be fully present and use our tips for improved concentration.

Authentic Listening: Increasing Concentration

Understand the three components of curiosity and how to use them in your situation. Avoid pitfalls that cloud our ability to interpret messages accurately. Discover how to increase your ability to interpret messages accurately and how to develop curiosity.

Authentic Listening: Building Curiosity

Understand the difference between direct and indirect communication. We communicate at our best when balancing directness with indirectness, being frank and diplomatic. Understand how to ask clarification questions to increase clarity and using the correct language with your customer.

Authentic Listening: Gaining Clarity

Listening is challenged by attention and inference-making problems. Critical listening demands concentration, curiosity, and clarity with organization and evaluation. Discover how to increase understanding and what is the difference between people-orientated, action-orientated, content-orientated and time-orientated.

Authentic Listening: Critical Listening

Listening

Problem recognition occurs when you become aware of a gap between where you are and where you want to be. We will guide you to proactively look for hidden problems using tools such as a gap analysis, surveys and interviews. How do you unpack a problem to see the entire problem and not only a small part of the problem? Understand what you can do to initiate problem recognition and how you can gather data.

Problem Solving: Early Problem Recognition

Utilize the four stages of problem-solving and discover what characteristics you need to consider when solving a problem. What is the difference between a problem and dilemma? We will demonstrate how you can verify that your problem has been resolved by evaluation and questions.

Problem Solving: Four Stages of Creative Problem Solving

Problem definitions provide a target boundary, description, and measure of success. To accurately define a problem, use techniques such as data collection, symptom analysis, brainstorming, key-word analysis, force-field analysis, writing it down, and writing a conflict definition. Discover why most problems exist and how to solve the root cause of a problem. Understand the difference between being at cause or at affect and how you can be in control.

Problem Solving: Defining Problems Accurately

A crisis is an urgent demand for change that must be addressed immediately. Identify the main cause of a crisis as it is often people-related. Crisis management merely controls the problem and crisis resolution must end the situation. Understand how to prevent, manage and eliminate a negative impact. Discover the six steps to crisis resolution and how do you ensure that you learn from a crisis?

Problem Solving: Crisis Resolution

Problem Solving: Confident Decision-Making

Problem-Solving

The first priority in calming upset customers is to diffuse tension and then resolve the issue. Discover some words to avoid and how to ensure angry customers feel like they are heard, feeling empathy and can see you are trying to find a resolution. The focus needs to be you and the customer against the situation. Learn how to implement a four-step model for calming upset customers. Understand how to manage customer complaints better in the future by understanding the special needs of customers with complaints.

Difficult Situations: Calming Upset Customers

Difficult customers may not be angry, but difficult to work with for a variety of reasons. We will help you to determine the customer’s difficult behavioral “type” and work with an appropriate strategy. View challenging customers as an opportunity to shine, be your best, and set a great service example.

Difficult Situations: Dealing with Difficult Customers

Call escalation is including others in facilitating the resolution of a customer request. It may take place in person, on the phone, or through electronic communication. We will show you four steps in handling customer issues and call escalation.

Difficult Situations: Call Escalation

Customers with complaints want to be seen as right, feel special, treated fairly and be taken care of. We will show you how to ask questions and listen to fully understand the complaint. Acknowledge and agree with the customer’s right to be upset and that a resolution needs to be reached.

Difficult Situations: Handling Complaints

Be balanced in your approach to delivering bad news. Deliver the information tactfully, balanced with directness or the “meat” of the message. Understand how to use the sandwich approach in more sensitive matters: good news, bad news, good news. Think with your heart when delivering bad news. Your compassion will be appreciated.

Difficult Situations: Delivering Bad News

Difficult Situations

Follow-through with customers after the sale ensures that all the work you did up front not only sticks but produces additional sales. Up-selling works best when suggesting something related or like the original purchase. Discover you could up-sell before, during or after the sale. We will guide you to move from hunting to harvesting a client and how to sell more in less time.

Follow-Through: Upselling Opportunities

Buyer’s remorse is emotional regret after a purchase. Buyer’s remorse is a natural human reaction emerging from a sense of caution and doubt over a decision. Understand the causes of buyer’s remorse and how you could be in control to prevent buyer’s remorse.

Follow-Through: Preventing Buyer's Remorse

Understand the five C’s for diamond-grade email etiquette. These include content, concise, clarity, color and carat. Identify the top ten spam filter mistakes to ensure successful delivery, avoid complaints, and improve response. Discover the ten power words to improve customer response rates.

Follow-Through: Email Etiquette

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are the most important factors in creating long-term business growth. Discover how to get quality feedback and how to work through criticism. Objectives of many customer satisfaction surveys look to measure three core indexes: satisfaction, loyalty, and value.

Follow-Through: Customer Feedback and Satisfaction Surveys

The mission of every business is to create and retain customers. Understand the ten ways to create brand loyalty and implement the six F’s strategy to exceed customer expectations.

Follow-Through: Keeping Customers for Life

Follow-Through

Starting a project can be an intimidating prospect. Understand why it is important know the difference between a project and an assignment or program. We will help you to understand key definitions used in Project Management and the responsibilities and attributes of effective project managers. You will discover the four phases of project management that is vital to the success of any project.

Project Management: Introduction

This course will ensure that you have the correct knowledge for the start of any project. We will help you understand the basic project management terminology and how to set the project up for success. Know the meaning of words in project management like life cycle, milestone, project charter, SOW and scope. Human capital will be an important component for the project success and this course will help you with guidelines to choose the core project team and set the rules and guidelines for the team.

Project Management: Project Definition

What elements do you require for a project plan and how do you create a work breakdown structure? Let us help you to take the trouble out project planning. This course will teach you three steps to take when scheduling work and why it is important to schedule correctly as this will add to the success of the project.

Project Management: Project Planning

Do you know what is the project manager’s responsibilities during the implementation? We will help you to implement and understand what the vital components of a successful launch are are. How do you run effective meetings? How do you control work in progress? Let us help you to understand these questions and unpack the four roles of a project manager in review meetings. You will experience conflict during the project and we will teach you how to resolve any conflict you will experience.

Project Management: Project Implementation

There comes a time when good things (or bad) come to an end. You will understand why it is important to close a project and the contents of a final evaluation report. This last phase wraps up the details and allows you a sense of completion. The shutdown process can be complex and drawn out with lots of loose ends. We will help you to focus on the required steps required to close the project efficiently.

Customer Service Cycle Management Curriculum

What you'll learn

Explore more technology skills