Introduction

Good customer service can be considered as a big differentiator between firms. While competing products are often similar and can anyway be easily duplicated, good customer service is a holistic system, requiring a sustained organization-wide effort, driven by the top and permeating all aspects of the organization culture. The resulting customer-centric organization becomes a formidable competitor whose model cannot be easily copied. In this course, we look at what it takes to build a customer-centric organization.

Course Objectives of Customer Management

• Develop a holistic customer care approach by taking into consideration seven different aspects of the definition of customer service
• Create objectives and programs to maximize internal customer satisfaction
• Evaluate the design, implementation, and analysis of customer satisfaction surveys
• Use customer complaints as the springboard for service improvement
• Write Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure clarity and conformance
• Assess the service aspect of the organization or department through well-chosen Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Course Outlines of Customer Management

Day 1: Defining and appreciating the customer

• Definition of customer
• Definition of customer service
• The internal and external customer

Importance of the internal customer

• The need for motivated employees
• The need for qualified employees
• Silo mentality
• Destroying the silos

Day 2: Customer service as a strategic imperative

• From ‘suspect’ to ‘partner’
• Going up the ladder
• The 'KANO' model
  • ‘Basic’ attributes
  • ‘Performance’ attributes
  • ‘Delight’ attributes
• The customer-centric organization
• Customer service as a strategic imperative
• The 7 practices of a customer-centric organization

Day 3: Customer satisfaction surveys and other vital tools

• Understanding your customers
• Importance of segmentation
• Principles of customer segmentation
• Focus groups
• Customer satisfaction surveys
  • Key terms
  • Major survey methods
  • Questionnaire examples
  • Customer survey guidelines
  • Types of satisfaction surveys
  • Basics of sampling
  • Attributes to measure
  • Customer satisfaction index
• 'RATER' in-depth
• Service quality (servqual) gaps model

Day 4: Customer complaints and service recovery

• Facts and their implications
• Symptom versus cause
• Root cause analysis
• Failures do happen
• The recovery paradox
• The strategic initiative
• Tactical activities
• The ‘WOW!’ factor

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

• SLA definition
• Characteristics of effective SLAs
• Key elements of an SLA
• Steps in SLA development
• Quality versus cost
• SLA metrics

Day 5: KPIs for customer service

• Monitoring performance through key performance indicators
• The 4 perspectives of the balanced scorecard
• Impact of the customer perspective
• Characteristics of good KPIs
• Building customer service KPIs