As someone who participates in delivering high levels of customer service, you're an important ambassador for your organization. In this course, you will discover a number of dynamite methods to bring out your best and also do the same for the people you work with. You will learn how to measure customer service—from your company's point of view and from the customers—and discover how to anticipate the needs of your customers.
You may already understand that top-notch customer service begins with knowing your customers and their needs, but do you know how to evaluate those customers, or better yet, what to do with the data once you have it? You will take a look at that, as well as identify how your customer service stacks up right now, and how you can build on even the sharpest of service policies. Plus, you will learn how to communicate, resolve complaints, and build long-lasting customer service programs.
Tony Swaim has helped many clients, colleagues, and students reach their professional and personal goals. He has been an online instructor since 1998 and has taught at colleges and universities across the United States since 1981. His focus areas are project management, Six Sigma, and supply chain management. Tony manages a successful consulting firm, and his industry experience includes 20 years of supply chain management. He earned a Doctorate in Business Administration from Kennesaw State University and holds professional certifications in six disciplines, including the Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification from the Project Management Institute (PMI)® and Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (CSSBB)® from the American Society for Quality (ASQ)®.
The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.
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Lesson 1
In this first lesson, you'll learn who customers are, determine how to find them, discover what it means to be a customer-driven organization, and see how customer complaints can actually be helpful.
Lesson 2
Customers are complex and multidimensional. The success of your organization depends on how well you understand what customers want and meet their needs. So, today's topic is measuring customer service levels. You'll learn how to define customer service, find out how to make key service level decisions, and identify the different ways to measure customer service.
Lesson 3
Your ability to satisfy customers is highly dependent on following the marketing concept. Marketing is more than selling or advertising. Today, I'll help you see how marketing orientation differs from sales orientation and production orientation. You'll learn what it takes to implement and use the marketing concept.
Lesson 4
You won't get too far with customer service if you don't have the right system and great employees in place. In this lesson, you'll find out how to develop and implement an effective customer service strategy. You'll also discover how to recruit, interview, select, and train customer service representatives so they become effective company ambassadors.
Lesson 5
Customers are happy when they get the right combination of product, price, and information. When you add making the product available at the right time and place, you have a winning marketing mix--also known as the 4Ps (product, price, place, and promotion). Today, you'll learn about each member of the marketing mix and see how you can help your organization assemble different groupings of 4Ps that your customers want.
Lesson 6
In our earlier lessons, we talked about how customers have different needs. So, how can you get to know them better and give them what they're looking for? By using a technique called market segmentation. In today's lesson, you'll learn how to organize customers into segments and then develop target markets that provide maximum satisfaction.
Lesson 7
Today, we'll discuss one of the most fascinating topics related to customer satisfaction: consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is a creative undertaking that looks at buying influences and customer motivation. You'll find out where the field of customer behavior came from and how it borrows concepts from sociology and psychology. We'll look at the steps consumers take to purchase products and see how to better predict them.
Lesson 8
It's likely that many of you work--or will work--in a business-to-business (B2B) setting. B2B customer service focuses on both private (manufacturing plants, retailing establishments, distribution centers, wholesalers) and public organizations (hospitals, schools, churches, and city, county, state and federal governments). To help you succeed with B2B activities, today we'll review major products and services, contrast B2B marketing with B2C (business-to-consumer), and discuss how the major customers, primarily purchasing agents, operate.
Lesson 9
In order to satisfy customers, you have to be able to forecast what they want, when they want it, and how much they want. So, in this lesson, we'll demystify the process of predicting customer demand. You'll learn all the components of demand, identify the different forecasting activities, review the forecasting cycle, get familiar with different forecasting methods, and see how to make a forecast more accurate.
Lesson 10
New products are the lifeblood of an organization. After all, not too many customers want to buy the same products forever. Also, many organizations now sell products and services outside their national borders. So, as a customer service professional, you need to understand how to support new product introductions and work with customers in other lands. Today, you'll learn about how to do both. We'll discuss the nature of new product adoption by customers and the requirements and challenges of international customers.
Lesson 11
Your success in satisfying customers largely depends on the level of your communication skills. So, in this lesson, we'll discuss the basics of communication. You'll find out how to solve communication problems, especially the ones that happen all the time when you're doing business over the telephone.
Lesson 12
I've saved the best topics for our last lesson. Today, you'll learn how to revive a troubled customer service program, discover how to deal with upset customers, and determine the best ways to use technology to simplify your job duties. We'll also go over the steps to take when you face a difficult customer and review the use of call centers, e-mail, and the Internet.
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