Managing Service Excellence

Business Challenge

An organization's ability to build customer loyalty significantly impacts its top and bottom line, making excellent customer service a requirement for sustained growth.  Yet today's service environment is more complicated than ever with sophisticated products and services, demanding customers, complex technology, costly turnover issues, and the need to keep employees productive in what is often a stressful environment.  These challenges increasingly fall on the shoulders of customer service managers, who need to capitalize on the strong link between employee and customer loyalty and enable their team to deliver service excellence.

Managing Service Excellence

Managing Service Excellence teaches frontline service managers a system and skills for leading, developing, and motivating their service employees.  It enables participants to clearly articulate what their customers value, link employee performance to customer expectations, model and coach impeccable service skills, and strengthen employee commitment and productivity.  It also helps managers fully support and reinforce the skills and behaviors taught in Achieving Service Excellence, Forum's core program for service providers.

Key Content

Using real-work sessions, interactive skill practice, and peer advice exchange, Managing Service Excellence addresses the following key content areas:

• Identifying Customer Expectations:  A research-based framework for identifying and consolidating customer expectations, and communicating those expectations to employees.
• Setting and Communicating Customer-Focused Service Standards:  Tools for understanding customers current experience, for developing service standards that reinforce the desired experience, and for communicating those standards in a way that both ensures consistency and encourages employees to use their judgment.
• Coaching People to Deliver Exceptional Service:  Three proven practices for building service providers capabilitiesteaching and modeling a reliable service process, delivering effective feedback designed to reinforce and improve performance, and engaging in coaching conversations that build ownership and judgment.
• Building Employee Commitment to Service Excellence:  Tactics and practices for increasing commitment and building a motivating service environment.
• Coach's Guide:  A tool kit of quick, fun activities that managers can use on the job with their team to teach and reinforce service concepts and skills.

Target Audience

Managing Service Excellence is for managers of service providers who interact directly with internal or external customers.  It has been successful in a wide range of industries and situations, including managers of telephone providers, retail or hourly staff, service technicians, technical support staff, and professional personnel. 

Outcomes

Participants in Managing Service Excellence will be able to:

• Identify what their customers value and assess the extent to which customers current experiences meet their expectations
• Define, communicate, and reinforce the critical few service standards that matter most to customers
• Coach employees to provide consistently positive service, in both routine and service recovery situations
• Empower employees to own service issues and use their judgment in solving customers problems
• Create workplace environments that encourage commitment to service excellence

Delivery Options

• Classroom:  2-day learning experience followed by on-the-job skill application and reinforcement
• Modular Classroom:  16 hours, divided into half-day modules
• Custom Blend:  Learning experience customized by Forum to meet your unique needs

Prerequisite

Managing Service Excellence is to be delivered as part of a learning system that includes Achieving Service Excellence (ASE).  Participants should have first learned the ASE process and skills by doing one of the following:

• Completing the online version of ASE
• Attending the classroom version of ASE
• Attending a half-day Manager's Overview of ASE

Managing Service Excellence can also be customized to reinforce your organizations own service processes, skills, and tools.

For More Information
Please call 1-800-FORUM-11 or visit us at www.forum.com.