Sometimes customers seem like sand in the gears of a well-oiled machine. They’re demanding. They’re petulant. They want what they want when they want it. And although they almost always find a way to tell us when we let them down, they rarely tell us when we’ve exceeded their expectations.

A sale gets a customer. Customer service keeps ‘em. And we all know that it’s more expensive to get a new customer than to keep the one you already have. The costs of customer acquisition have skyrocketed. As a result, "customer-for-life" is an expression we hear a lot these days.

Even as recently as a decade ago, in many companies customer service was an add-on, an after-thought, a necessary unpleasantness. It was a back room where the irate, the disappointed, and the complainers were sent to be ‘managed.’ There was a huge rulebook that was pulled out and quoted to explain why company policies and procedures couldn’t accommodate specific requests. Customer service was a thankless job. And it was often frustrating to the point of apoplexy to be a customer.

Then things changed. We woke up to the fact that the bottom line is affected both directly and indirectly when customers are unhappy. There’s ‘negative advertising.’ There are expensive sales and marketing budgets as sales struggles to replace customer churn. Then there’s the loss of information about our businesses—information that is priceless in the design and improvement of products and services. Customers are our best source of information. And smart companies began to realize that customers are partners in the business.

Customer service is where the relationship with the customer is developed and maintained over time. And the customer is not, in fact, always right. Sometimes you have to say "No." You want to keep your customer but you can’t lose your shirt, and that can be a very delicate balance. It takes a high level of skill to walk that tightrope all day, every day.

As with expert sales people, it requires training to develop the skills of an outstanding customer service representative. Then it requires coaching to hone and refine the skills. Customer service reps often juggle complicated technical information with high levels of customer emotion. They have a responsibility to get the information they’ve gleaned from the customer back into the system. It is vital that their communication skills be exemplary. It may not be rocket science, but it couldn’t be more critical to a company’s long-term success.

A comprehensive Customer Service curriculum includes these things:

• Reflective Listening Skills
• Building Rapport—the Client’s Frame of Reference
• Identifying Solutions
• Facilitating Your Team: Delivering the Optimum Client Solution
• Communicating Solution Strategies
• Corporate Intelligence—Bringing Back What You Learn from the Market
• Conflict Management—Working with Emotion

To see samples of our work click on a choice below.

• American Airlines / Best Get Better
• American Airlines / Best Get Better II
• American Airlines / Customer Service for Airport GM's