Building a Customer-Centric Organization: Strategies for Service Excellence

Introduction

Good customer service is 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 organisation's 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 (Awareness, Acquisition & Retention)

• Develop a holistic customer care approach by considering 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)

Customer Management (Awareness, Acquisition & Retention) Course Outlines

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.
• 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.

Day 5

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

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

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.