News

Singapore Learning Festival 2005 Free Seminars on Service Excellence = Reputation = Profit Research Reports Best Practice Guide For Customer Service Professionals
Resources/Articles
The Business Case for Measuring What Matters Understanding Customers’ Emotional Needs Why The Future Is Very Bright For Customer Service Professionals? Rise To The Challenge Branding Service - The New Challenge Motivating Staff With The ‘Right’ Message
Singapore Learning Festival 2005 Customer First Singapore is proud to be involved in this year Singapore Learning Festival 2005 organised by the Workforce Development Agency (WDA) from 27 to 30 October 2005 at Suntec City. This year theme is on “GEAR UP for Service Opportunities”. Through our partners, the Institute of Customer Service, UK, the CEO Mr. David Parsons have been invited to deliver a paper on 28 October 2005 in conjunction with the Service Practitioners’ Seminar Series. The session was attended by more than 100 participants across various service industries. For the presentation material, please click here. We are also delighted to have our Chairman, Customer First Group, UK, Mr. James T Pymer to be with us during the duration of the event. Customer First will also have an exhibition booth to showcase all our services and products and during the four days event we have attracted about 700 visitors shown interest in us and wanted to know more about us and the ICS, UK. During the 4 days event, we have also given inspiration talks and sharing sessions attended by more than 200 visitors to the exhibition. The topics include: Using Emotional Intelligence To Win Customers Importance of Coaching in Customer Service Going The Extra Mile in Customer Service Career in Customer Service Service Excellence = Reputation = Profit Aspirations to be Customer Service Professionals Using Rewards & Recognition to Deliver Your Customer Service Strategy Satisfying Customer: The Extent and The Limit Organisation interested in organising Inspiration Talks on Customer Service on any of the above subject or customized talks can contact us for discussion.
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Free Seminars on Service Excellence = Reputation = Profit A seminar was organised on 28 October 2005 at Le Meridien Hotel on the above subject. The seminar was attended by more than 40 professionals in the service industries. The seminar shed lights to industries on the misconception that investing in customer service can be expensive and difficult to see tangible returns. Also, the term “Service Excellence” is too widely and commonly used such that the actual meaning and implications can be very confusing. Thus, in the seminar we shared with those presence a simplistic model of Service Excellence and the approaches that organisation can take step by step in achieving Service Excellence. The seminar is supported by case study and survey conducted by the Institute of Customer Service based on the popular research conducted by Warwick Business School on the above subjects. For organisation interested in the Research Report, the retail price is £250 excluding GST.
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Research Reports As part of our commitment together with the Institute of Customer Service (ICS), UK. To provide service leadership in customer service development, through the Breakthrough Research Programme, ICS is pioneering cutting edge research on a range of other service related themes.
UK National Complaints Culture Survey 2003 Service excellence is increasingly becoming the difference between success and failure of organisations and a key element of this is how a company treats and processes its complaints. Through the yearly survey, the results were extremely wide ranging and created great interest in the market and the media industries. The survey looks into very wide ranging factors such as: Customer perceptions Expectations of complaint handling Cultural factors across sectors	Price: £185
Delivering Service Excellence : The View From The Frontline Service, whether excellent, poor or just ordinary is, in the main, delivered by front-line employees. These people, individually and collectively, play a key role in service organisations. They provide prime contact with customers. This research focused on three objectives framed in terms of questions: What does service excellence mean to the people who deliver it? How do they go about delivering it? What are the conditions that enable and encourage them to deliver it?	Price: £200
Rewarding Customer Service? Using Reward and Recognition to Deliver Your Customer Service Strategy The study focused on three specific aims: To identify the impact that reward and recognition practices have upon customer service and highlight which practices are most effective. To identify those approaches to reward and recognition most associated with perceived motivation, employees feeling valued and high levels of individual, team and organisational performance. To understand how other factors, such as job design, training and development, perceived autonomy, participation and involvement may moderate the effectiveness of reward and recognition process. In addition, previous other research reports available are: The Future of Customer Service Trusting the Internet: Developing an eService Strategy Emerging Skills for a Changing Economy : Evolution of the Customer Service Professional For further information on the above or ordering, please contact us.	Price: £50
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Best Practice Guide For Customer Service Professionals The Best Practice Guide reflects the knowledge, understanding and skills required in the UK’s Level 2 National Occupational Standards for Customer Service. The Guide is for all those who deal with customers, face-to-face or on the telephone. It has been written to help you to improve. As a customer service professional, you will need to use skills and knowledge that take a lot of time, effort and motivation to develop. The purpose of the Guide is to allow you to develop that set of skills and knowledge. This may be done either in your job role or within a learning programme. For someone new to customer service all the concepts, guidelines and activities will prepare you to operate as a true professional. If you are already experienced in dealing with customers you will discover new ideas and find ways of improving your expertise. Each chapter has a simple self-assessment activity. Use these activities to test your own understanding. Use the learning log to reflect on your own development, making sure that you put changes and improvements in place. For mass purchases or organisation wish to use the Best Practice Guide to incorporate into their programme, please contact us for advice and package prices.	Price: £20
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Resources/Articles
The Business Case for Measuring What Matters (Nigel Hill, The Leadership Factor) Reference No: V4N818   Over past years, we saw the huge expansion in the customer service activity in most companies, a greater emphasis on service quality and widespread adoption of customer service measurement. Recent evidence even suggested that it could cost 20 times as much to win customers than to keep them seems to ratify the ‘customer is always right’ stance adopted by some businesses. This article looks into why customer retention is more profitable than customer acquisition as the value of customers typically increases over time due to several factors. Also shared some examples of how some companies can built a fully validated model that precisely quantify the relationship between customer satisfaction and various desirable business outcomes from customer retention and recommendation through to sales and profitability. The paper also look into a mirror survey that goes a step further than most customer or employee satisfaction surveys by measuring the extent to which employees do understand their customers.     [back to top] Understanding Customers’ Emotional Needs (Jon Burton, Select People Development) Reference No: V4N821   Traditionally, in the past there is this belief that sound processes and procedures will automatically make customer service happen, and with it goes the presupposition that systems will drive and support all customer service activities to provide neat, failsafe guidelines that guarantee customer satisfaction, no matter under what circumstances. When things go wrong, two essential ingredients will help to ensure customers are dealt with, quickly and in a sensitive, understanding manner. They are: Having sound procedures and processes in place Acknowledging the customer’s emotional needs is crucial.     [back to top] Why The Future Is Very Bright For Customer Service Professionals? (Steve Bernard, CMICS) Reference No: V4N827   Let’s be honest. Who in their right mind would choose a career in the customer service today? Especially with these soc call discouraging factors: Not brilliant starting pay Pretty stressful environment Often work in unsociable hours for little thanks Future prospects aren’t always that great Introducing the ‘ICE’ framework that describes the true potential in planning and building a career in customer service. ‘I’ stands for ‘Insight’ ‘C’ stands for ‘Connections’ ‘E’ stands for ‘Extending Your Influence’ Using the ICEberg experience to describe the potential and the diversity of opportunities now available in customer service is to imagine standing on top of an iceberg. You see only a small part, with the vast mass hidden below water waiting to be discovered.     [back to top] Rise To The Challenge (Chris Horseman) Reference No: V5N112   Introduce a four steps process that can help you to handle properly and professionally, the most challenging and discerning customers and convert them to be your organisation’s best friends. Understanding these four steps and with examples illustrating how to use the four steps with five different types of challenging customers: Uncommunicative customers Uninformed customers ‘Wrong’ customers Rude customers Undecided customers As the quote said that ‘Not every encounter with customers begins as a positive experience but nearly every one can be turned around’.     [back to top] Branding Service – The New Challenge (Lesley Everett) Reference No: V5N133   It is recognised that successful business today no more just depends on the organisations’ products or company brand name. Instead, it very much depends on the customer service delivery and the total ‘customer experience’. We have to shift our branding now from just product to human factor which in the past have been overlooked. Human branding look into how we as managers and employees look, act and behave when communicating and interacting, both externally and internally. Successful teams and companies in service industries are built on individuals who perform to high standards in their individual areas of expertise. Personal branding is about identifying your values, strengths, motivators, drivers and beliefs and then consistently reflecting these on the surface through the way you dress, your voice, body talk, behaviour and attitude. Personal branding is not about changing the person you are, but rather projecting the values you want to project about yourself and your company. Good customer service is crucial in every business and it’s not just about words and doing the job. Exceptional customer service and exceptional performance of a branded service is a key differentiator in today’s fragile and fickle market place. Remember that ‘Your People Element in Your Business is Your Window to Your Customer”.     [back to top] Motivating Staff With The ‘Right’ Message (Paul Winterburn, Hearts & Mind) Reference No: V5N312   Excellent internal communication is the heart of every thriving business and organisation. Employees will be motivated if they receive a regular flow of interesting, informative information that keeps them up to date with the things they need to know. Sadly, in most organisations, the employees are fed with information that they don’t understand, is of no interest and adds little or no value to their working environment. Why is that so? The reasons for the problem generally fall into four categories: Frequency - Is it too much or not enough? Method - How the message is delivered? Accessibility - Is the information readily available? Style and Content - Are messages dull, boring and demotivating? Research had shown that the use of ‘you’ and ‘your’ are the two most powerful words use in communicating with employees. So if you focus your messages on the receiver, not the organisation or company, you can’t go wrong.     [back to top]