 My name is Angela Kegler, and I'm gonna be the instructor for the following course. You may be wondering to yourself, what does she know about this course? Well, allow me to share with you that I do have a PhD in organizational development, and I have several years' experience leading organizations. So that gives me the unique opportunity to share with you that I have both the academic experience having sat in your shoes in classes watching instruction on the content that you're about to learn. On the other hand, I've also led organizations, which gives me the practice or the practical experience of seeing this firsthand in organizations. With that scholar practitioner experience, I'd like to deliver the content to you so that you can take this and turn it into something that you can use in your workplace. I hope you enjoy the class and you learn a tremendous amount. Happy learning. We're gonna begin with understanding customer service. What is customer service? Well, customer service involves anticipating and satisfying the needs of your clients and potential clients in a consistent and dependable manner. When we talk about a consistent and dependable manner, that's really the service level. Anticipating and satisfying their needs means that a customer comes to you and has a need. You're willing to serve it, the expectation of the customer, and then the service provided in a consistent and dependable manner is what customer service is. Let's look a little further at what customer service really means. Customer service is also about customer care. Well, what is customer care? Providing customer service means caring for your customers and ensuring that every single contact within your organization is a positive experience. Customers expect that they're going to have a positive experience when they do business with you or your organization. So providing excellent customer care requires that you consistently do the following. First, you wanna build relationships with your customers. Do you know your customers' names? Do you know them more than just the services or the products that you provide to them? Do you understand what their expectations are? Do you know a little bit about them? When you know your product or service and how it can benefit your customer, that's a foundation. But do you understand how your customer uses it so that the benefit is even greater? Can you advance on those benefits and share with your customer various ways that they can benefit from your products and services even further? Do you communicate effectively with your customers to learn what's important to them? Not just the basic expectations, but what's truly important to them and what they value and why they come to you? Do you take responsibility for handling their complaints and see their complaints as opportunities to interact with them, build a deeper relationship, and then serve them better? Do you go the extra mile for your customers? Customer care is about going the extra mile, going above and beyond their expectations and delivering service at a level that meets not just their needs, but warms their heart and makes them wanna come back even more. So who is the customer? Well, a customer is someone who purchases products or services from you or your organization. A customer is also anyone who provides a service to someone else within your organization. Customers can be internal or external. Internal customers are those individuals who work within your organization and may potentially provide services to somebody else, but they are also looking to you for services. The services are a little bit different because services from an internal customer would be the collaborative efforts that you provide as a teammate. External customers are those customers who are purchasing products and services from you or your organization. When we talk about customer service, our mindset typically goes to the external customer, those outside our organization, but it's incredibly important to not forget that we have internal customers as well. Anybody and everybody that we come in contact throughout the work day are customers or potential customers. Have you ever thought about wow service? What does it take to wow somebody? Well, if we're going to look to wow somebody, we have to go above expectations. The customer perception is one piece of the puzzle. The expectation level is really what we're trying to meet. Think about it this way. When a customer comes to us, they have a perception of what you're able to do for them. We often try to determine what their expectation is so that we can meet their expectations through our products and services. As a customer service professional, our goal is to meet their expectations. However, if we meet their expectations as well as exceed their perception, we're now delivering wow service. Remember, this is for both internal and external customers. It's easy to put this into perspective when we think about a customer from the external coming to your organization to buy a product or service, and they have a perception of what your product and service may do. Have you ever purchased a product, thinking that it would do one thing and then discovering that it does something so much better? Were you wowed? Well, let's also consider that internal customer. They may come to you with a perception of what you can do. And how awesome would it be if you can exceed their perception and show your internal customers that you can wow them because you can provide even greater products and services to your internal customers as well? That would make you not only look like a customer service professional, but an outstanding professional within the organization who can do so much more than your internal customers first initially thought. Meeting expectations is one thing, but wowing your customers by exceeding their perceptions is something completely different. The key to providing exceptional customer service is in building relationships with your customers. So how do we build relationships? Well, first of all, greeting them in a warm, friendly manner. Again, thinking about internal and external customers. When we're greeting external customers, we wanna welcome them to our workplace. We wanna ensure that we greet them. We are warm, we're friendly, we're smiling, asking them about what you can do for them and why they came to your organization. Building a relationship is about starting with rapport, opening up dialogue. This could be somebody that is brand new to you. So think of the opportunity to build a new friend that's an internal customer, do not lose sight, that as they approach you, you wanna greet them as well with a warm, friendly manner. Think about your own experience as a customer internal and external. When you've gone to an organization to purchase products and services, have they greeted you? Think about when you've been wild. Was it warm and friendly? Did they feel like they were your friend? Did they feel like they wanted to get to know you? What about internal? Have you ever worked at an organization where you worked with somebody who greeted you each time that you came to their desk or to their office? Building relationships also happens when you treat your customers with respect. Respect is such an important aspect of relationships and building a relationship with your customer. Our external customers, we wanna ensure that we're treating them with the utmost respect because they are giving their hard-earned money to our products and services within our organization. But we certainly wanna also respect our internal customers. Understanding what our internal customers expect from us, what does respect look like to them? Having dialogue with them and it's an okay question to ask, how can I show you respect? Imagine if you were in the workplace and somebody contacted you and said, I'd like to show you respect. What would it look like to you? How would it feel? What would you say? Treating our customers with respect means engaging in dialogue with them to understand what respect feels like, looks like and sounds like to them. Building relationships is also when we provide them with information that they need. When we provide information, not just the product or service, not just fulfilling an expectation, but going above and beyond, giving them the information they need, not only what they want, but also what they need. Imagine if it was an external customer purchasing a product and service and you were talking to them about everything that your products and your services did for them and they were wowed. Now let's turn and think about the internal customer. They may come to you with information or a request and if you can share with them, not just fulfilling the request, but going one step beyond or even 10 steps beyond in saying, let me help you with everything that you could possibly need in regards to what I'm about to fulfill for you. That would build such a relationship with the individual that they would wanna come back to you more and more. Building relationships can make a buying experience easy and satisfying. Now we think of buying experiences with those external customers when they're spending their money on products and services with your organization. However, that's also true of our internal customers because their buying experience is their time with you, their investment with you in asking for your assistance. Whether it's internal or external, we wanna make their engagement with us easy and satisfying. We wanna ensure that they see us as a professional and that we are there to help them and build a relationship with them and serve their needs. Building relationships also comes from thanking them for calling or coming in. When was the last time you were thanked by an internal customer for just stopping by and asking them for some help? Imagine the power and the respect that they would feel if you were to thank them for asking you for assistance. Our external customers should be thanked with every interaction. We should thank them when they call us, when they visit us, when they ask us questions, anytime they have a need, we should be thanking them for taking the time to invest in your organization. And most importantly, with any relationship, when you make a mistake, you wanna fix it. So when you are looking to provide exceptional customer service and you discover that you may have made a mistake, take responsibility and fix it. If you're not sure how to fix it, find out. That can show your customer that you're willing to take responsibility and that you appreciate the time and energy that they brought this mistake to you and that you're willing to ensure that things are done right for them. There are several barriers to excellent customer service. When I say barrier, it's something that an organization may or may not do that does not get the customer to the full potential of customer service, where they're not being wowed, where their expectations are not being met. Let's take a look at what some of them may be. Customer service requires the commitment of an entire organization at every level. And so with that excellent customer service does not permeate every level, then it's going to fall down. Many things that can interfere with an individual's ability to deliver exceptional customer service, things like organizational policies. Think about organizational policies that might prevent a frontline customer service agent from dealing effectively with customers. When the customer calls in and they have a challenge or a problem, but the customer service agent is being held to maybe a standard to terminate that call to solve the problem and get off the call very quickly. Sometimes policies from the organization don't really meet the customer's needs. There may also be poor communication skills. If you or your colleagues do not have the skills to communicate effectively with your customers, then you certainly can't expect to meet the needs of your customers. For yourself, you want to ensure that you are building strong communication skills so that you can have dialogue and engage with your customer and know how to listen and ask questions that will allow them to communicate more effectively with you and you to communicate more effectively with them. This can help you and eliminate those barriers to excellent customer service. Often, a barrier can be that there's insufficient resources. All too often, organizations trying to lower operating costs will cut staff in an effort to maintain or increase profits. When lower levels of staff are in an organization, it's more challenging to commit the time and energy to a customer that they may need. Many organizations also have a lot of bureaucracy. They've built in so many levels for approval that satisfying a customer can be counterproductive for frontline agents. A customer may contact an organization with a complain or a challenge or a need and that customer service agent has to go through so many different levels of red tape that they can't make a decision that may have been simple so that the customer's expectations were met or potentially even wild. Some organizations have inadequate facilities or equipment and using outdated or poorly functioning equipment can certainly interfere with an individual's ability to provide exceptional service. Think of yourself. Have you ever contacted an organization and been told, I'm sorry, I need you to hold on because the computer's not quite working today? Or I'm going to ask you to call back or may I call you back because I can't access the resources that I need to take care of you right now. Having inadequate or poorly functioning equipment can certainly damper a customer's experience. Poor attitude can also have a tremendous impact on how a customer will perceive your organization and whether or not they will return. When we say poor attitude, attitude is heard and seen through behaviors. And so when an individual or a customer service rep has an attitude or is behaving in such a manner that they don't seem to care about the customer, that can be a poor attitude. Attitude starts with you. Each and every individual has to choose to take the mindset of having a positive attitude in which they wish to serve the customer. And finally, there's inadequate training. When employees are not trained on how to provide excellent customer service, then there certainly can't be an expectation that it would be delivered. Take the time to learn customer service skills. Take the time to learn skills about how to build a rapport and a relationship with your customers so that you can engage with your customers in a way that you have a strong relationship. You understand what their needs are. You can communicate effectively and meet their needs and wow them. Now that we understand the barriers to excellent customer service, let's talk a little bit about overcoming these barriers. Barriers to excellent customer service can cost your organization dearly in terms of lost customers. So removing the barriers is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your customer service levels. So let's talk a little bit about how to do that. First of all, empowering your employees. Well, you might be saying, wait a minute. I don't have employees. That's okay. Empowerment can be done through any individual, any employee at any level. If you were to go into work even without your own employees and talk to your teammates about what they can do instead of what they can't, you're going to motivate and inspire your teammates to become empowered and start to shift their mindset from what they can't do to what they can. You can also empower individuals by asking, where are our parameters? In which direction can we move without looking for approval so that we can ensure that we're taking care of our customers? You may also look at taking training classes to improve your personal communication skills. Communication skills are the key to ensuring that you are providing the best service possible. Because of communication, verbal and nonverbal, you can learn how to ask questions, listen more attentively, engage in dialogue with your customer to where they're going to open up and share more information with you. The greater the relationship you have with your customer, the better the service you can provide. Because the more information you'll have about them that you can respond to. And take steps to reduce red tape. If your organization has lots of bureaucracy built in into the approval process for taking care of your customers, then you'll want to talk to somebody within your organization about the impact of the service levels to your organization because of the red tape. Find a champion in the management team that will help you to reduce red tape and look for ways to provide better customer service. Think about it this way. Would any leader of an organization say no, we shouldn't serve our customers better? Quantify and qualify where the red tape is making an impact and communicate it with your manager or another manager who can champion the process. Thank you.