Managing Customer Expectations using the RATER model

One of the biggest challenges that face people working with customers these days is the fact that customer expectations consistently change direction, grow, shrink, change shape and adapt to the environment. Their demands, needs and wants will decide how they feel about your level of service and their satisfaction will be dictated by how well you meet their current expectations.

This means that we need to be able to adapt with the customer and makes the job of providing excellent customer service an organic process that needs constant focus. The important thing to remember is that the definition of good service is decided by the customer, not you.

I'm sure you already have some methods of ensuring you provide excellent customer service, but don’t let these ideas become imbedded into a process that you rigidly stick to regardless of the facts around you. It’s important to adapt and alter to meet the customer’s expectations each and every time you deal with them and if something’s not working…change it.

There are typically five main areas customers are concerned about when we interact with them. These are…

Reliability

• Providing service as promised
• Dependability in handling customers’ service problems
• Performing services right the first time
• Providing services at the promised time
• Maintaining error-free processes

Assurance

• Give confidence to customers
• Making customers feel safe in their transactions
• Being consistently courteous
• Having the knowledge to answer customer questions

Tangibles

• Ensuring equipment works
• Keeping facilities clean and tidy
• Having a neat, professional appearance
• Displaying or presenting the product/service in a visually appealing way

Empathy
 

• Giving customers individual attention
• Dealing with customers in a caring fashion
• Having the customer’s best interest at heart
• Understand the needs of their customers
• Convenient business hours

Response

• Keeping customers informed as to when services will be performed
• Prompt service to customers
• Willingness to help customers
• Readiness to respond to customers’ requests

These are the typical basic expectations that customers have and we need to consistently ensure we are working to address issues under each of these headings. It’s not good enough to be excellent in some areas, but not others. We need to ensure that we excel at all things all the time. Customer service is a constant challenge and those who work to ensure they meet this challenge will get the best results. The good news is that most of these elements are not difficult to work on. However, problems occur when we forget what is expected or lose sight of the customer’s needs within our day to day responsibilities.

This article is a short excerpt from the Trainer Bubble training course materials on 'Customer Excellence', which can be purchased directly from our website at www.trainerbubble.com

The top ten weird mobile phone insurance claims

We love these great surveys that highlight weird and wonderful customer scenarios. They can be great fun to use during customer service training courses, where you want to get participants to discuss how they might go about resolving the problem if they were to be faced with a customer who mentions them.

Apparently, these are all true customer reasons for making an insurance claim on their mobile phone and while the credibility of some of the claims was questioned a spokesman from the mobile phone insurance comparison website said that all the stories were fully investigated.

1. A farmer in Devon claimed his phone had disappeared inside the back end of one of his cows when he’d been using the torch on his iPhone whilst assisting the cow during calving. The phone later made an appearance, but was damaged.

2. A woman in her early 40s from Nottingham claimed that she’d baked her Nokia 6303i into a Victoria Sponge she’d been making for her daughter’s birthday. It didn’t endure the heat of gas mark 5.

3. A woman in her 30s claimed she’d been walking her Cocker Spaniel on Barry Island beach, Wales, when a seagull swooped down and took her Samsung Galaxy from her hand.

4. A woman in her late 20s from Bristol claimed the vibration function on her BlackBerry Bold 9900 phone had stopped working whilst she was using it as an adult toy.

5. A 40 year old construction worker said his iPhone 4S had fallen out of his back pocket when he pulled his jeans down before sitting on the toilet. Not realising, he went about his business and flushed the chain. The phone didn’t flush, but underwent serious water damage.

6. A man in his 30s claimed he’d been filming monkeys from the car window in Longleat Safari Park with his HTC One X when a monkey climbed on the roof and snatched it.

7. A couple re-enacting the 'I'm king of the world!' scene from Titanic lost their phone over the side of their cruise ship, whilst trying to take a photo of themselves.

8. A pyrotechnician was setting up a show for the National Fireworks Championships in Plymouth, and having left his iPhone 3GS within the 'blast zone', it was nowhere to be found when he returned post-show, having been fired 3,000 feet into the air before exploding in a stunning display.

9. A woman in her 20s from Liverpool admitted she’d thrown her HTC Desire X at her boyfriend, whom she’d discovered was cheating, but it missed him and hit a wall; breaking the handset.

10. Rather than paying £60 for a ticket to see Blur at their sell-out Hyde Park shows, one customer tried to film the event on his iPhone from up a nearby tree - he got a little too excited as the band came on stage though, and dropped his phone onto the ground below.

Visit Trainer Bubble where you can download lots of free training games, energisers and icebreakers that will enhance your customer service training courses.
 

Success - It's not always what you can see.

We are loving the sentiment behind this great cartoon that was sent to us recently...

What do you think?

Who do YOU want to be in life?

We love this inspirational movie based on a speech by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This would make a great motivational clip to play during training courses, such as; Assertiveness Training, NLP Training, Leadership Skills Training or any type of Positive Thinking Training Course.

What do you think?

Reacting to News of Redundancy

The news of redundancy – be it good, bad or indifferent – will hail a change and a new beginning.  It will bring a fresh phase in life, welcome or otherwise, and whatever a person’s situation, it is important for them to ‘look after number 1’ at what can be challenging time.

In the very early stages of dealing with the news of redundancy, there are some useful and constructive points to consider that will help ensure we protect our emotional well-being, whether redundancy is voluntary or compulsory. 

This investment in ourselves will pay dividends; it will stand us in good stead for the time ahead and show that redundancy does not have to be the end of the world. 

To begin with, let’s explore the factors that influence our reactions to the news of redundancy.  A good understanding of these can keep us grounded, focused and in control.  This in turn, allows us to begin to look at our personal situation in a structured and managed way.

How we react to the news that our job is redundant will very much depend on our personal and financial circumstances.  What sorts of thing might this include?

Factors affecting us include our:

·        age

·        marital or relationship status / situation

·        dependents – whether children, elderly or other relatives

·        outgoings / financial responsibilities

·        savings / pension provision

·        skills

·        industry / sector

·        career

·        opportunity for severance or statutory pay

·        insurance arrangements.

As we said above, having a good understanding of the factors that influence our reactions can help keep us grounded, focused and in control and allow us to look at our situation in a structured and managed way. 

 

These are external ‘tangible’ factors; it’s important to consider too some of the internal ‘emotional’ factors that will affect how we react to the news of redundancy.  These could include:

·        our pride / ego

·        the extent of our emotional investment in the organisation

·        our levels of confidence and self-esteem.

Taking account of the emotional factors helps to ‘normalise’ our reaction to redundancy.  It enables us to see that we are not reacting unreasonably or unusually.  This in turn helps us to rationalise things, steady ourselves and begin to focus on the path ahead.

So to re-cap then, the point of starting off with a look at what influences our reactions to the news of redundancy is to improve self-awareness and thereby give us some grounding that will allow us to ‘see the wood for the trees’.

This article is a very small extract from the Trainer Bubble training course materials for, 'Dealing with Redundancy', which you can purchase from the Trainer Bubble website.

The 'Dealing with Redundancy' training course materials provide organisations with the opportunity to provide an effective post redundancy support mechanism for their staff. It will provide them with practical guidance on coping with redundancy as well as giving them clear guidance on how to progress to their next role or opportunity.

Writing Multiple Choice Questions

Writing effective multiple choice questions needs to be done with a lot of care. We think that this involves following four basic principles. Here is some brief information about them before we go on to work through them individually.

1. Start With the Objectives

Effective multiple choice questions must always be linked to clearly defined objectives.

What are you trying to assess?

Is it a formative or summative assessment?

Avoid trick questions that are not related to objectives.


2. Clear and Understandable

As a general rule, language and sentence structure should be kept as simple as possible.

Take care to avoid ambiguous stems, answers and distracters.

Make sure that you are assessing the objectives rather than tricking people with questions that are difficult to comprehend.


3. No Soft Clues

It can sometimes be possible to guess the correct answer from the question itself.

Questioners may leave clues in the stem, answer or distracters that they do not intend.

Remember that you are assessing objectives not candidates ability to guess answers correctly.


4. Meaningful Feedback

In summative assessments the absolute minimum that candidates will need to know is whether they have passed or failed.

Formative assessments require more.

Candidates need to know whether their answers were right or wrong.

They also need to know why they were right or wrong.


This is a short excerpt from the Trainer Bubble 'Writing Multiple Choice Questions' training course materials, which you can download from our website at www.trainerbubble.com

Influencing, Persuading...or worse?

We all use what we consider influencing skills every day to try and get what we want. However, although we might think we are influencing, it could be that the methods we are using are quite different to what can be considered ‘influencing skills’.

Typically, the methods we end up using to get people to do things fall into the following areas

·         Manipulation

·         Coercion
·         Threats
·         Authority
·         Persuasion
·         Deals

These approaches usually only give us short term wins and more often than not people become resistant to the methods and become less likely to respond to them. The reason for this is that they are more about helping you out than demonstrating that there are benefits for both parties. Once we have experienced these behaviours from one person, we are less open to them in future.

What this means is that in order for anyone in the workplace to consistently gain the cooperation of others they must learn effective influencing skills.

The behaviours we should be displaying to get people to do things can be:

Listening, questioning, understanding, empathy, honesty, challenge, support, exposing concerns, fears, blockers, positive attitude, positive body language, rapport building, seeks first to understand before being understood, trying to appeal to a value that is important to the other person.

This is summed up with the difference between the definition of ‘influencing’…

“Getting others to do things by showing that there is a real and genuine advantage to them in moving in the direction you want - Influence is the ability to affect a person’s character, beliefs or actions, reaching agreement by discussion”

Versus the definition of ‘persuading’…

“Persuading is to induce, urge or prevail. To convince through reasoning. To talk someone into something.”

So, the next time you try to influence someone, consider what style you are using and whether you are in fact influencing, or just telling people what to do!

This article is a short extract from the Trainer Bubble Training Course Materials for 'Influencing Skills'. Visit our website now to purchase these engaging, activity based training materials.

Alfred Hitchcock on Happiness - Emotional Intelligence at its best.

I recently came across this clip and felt that it really sums up the mood of how we should perceive life against how we sometimes do. The line, 'Hatred is wasted energy' is very true and should be shouted from the roof tops.

This clip is something I will consider using when running several training sessions, including; Managing Difficult Behaviours, Emotional Intelligence, Conflict Handling, Communicating Difficult Messages and Great Leadership.



Finance for Managers - Finance Statements

Most organisations will have some form of accounting department or team and their job is to maintain the day-to-day recording of transactional information within the company.

Every business organisation needs to maintain accurate accounting records to help it manage and control its finances more efficiently. Without day to day records it would be difficult to know if it was making a profit or a loss.

The book-keeping side of the business ensures financial records such as receipts and payments, sales, purchases and expenses are maintained accurately. Allowing informed decisions to be made about the price to charge for goods and services.

Accounting is a step on from bookkeeping as it is used to communicate financial information to interested parties such as owners, managers and banks.

Accounting has only FIVE distinct accounting groups. A business may have hundreds of accounts recorded in its ledgers, but all will belong to one of these groups.  An easy way to remember this is the word “RECAL”

Revenue – the income earned by a business when selling goods and services.

Expenses – the day-to-day expenses a business incurs such as stock, wages, advertising etc.

Capital – represents the owner’s investment in a business and is needed to begin trading. Capital may grow if the business is profitable.

Assets – the things of value which the business owns such as premises, equipment, stock, cash etc.

●      Fixed assets (non-current assets) are used on more permanent basis, like premises and equipment.

●      Current assets, like stock, cash and bank are used for daily trading purposes.

Liabilities – the things of value that the business owes

 

●      Current Liabilities are debts expected to be repaid within one year e.g. trade creditors

●      Long-term liabilities are debts expected to be repaid over more than one year e.g. a bank loan or mortgage.

The accounting team will work with this data to provide managers with information to be able to make sound financial decisions based on fiscal fact. These will usually come in the form of financial statements or ‘reports’.

In business there are THREE key financial statements or reports. The profit and loss statement, balance sheet and cash flow represent the three key financial statements that show how a business is performing.

• The profit and loss shows exactly that, how much profit or loss a business has made.
• The balance sheet shows the value of the business’s resources and how these resources are financed by the owner’s capital and borrowed money (its liabilities).
• The cash flow statement provides the short term priorities for the business, because if you run out of cash it is hard to trade.

This is a short extract from the Trainer Bubble Training Course Materials for, 'Finance for Non-Financial Managers'. You can view more about this training course and purchase the materials at www.trainerbubble.com

Time Management Advice from a six year old

I was complaining about my workload over dinner with the family last night and my six year old came out with his own brand of Time Management advice for me. I thought I'd share it with the world. He said...

"I don't know what the problem is..."

"Just do half the work today and then half the work tomorrow. Then do half the work the next day if you haven't done it all."

Very helpful advice I'm sure you'll agree and I encourage everyone to follow the same plan.

If you're looking for training on Time Management or any other management elements for that matter take a look at Trainer Bubble.

Bill Gates High Schoool Speech

Some time ago, Bill Gates gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality.

This concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Mentor Relationship Stages

Mentoring is a learning support mechanism where an experienced person provides guidance, knowledge and advice to someone who is in development or has less experience in a given topic or function.

The role of mentor is a very important one and whether the relationship is formal or informal, the fact is that a good mentor can be instrumental in the development of not only a mentee’s skills and knowledge, but also their behaviour, attitude and social outlook.

Mentors have a varied role and this can range from ‘challenging friend’, who acts as a sounding board, shares experiences and facilitates the mentee’s development, to ‘assessor’, who may also be required to assess competencies and skill levels in conjunction with the ‘challenging friend’ role.

A mentoring relationship has four definable stages within its life cycle:

1.     Getting to know each other – establishes expectations of a mentoring relationship. In the early stages, a large part of the mentor’s role involves being supportive and creating a reassuring environment for the mentee. Initial meeting agendas might include:

• getting to know each other personally
• identifying the mentee’s learning needs for career and professional development

2.     Goal setting – establishes expectations of learning by:

• identifying potential learning opportunities at work and the technical and theoretical learning that might result (e.g. brainstorm possible areas of learning that relate to the development or profession as a whole, suggest useful contacts, check for other training opportunities, etc.)
• agreeing meeting schedules and ways to arrange meetings by writing a Mentoring Agreement

3.     Progress and maturation – the longest stage. At this stage, the emphasis of the mentor’s role should change to that of a challenger and stimulator to encourage deeper learning and reflection. A balance needs to be reached so that mentees continually explore their limits but not to the extent that they feel overwhelmed. Emphasis should be on issues of professional development. Later meeting agendas might include:

• reviewing general progress and achievements to date and giving guidance on ways to improve performance and progress
• reviewing any work-based learning

4.     End – a final meeting is essential. For many mentors it can be tempting to avoid defining the end or separation stage and to regard it as unnecessary. However, a final review session is crucial to provide closure on the relationship for both the mentee and the mentor. The mentee and the mentor are jointly responsible for providing a proper ending to the relationship.

This structure provides a clearly defined approach to the mentoring process. It will ensure you are both clear on the progress of the mentoring relationship and allow you to consistently review and support development.

This article is a short excerpt from the Trainer Bubble training materials for Mentor Training, which can be purchased from our website at www.trainerbubble.com