Customer Relationship Skills Workshops

Customer relationship skills are essential to bringing your customer experience strategy to life. Skills in customer advocacy can be a distinctive and long-lasting differentiator. In addition to strengthening custmer-facing capabilities, all employees can improve relationships with their internal customers to improve morale, hand-offs, and business results.

The following workshops can be customized by nature of application exercises to accommodate participants ranging from executives to front-line employees. Workshop Modules can be mixed and matched to meet your specific needs. New skills will be developed via case studies, self-awareness exercises, role-play, and application to participants’ jobs. Follow-up exercises or sessions are also available to stimulate continual usage of the new skills.

Communication Skills Workshop

Effective communicators are skilled navigators of circumstances and personalities in receiving as well as sending messages.

The Power of Listening: Practice listening skills appropriate to the situation at hand, including nonverbal cues, the skills of empathy and silence, and advanced levels of listening that will propel your relationship growth.

The Power of Questions: Involve your client through appropriate questions that reveal the often unspoken issues, criteria, rationale, perceived risks, motives and vision that are germane to your mutual success.

The Power of Intended Outcome: Identify success factors for each client interaction, taking into account the expectations of each party, what to share or reserve, managing disengagement or resistance, and discovering underlying needs.

Balancing Open Dialog: Integrate communication techniques for various phases of discussion, using the exploring, stating and teaming dialog components appropriately.

Interaction Skills Workshop

Styles differ across personalities and create challenges for achieving mutual understanding, commitment and results. Quickly detect what you have in common with another individual to overcome potential barriers to success.

Interaction Bridges: Learn techniques to use on-the-fly in navigating unexpected changes with clients or colleagues, or gaining cooperation from persons outside your line of authority during moments of impasse.

Personalities Under Stress: Recognize what stresses different thinking types and develop methods to transform yourself and others to a positive outlook during stressful situations.

Relationship Skills Workshop

Trust is the defining factor for long-term relationships. Catalyze and manage bonds that transcend inevitable challenges.

Building Trust: Explore the character and competence dimensions of the trust you convey and tools for building credibility, managing commitments, maintaining standards, and demonstrating your trust in others.

Sources of Influence: Measure your formal and informal sources of influence: positional, political, knowledge, relationship, and personal power ... and leverage your client's sources for win-win arrangements.

Partnering Roles: Monitor your journey from expert-for-hire to trusted advisor by identifying your current level of partnership and growing the relationship through dimensions of expertise, process and people.

Building Client Relationships: Prioritize stretch goals for opportunities and relationships, thought leadership, team development, quality assurance, and commercial success; develop tools to monitor and celebrate success.

Relationship Dynamics Workshop

Anticipate connections and interactions within and between processes and groups, to maximize customer experience success.

Stakeholder Management: Map the players integral to an initiative and determine strategies to create a common vision and build momentum and success in achieving desired results.

Building Relationships With Each Buying Influence: Identify the players in your client organization in various roles of the buying decision, gain awareness of each role's care-abouts, and nurture your relationship with each client role.

Creating Value Through Systems Thinking: Optimize the value you bring to clients through big-picture techniques that accommodate critical system components through framing, analogies, patterns, perspectives, openness, and connectivity.

Learning From Challenges & Successes: Imagine yourself in the future with both positive and negative scenarios and ask "how did that happen?" to discover strategies to thwart competitors and build relationships.

Mastering Implementation: Bring action plans to life by integrating customer perspective, root cause analysis, metrics, execution specifics, and recognition on a single page as a living document that encourages follow-through.

Benefits

Strenthen customer relationships, both internal and external
Gain mindshare and involvement beyond product and price
Adapt selling to the customer's specific scenario
Resolve concerns and achieve sales goals
Build strong ties with customers for word-of-mouth marketing
Deepen professional capability without sacrificing productivity
Challenge learners via specific application tips to apply principles immediately
Expand volume with existing customers
Transition fence-sitting customers to advocates of your brand
Sustain pricing strategies
Differentiate sustainably through superior customer experience

Cost and Terms

One-day or partial-day in-house workshops are designed for 12-20 attendees, including participant materials and application exercises customized to your industry or company situation. Final charges are subject to final scoping of the workshops. Follow-up exercises or sessions are also available, with pricing based on the nature of guidance desired.

What Next?

If you have people who would benefit from attending one of our workshops, please telephone + 1-408-733-5818 or email us at info@customerimpact.com.

Designed and led by Lynn Hunsaker of ClearAction.

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