What You Will Learn:
Participants will learn to:
- Assess callers’ service expectations
- Develop question skills to elicit critical information
- Apply proven communication processes and methods
- Move calls forward to resolution
- Properly document techniques
- Execute follow-up activities
- Effectively communicate with customers through email and web chat
- Diffuse conflict and create a less-stressful, positive experience for the customer
- Maximize the productivity and effectiveness of the team
- Direct personal contributions toward team synergy and successes
Overview
Contact Center Professional Training and Certification is designed for call center, help desk, customer service and technical support professionals. Attendees will learn best practices, skills and techniques for effective, high-quality front-line customer care. The course presents opportunities to learn and practice skills that build customer relationships and create a positive business image.
After the training, participants will be able to recognize customers’ needs and adapt strategies to meet those needs. The course focuses on relationship building skills and problem resolution techniques that can be applied first and foremost to customer interactions, but also to everyday communication (and conflicts) within the team and with team leads and supervisors.
Attendees will:
- Explore the personal paradigms, attitudes and motivators that influence caller behavior
- Learn how to assess customers’ preferred communications styles
- Practice steps in the contact resolution process, including effective listening, response and conflict management skills
- Apply newly-learned skills that result in quality, efficiency, and professionalism throughout customer interactions
The post-course CCCP certification exam is highly recommended for all attendees. A formal, standardized certification exam ensures that information has been absorbed and that every member of your contact center team uses consistent terminology, best practices, and skills. Your contact center staff will “be on the same page” and will better understand criteria by which their performance is evaluated. Standardization also improves intra-team communications, agent-supervisor communications, and increases the productivity of coaching sessions.
Core 2-day Certification Course Chapters
- Chapter 1 – Understanding the Customer
- Chapter 2 – Listening Skills
- Chapter 3 – Questioning Skills
- Chapter 4 – Professional Communication Skills
- Chapter 5 – Call Handling Skills
- Chapter 6 – Adaptive Communication Skills
Expanded 3-day Course Chapters
An expanded 3-day version of this course can be delivered on-site at your location. On the additional day, participants will learn about difficult caller behaviors, online chat and effective writing skills, conflict management, and will participate in team-building exercises. This final module promotes team cohesiveness through intra-team understanding, appreciation, communication, and the expression of common purpose.
- Chapter 7 – Managing Caller Behaviors and Emotions
- Chapter 8 – Conflict Management Skills
- Chapter 9 – Email and Chat Writing Skills
- Chapter 10 – Team-Building Skills
Refresher Training for the Already-Certified
and 1-Day Continuing Education Courses
Do you have CCCP-certified professionals due for a 2-day annual refresher training? Veteran contact center professionals as well as the newly on-boarded will benefit from the same core CCCP skills training (days 1 & 2). Would other professionals benefit from a 1-day Continuing Education course delivered on-site at your location? Offer a Continuing Education opportunity to your center’s experienced front-line professionals by inviting them to attend day 3 of an extended CCCP. Day 3 topics are perfect for fulfilling annual training and career development requirements. For just $395 per person, anyone in the contact center can join a 1-day CCCP Elective training course (day 3 of an extended CCCP) up to a class maximum of 28 participants. Day 3 electives include:
- Elective A – How Customers Perceive Quality
- Elective B – Stress Management and Contentment in the Contact Center
- Elective C – Managing Personal Productivity with Metric Scorecards
- Elective D – How Your Timing Impacts the Customer Experience
- Elective E – Fundamentals of Incident Management (for help desk and IT support analysts)
- Elective F – Standard Operating Procedures Workshop
- Elective G – The Continuous Quality Improvement Process
Who Should Participate
The Contact Center Professional training course is ideal for:
- Front-line contact center and help desk professionals, and team leads
- Quality assurance professionals, coaches, and mentors that lead, evaluate quality, and develop front-line contact center and help desk service professionals.
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this introductory course.
Agenda
Day 1
Chapter 1 – Understanding the Customer
- The role of the contact center professional
- Customer focus
- The tactically-skilled contact center professional
- The contact center professional skill set
- Customer service
- Listening
- Questioning
- Professional communication techniques
- Contact handling
- Conflict resolution
- Call Control
- Understanding stakeholders and stakeholder value
- Understanding customer needs and expectations
- Why customers contact the center
Chapter 2 – Listening Skills
- Listening v.s. hearing
- Characteristics of personal listening styles
- Steps in processing verbal communication
- Challenges: distractions, interference, mental drift, and more
- Active listening skills
- Strategies to use to overcome active listening blocks and barriers
- Impatience
- Flagging Concentration
- Focus
- Open-mindedness
- Personal biases
- Noise
- Poor transmission
- Physical fatigue
- Slang, jargon and acronyms to avoid
- Strategies for enabling and restoring active listening
- Assessing a caller’s true expectations – how to listen for what a customer really wants
- How fact and opinion differ
- Listening for words that convey facts
- Listening for words that convey opinions
- Strategies for addressing customer opinions
- Listening for what the customer is not saying
- Verbal and non-verbal paralinguistic cues
- Cues that signal emotions and changes in attitudes
Chapter 3 – Questioning Skills
- The art of skillful questioning
- Asking the right question at the right time for the customer
- The four types of questions; how and when to use each
- Open-ended
- Closed-ended
- Probing
- Verification
- Structure and key words to use with each question type
- Strategies for applying questioning techniques – how, when, and why
- Techniques for handling awkward questions and reviving failed communications
- Unraveling the customer question that can’t be understood
- How to respond to a question for which you have no answers, but should
- Explaining a solution that the customer just can’t grasp
- Conveying a correct, but unwelcome, resolution
- Gathering information from an unresponsive customer
Day 2
Chapter 4 – Professional Communication Skills
- Using components of communication to your advantage
- Words
- Tone
- Body Language
- Effectively selecting and using tone and word alternatives
- How to use positive language and avoid negative language
- Using tone to engage the customer
- Techniques for improving tone
- How and when to use volume to:
- Convey meaning
- Control the conversation
- Maintain interest
- Impart authority
- Steering a conversation with inflection
- What conversational pace conveys to the customer
- Techniques for controlling rate of speech – yours and the caller’s
- Empathy and sincerity
- What empathetic phases convey to the customer
- Using proper verbiage to impart empathy
- Minimizing the emotional impact of a call
- How to say no without saying “no”
- Body language that will impact your performance
- Key words to avoid in conversations with customers
Chapter 5- Call Handling Skills
- The four phases of the contact resolution process
- Managing the first impression
- The five components of a greeting
- Asking the right questions to gather accurate, needed information
- Steps to follow in contact discovery
- Moving a call forward to resolution – the process of combining knowledge and resources
- Steps to follow in contact resolution
- Contact closure – communicating the resolution and the reason
- Steps to follow when closing a contact
- Properly documenting customer contacts
- Classification
- Assigning priority attributes
- Follow-up contacts
- Setting realistic timeframes
- Customer hold, transfer and escalation processes
- Steps to follow before putting a customer on hold
- Routing the unresolved contact
- The transfer process
- Transfer with hold
- Live transfer
- The escalation process
- Call handling strategies
- Managing customer expectations
- Setting customer expectations for
- Hold time
- Timeframes
- Delivery times
- Call backs
- Follow-up
- Priority levels
- Pricing
- Service level
Chapter 6 – Adaptive Communication Skills
- Communication style profiling
- Predictable communication styles
- What communication style profiling can tell you about the caller
- Preferred work environment
- Preferred speaking pace
- How one gains security
- Motivations
- Measures of progress
- Fears
- Irritations
- Major limitations
- Effectiveness enhancers
- Adapting your communication style to the caller’s
- Dominant style
- Influential style
- Steady style
- Conscientious style
- Predictable communication shortcomings and flashpoints
- How to assess a caller’s communication style in real time
- Assessing a caller’s conflict communication style
- How to alter your communication style, caller by caller, for optimal results
- Voice
- Opening
- Interaction Style
- Response to Concerns
- Reaction to Emotions
- Method for Communicating Justification, Evidence and Support
- Requests
- What not to say
Optional Day 3
Chapter 7 – Managing Caller Behaviors and Emotions
- How to handle specific caller behaviors using strategies and learned skills and techniques
- The confused caller
- The blame game caller
- The VIP customer
- The faux VIP
- The know-it-all caller
- The angry caller
- The talkative caller
- The hostage caller
- The emotional caller
- The by-passer
- Managing unruly customers
- Procedures to be followed when encountering an unruly customer
- Effective disengagement – procedures for handling customers who have crossed the line
- The disconnection process
- Transferring with warning
Chapter 8 – Conflict Management Skills
- Identifying causes of conflict in a contact center setting
- The value of conflict management skills
- Conflict management styles
- Assessing your own conflict management style
- How to choose an effective conflict management style to achieve the desired outcome
- Collaboration exercise
- Accommodation exercise
- How to handle a complaint
- The 12 steps of complaint handling
- Customer recovery – What to do when expectations have not been met
- Conflict resolution best practices
- Words and phrases that exacerbate conflict
- Winning phrases that diffuse conflict
Chapter 9 – Effective Email and Chat Writing Skills
- Essential traits of a responsive customer service e-mail
- Your use of e-mail
- Component parts of e-mail
- The heading
- to:, cc:, or bcc:? What recipient prefaces tell the recipients
- Composing an effective subject line
- Greeting alternatives
- Techniques for writing an effective e-mail message
- Proper closings and signatures
- Writing in an active voice v.s. passive voice
- Full sentences v.s. fragments and run-ons
- Strong verbs that add power to your writing
- Bullets and numbering, which to use and when
- Font, color, bold, italics, and underlining and what each means
- Polite, positive, personal tone
- Words that affect tone
- Personalizing your email
- Idiomatic expressions and how to avoid them
Chapter 10 – Team Building Skills
- Assess your team’s teaming IQ
- Performing a Team SWOT Analysis
- Identifying the team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- Assess your own teaming abilities in key team-building performance areas
- Team architecture and balance
- The role of a team
- Identifying your own role within the team
- Strengths and talents each team member brings to the team
- Developing effective intra-team communications
- Performing a communication style self-assessment
- Communication styles within the team
- Best practices for effective communication and interaction
- Strategies for effectively communicating with each team member based on their personal communication styles
- Team building exercises
- Five steps to becoming a better team
- Building an action plan for developing a more successful team effort