Bridge the Expectations Gap

Overview/Description
 You have to be prepared to walk a mile in their shoes to understand more fully what customers experience when they deal with your company. There's nothing more effective in emphasizing the gap between what you believe their experiences to be and their realities than thinking and acting like a customer. This course takes you through several processes for doing exactly that, and you'll be shown how to find out if dealing with your company is a delight or a disappointment. The first lesson describes the common causes of the gaps between what customers want, and what they receive from your company. Perhaps policies that impact on customer service are set without input from either the customers themselves, or the frontline employees who are the best qualified to know what customers want. Maybe your company's advertising is making promises that your employees can't keep, no matter how hard they try. Directed towards "the usual suspects" in this way, you can make some basic checks in the areas that precipitate customer dissatisfaction most often. In the second lesson, you'll learn how to conduct a more in-depth service audit, examining each customer-company interaction in the cycle of service, and gaining awareness of what the result of each is likely to be. Are your systems designed for your convenience, or the customers? Do they make it easier or more difficult for customers to do business with you? By mapping the service process, as you will be taught, you'll be able to see more easily where the process can be streamlined for the customer and the necessary improvements can be made. Not all of these improvements can be made at once, so the final lesson teaches you how to prioritize changes, and how to select the most appropriate method for the task.

Target Audience
 Customer service managers, supervisors, team leaders, and anyone with responsibility for managing the delivery of quality customer service

Expected Duration
4.5 hours

Lesson Objectives:

The Need for Change

  • recognize the benefits of leading continuous improvement.
  • classify the "gaps" that lead to customer dissatisfaction.
  • analyze information gained from customer feedback to determine the general operational changes or improvements required to fill the "gaps" causing customer dissatisfaction.
  • use employees' comments and behaviors to identify the stages of resistance they indicate.
  • respond appropriately to employee reactions indicative of various stages of change.

    • Review the Service Delivery Process

  • recognize the benefits of using formal service process analysis tools.
  • identify the "moments of truth," given details of a customer transaction.
  • evaluate moments of truth, in given situations, as customer satisfaction enhancers or detractors.
  • sequence "moments of truth" for inclusion in a cycle of service.
  • recognize the components of a service process map.
  • for a given process, select and position items correctly on a service process map.

    • Improve the Process

  • recognize the benefits of aligning process improvements to customers' requirements.
  • label customer requirements according to the T.R.A.C.E. factor with the highest priority.
  • label examples of process improvement according to the method used.
  • use the most appropriate method to improve the process described in a given situation.

    • Course Number: CUST0173