1. Personal Service/ Customer
Empathy Programme
Development Consultancy:
- Empathy Introductory
Seminars
- Empathy Development Workshops
- Experiential Empathy
Training
2. Cultural
Change for Customer Empathy / Personal
Service:
-
Strategic Consultancy and coaching up to Board
level
- Change Programmes support
- Supporting true Values development
- Vision development
3. Presenting your success:
- Executive Presentation development
- Executive Presentation
coaching
- Awards submissions
- Seminar development and management
- Presenting With Passion
courses
So where does one go to get help with Customer Empathy
/ Personal Emotional Connection/ Personal Service? It's not so obvious: there
are still very few suppliers even edging into this new
arena.
My 20 years of unique,
varied and valuable experience of Customer Empathy
auditing, and consulting for the changes that are required to improve personal service in
a commercial environment, as well as my very low overheads, means that I can
offer possibly the best qualified/ best value around!
So, if you too have a passion for making Customer Service far more
personal, let's have a chat! It would be my pleasure to discuss with you Customer Service/ Empathy
in general, as well as around applying it to your own situation. And if you wish to take it further
it into a Customer Empathy Audit or some consultancy, I'd, of course, be delighted to
assist!
Some examples of consultancy assignments:
Simplyhealth (previously HSA)
Motivated and inspired by a series of Customer Empathy
Audits over several years showing consistently better results, Simplyhealth recently took the bold step of
targeting their entire Customer Services division with a single, very challenging Empathy Rating goal right
up in the 'Feel Good' zone - one that would put them ahead of the entire world of large UK
businesses!
Assisted by my own developmental Customer Empathy
workshops and trainings, as well as coaching them to be able to measure their own levels of Customer
Empathy internally, they rapidly focused on and were inspire to reach their goal - renaming it to
Excellent Personal Service (EPS), instead of Customer Empathy.
In almost all areas of their contact centres, the
whole Customer Experience has already been wonderfully transformed, almost beyond recognition, as advisors
are now consistently opening up to creating a personal connection that feels emotionally Good to Very Good
with each of their callers.
Simplyhealth's recent winning of the prestigious
Institute of Customer Service award for Customer Commitment at the 2012 UK Customer Satisfaction
Awards reflects their success.
Friends Provident
- Service Excellence Project and F.A.C.E.
My involvement in Friends Provident was
initially as a Strategic Business Consultant sitting on the executive steering committee
of a major
strategic 'Service Excellence Project' (SEP) commissioned by the Board
of Friends Provident. Acting as the resident Customer
Empathy expert consultant, my role was to constantly pull the human
and personal side back into the discussion, and this was very
much appreciated (they were amazed at how often and easily they drifted back to traditional
ways!)
One area of input was the encouragement to move away from their
previous reliance on targeting specific, easy-to-measure 'behaviours' (you must DO this and that) to
the far more empowering encouragement of 'attitudes'. For example, if the objective is to come across as
'welcoming' at the beginning of a call, instead of insisting that people must 'smile' and
give them a 'welcome' script to repeat verbatim, it actually works better to simply ask them
to have what you wanted in the first place: to feel, to be ... welcoming!
Alongside with an Empathy
Audit at the time, it all had a profound effect as we rolled
out an introduction to staff within Friends Provident for their
feedback and ideas, through a programme of mass 'engagement' and
buy-in of the entire organisation.
One outcome was the realisation that creating good personal connection with a customer was similar to being like a good
friend, and as that was already built into the brand
(Friends Provident, or just Friends as it's often known
as), staff voted to rename the SEP to the
FACE program: Friends
Achieving Customer Excellence.
This culminated in my facilitation of a major project to define precisely
what 'being a Friend' in a business context actually meant
to the individuals actually relating customers, and how that could be specifically encouraged and monitored
without ambiguity. Once implemented, the staff absolutely loved the freedom it gave them to be themselves,
and to make a connection with each of their customers in their own
way.
The outcome of that part of the programme is detailed in
the free report page (a
must-read!)
Here's what Keith
Mansfield, Head of Individual Customer Services, had to
say:
|
" Right from day one, John provided us with valuable
insights into how we could not only improve the service but also how we could go to a fundamentally
higher level of service than we had ever contemplated.
" I am pleased to say that Friends Provident has just
won a National Customer Services award. It is absolutely fair to say that without John's
encouragement and challenging, we would probably not be in that position today.
" Since his involvement with the design of the
programme to recover our service, John has worked extensively with my team to embed the changes
needed. A key skill John brings is, of course, his accompanying knowledge of empathy. He has
provided us with invaluable expertise on defining our Vision and Team Purpose in a way that
really captures what the business wants to achieve (service excellence and cost reductions),
yet in a way that really motivates all of our people at all levels. On top of that, John has
helped us understand how to define and consistently measure our service interaction with
customers.
" John is a living example of what he preaches and
has consistently delivered beyond our expectations in both the content and the manner of his
support. He has been worth every single penny! "
|
|
|
|
|
Keith Mansfield, Head of Individual Customer Services, Friends
Provident
|
Royal Sun Alliance Europe
Briefly: I was invited to sit on the management Board for Royal Sun
Alliance Europe as their Customer Service Consultant where I helped them shape their strategy and its
communication into the local markets across Europe, including conducting powerful Empathy
Audits in different countries. Despite language and cultural differences, it soon became clear
that everyone loves being treated in a genuine, personal way!
