What to Do with the customer's stress
This training is for employees who work with customers and clients and want to keep their emotional balance and professional composure even in tense situations.
What is the program about?
A one- or two-day group training, in person or online, built on the GROW model familiar from coaching; also available with Thod support.
What you take away: greater resilience against difficult customers and situations; the ability to steer and close customer conversations deliberately; tools you can apply right away, and your own proven solutions for recurring difficult situations.
Who is the program for?
For customer service and customer relations staff and their leaders. It is especially timely when people who work with customers often face difficult, stressful situations.
When is it worth starting?
- When you need to protect your own emotional well-being and organizational and personal values even with challenging customers
- When you need concrete communication tools you can apply right away: empathy, active listening, the GROW model.
How we work
The training answers with the coaching toolkit: how to handle the other person's anger without taking it on, and how to close a difficult customer conversation deliberately. We go through the typical difficult customer types one by one, with a methodical approach to each.
“Customer service is the face of the company.” “Every complaint is a gift.” Anyone who works with customers has heard these, and also knows that with an angry customer, these phrases on their own aren't worth much. The question is how to deliver the expected results, keep a balance between customer needs and your own emotional well-being, and represent the organization's values and your own even when the customer's behavior is far from them.
The toolkit includes empathy, active listening, recognizing communication roadblocks, and using the GROW model to steer and close the conversation. Throughout, we work with concrete situations, using examples from everyday practice.
Program topics
- the psychological foundations of customer communication
- influencing the customer's and your own attitude and mood
- communication tools: empathy, active listening, communication roadblocks
- applying the GROW model: questions, proposing a solution, closing the conversation
- handling typical difficult customer types: the aggressive, the talkative, the passive, the “boomerang” and the offended customer.
Delivery
We tailor the weighting of the topics to the client organization's situation. On request, we support the program with the Thod learning support system, which keeps participants applying what they have learned between training days.
It is also worth starting if:
- typical difficult customer types need to be handled more methodically.
