Available courses

Using Emotional Intelligence on the Job

Putting emotional intelligence to work is an emerging trend in the corporate world. Developing the best talents in executives, managers, and employees throughout the organization has become vital to workplace success. Intellectual knowledge is no longer enough; you must also have the interpersonal competence that comes with emotional intelligence.

In this course, you'll learn the value of emotions and how they can affect your workplace for better or for worse. You'll gain an understanding of how emotional forces can influence performance and decision making, learn how you can leverage emotions in a way that maximizes performance, and discover how you can shape your own and others' emotions in positive and mutually satisfying ways. The course will focus on using of empathy, particularly in confrontation scenarios, and on helping others to develop their own emotional self-awareness and empathy, leading to more positive exchanges on the job.


Improving Your Emotional Intelligence Skills Self-awareness and Self-management

Through this course you'll learn how to build your emotional intelligence through appropriate actions and techniques for managing your emotions. You'll focus on the competency areas of self-awareness and self-management. You'll learn how to identify and regulate your own emotions through self-awareness techniques, including understanding the value of emotional self-awareness and recognizing typical behavioral and physical expressions of key emotions. And you'll explore how to move from self-awareness to self-management and how self-management functions as a component of emotional intelligence.


What is Emotional Intelligence?

Do you pay attention to your emotions and the feelings of those around you? The answer to this question can help you discover how in tune you are with your emotions and help determine your emotional intelligence quotient, or your EQ. Your emotional intelligence quotient is your capacity to reason and analyze emotional information. Becoming aware of your emotions can help you become attuned to your own needs and the needs of others, and can help you make better decisions and develop better relationships.

This course explores the power of emotions and the concept of emotional intelligence. It also discusses emotional intelligence competencies in areas of self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and relationship management.


The Basics of Listening

Do you feel the need to better understand the basic meaning of a conversation, or a presentation given at the workplace? What about the need to identify what is being said to you in a more effective manner? Although relatively straightforward in theory, the process that transforms effective listening into successful communication requires great skill, awareness, and practice. This course will review the various types of listeners and the benefits of being able to listen effectively when communicating. The course also reviews some popular misconceptions about listening. Active listening techniques for improving your listening and maximizing your understanding are also covered.


Targeting Your Message

Author and communication expert Anthony Robbins once said, 'To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.' In other words, understanding who you're talking to is as important as understanding what you're trying to communicate. Additionally, it is important to understand the role the medium, context, and other variables have on the communication process so you can optimize factors that are under your control. To confirm that your message got through, the final step in the communication process is asking for and reviewing feedback from your audience. This course explores key considerations for planning and delivering targeted messages. It highlights the components involved in communication and describes what to look for when analyzing the needs and wants of your intended audience – even if it is an audience of one. This course also takes you through the selection of an appropriate medium and context for a given message, and suggests strategies for delivering a well-planned message and eliciting feedback after your message is delivered.

Listening Essentials

Effective listening takes more than just courage; it also takes constant learning and practice. To prepare for effective listening, you need to identify and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of effective listening. You also need to be an attentive, empathetic, and active listener. When you engage in the technique of active listening, you focus your attention completely on the speaker, listen carefully for meaning, then use feedback to verify that you've correctly understood the communication. This course explores the benefits and challenges of effective listening and demonstrates how active listening techniques enhance the effectiveness of your listening skills. It takes you through the various levels of listening and outlines behaviors and thought patterns that demonstrate active listening techniques. Finally, it highlights the important skill of providing listener feedback to demonstrate or clarify understanding of the speaker's communication.

Communicating with Confidence

Are you reluctant to voice your opinions to your colleagues for fear they'll be judged negatively? Do you find yourself avoiding awkward communication situations? Confident interpersonal communication skills are essential for healthy and successful relationships, whether personal or professional. Once you've learned how to apply them, these skills enhance your influence and help you achieve your goals. Communicators have an enormous advantage if their relationships are based on rapport-building trust and credibility. But trust and credibility are not the only essentials. You also need to use specific communication behaviors to project confidence in all your verbal and nonverbal interactions. The course shows you how the essential elements of trust, credibility, and specific confident communication behaviors bring about confident communication and enhance your influence. It highlights the advantages of communicating with confidence, explores the construction of trust and credibility, and clarifies how trust and credibility result in confident communications.

Communicating Assertively

Effective communication in the workplace can be a balancing act. If you're too passive, you may have trouble getting others to do what you want. If you're too aggressive, you may turn people off. Getting what you want in the workplace requires a balance of assertiveness without aggressiveness. This course will guide you as you move into a more straightforward and more effective communication style. You'll learn about the benefits of assertive behavior and how to distinguish it from passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive behavior. You'll also learn about the requirements for assertive communication, such as being honest and straightforward, being respectful of others' needs and feelings, and using assertive body language and tone. Finally, you'll learn about how to increase the power of your assertive communication when your first attempts don't get the results you intended.

Being Approachable

Walking into a meeting surrounded by unknown faces, going to conferences, attending work events, starting a new job, and even going to social gatherings can be daunting, especially if you don't know anybody who will be there. Perhaps you worry about being ignored or not connecting with anyone and dread that awkward feeling of standing alone, off to the side. Do you wonder why people seem to be drawn to certain individuals in the room? Those individuals probably faced the same feelings of uncertainty entering the room as you did, but the difference may be that they appear to be more approachable than you do. Approachability involves conveying your willingness to reach out and invite others in by initiating contact, making yourself available, and building rapport. This course is designed to give you an understanding of how to build skills to become more approachable. You'll learn about the benefits of being approachable, as well as some techniques you can use to enhance your ability to reach out and invite others in. You'll also learn about putting people at ease when you're communicating and building rapport using skills such as listening, harmonizing, and sharing to ensure that people see how approachable you are.

Avoiding Time Stealers

Time is a precious, non-renewable resource – how effectively you use it will determine success in both your career and personal life. The greatest squanders of this valuable commodity are time stealers – that multitude of annoyances, trivial tasks, and administrative duties that can easily consume your days. Moreover, you may find that some of your own behaviors affect how well you manage time. For example, you may be a procrastinator, or you may find it difficult to say no to requests to take on more work. Such behaviors can reduce your efficiency, as well as create unnecessary stress for you. This course focuses on strategies for dealing with common time stealers – procrastinating and taking on too much work – as well as how to handle interruptions. It shows you how effective time management can help you concentrate on the work that is truly productive while dealing both professionally and speedily with your time stealers.


Planning and Prioritizing Your Time

Managing time effectively entails analyzing your goals, breaking those goals into tasks, and then prioritizing those tasks. This isn't always easy or clear cut, given the number of tasks you may need to complete. But if you set clear and measurable goals and then develop an effective to-do list, you'll find prioritizing your many tasks is easier. And, in the end, you'll manage your time better. This course focuses on ways to prioritize your workload. It discusses how to prepare a useful to-do list and prioritize the items on it. The course also outlines how to sequence and queue tasks to help improve your time management. Finally, it describes how to estimate time frames so you can schedule your tasks effectively and meet your deadlines.


Analyzing Your Use of Time

Do you have too much time on your hands? With all of the pressures of modern life, so few people today do. In order to preserve your time, you have to know how to manage it. And the first step in learning how to manage time well is to understand how you make use of it now. This will help you determine where can you be more efficient. This course focuses on ways to analyze your current use of time. It covers how to use a time log to document and then assess your time use. It also describes how your energy levels and personality affect how you manage time, and outlines ways to better manage time in accordance with your personality type and energy cycle.


Problem Solving Digging Deeper

Several tools are used for analysis and evaluation at each of these steps. Examples of tools that help find the root causes of the problem are the cause-and-effect diagram and five-why analysis. Cost-benefit and force-field analysis help in choosing the best solution.

This course helps you recognize the value of honest, fact-based analysis and demonstrates how the application of a few tools greatly assists you when determining the root cause of a problem and the best solution. The course first discusses problem analysis, illustrates steps to follow when analyzing problems, and outlines the tools used for uncovering the root causes. It then describes how to use evaluation and analysis when choosing the best solution from the alternatives available, as well as some of the tools you can use to assist in your endeavors.


Problem Solving Determining and Building Your Strengths

Whatever you think of your current problem-solving skills, it is always possible to improve upon them, and even to develop new skills. To improve, you first need to assess your existing problem-solving style, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and develop an ongoing strategy for sharpening and building your skills. You also need to recognize the key barriers that lie in the way of effective problem solving – your biases – and develop techniques for reducing their impact on your ability to solve problems.

This course helps you assess and develop your problem-solving skills, and also aims to help you recognize and overcome several types of bias. The course first takes you through the process of assessing and interpreting your existing problem-solving styles. It then introduces approaches for identifying areas for improvement in your problem-solving skill set and recommends strategies for enhancing key skills. Finally, it explains how to recognize and overcome biases in a problem-solving situation.


Problem Solving The Fundamentals

'The problem,' says author and psychiatrist Theodore Rubin, 'is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.' A problem is a question or situation that presents doubt, perplexity, or difficulty. It's an issue that needs to be corrected or overcome in order to achieve a desired state. Problem solving involves goal-oriented thinking and action in situations for which no ready-made solutions exist.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, everybody solves problems relating to their personal or work life every day. However, you can greatly improve your problem-solving effectiveness by gaining a better understanding of the problem-solving process, essential skills, and required competencies, as well as an awareness of the mind traps and pitfalls that impair the process. This course takes you through the essentials of problem solving and explores some of its challenges.


Understanding a Manager's Role

Most new managers don't realize how much their new role differs from that of an individual contributor. Often, they have misconceptions about what managing entails, and they may be surprised to learn that the skills and methods required for success as an individual contributor and those needed for success as a manager are very different. This course describes some of the myths about management and their corresponding truths in order to clarify what managers really do. It also points to the typical demands and constraints of a manager's job. Finally, it describes strategies for dealing with common mistakes of first-time managers.


Meeting Expectations

One of the most exciting and challenging changes that comes with moving into a management role, is the need to take a more strategic view of the work you are doing. As a first-time manager, you have to develop a greater awareness of how your own work, and the work of those in your department, fits in with the organizational vision. You need to know what the organization expects of you as a manager. You also need to understand the different expectations that your direct reports, your peers, and your boss have of you, and how to balance these effectively. It's also vital to build a strong relationship with your manager so you get the support you need to meet expectations. This course covers how to meet organizational expectations as a first-time manager, as well as how to balance conflicting expectations of peers, direct reports, and management. It also describes how to establish productive relationships with your new boss.


Treating Your Direct Reports Fairly

Most of us are taught from a very young age to treat everyone fairly, but what does fairness mean in the business environment? Specifically, what role does fairness play when managing people? To be a fair manager, one must be committed to the principles of justice and responsibility, and maintain accountability in the exercise of authority and power.

This course focuses on what fairness means in the relationship between managers and their direct reports. It discusses the benefits of treating employees fairly. It also covers areas where showing fairness is most essential – for example, when dealing with different groups and individuals, when distributing information, and when applying standards. Finally, this course provides techniques that you can use in order to demonstrate fairness while managing your direct reports.


Managing a Diverse Team

The population as a whole is becoming ever more diverse. Naturally, these societal changes are mirrored in the workplace. The most forward-looking organizations recognize the importance of managing a diverse workforce effectively. In turn, those managers who have the skills to lead a diverse team successfully are highly valued. This course describes what diversity is, including its benefits. It also covers how to prepare to manage a diverse team by understanding key diversity issues and setting ground rules. Finally, it delineates techniques for managing a diverse team.


Directing Others

As a manager, your role is not only to supervise, but also to lead, develop, and direct your employees both individually and collectively to accomplish organizational goals. Understanding the essential responsibilities you have when directing others, and the practices you should employ in order to meet those responsibilities, will lead to you fulfilling your duties and realizing the potential of your entire team.

This course provides information on the key proficiencies you require to effectively direct others. Specifically, the steps for setting direction and establishing clear objectives and goals with your direct reports are explored. The importance of organizing, including organizing resources, is discussed. Finally, communicating for clarity and direction, including listening skills, barriers to effective communication, and tips for overcoming communication barriers are covered.


Delegating

As a manager you are most likely juggling multiple responsibilities at once. In order to accomplish everything you have on your plate, you must identify those tasks which can be handled by others familiar with your work so you can focus on the more time-consuming and demanding responsibilities on your list. Trusting your direct reports and delegating some tasks to them is key to performing effectively as a manager and supports employee development.

This course covers the best practices for planning delegation, including deciding what specific tasks to delegate, and identifying who you should delegate tasks to. Additionally, the course provides techniques for carrying through delegation, including providing your direct report with all the information they require to carry out the task. Finally, the course covers the importance of monitoring delegated tasks, including checking in and getting feedback on the tasks you delegate.


Caring about Your Direct Reports

To manage well, you need to develop many different skills, among which is the ability to show care and appreciation for your employees. It's important to remember that the people who work for you have hopes, goals, and aspirations as well as fears, anxieties, and doubts. To have good relationships with your direct reports, you need to recognize their humanity and care about them as people, not just as employees.

This course describes what it means to be a caring manager. Specifically, it outlines the behaviors that a caring manager exhibits, such as showing genuine interest and an engagement in the lives of employees. This course also describes ways you can show that you are a caring manager.


Motivating and Optimizing Performance

As teams mature, they're able to perform more independently. Accordingly, team leaders must shift their role to one of maintaining motivation and optimizing team member performance. This ensures that their teams continue to perform at peak levels. The early stages of team development are about establishing the purpose of the team and its key goals, but once the team is up and running, the leader has a prominent role to play in guiding the team to success. This course describes ways to optimize team performance and effectiveness through assessments and feedback. It outlines strategies for sustaining high performance, including using coaching to improve team performance and motivating through shared leadership.


Managing Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are emerging as the basic unit for conducting business of all types. Studies show that over 80% of workers today are involved in some way with team members who are not physically located in the same office. Virtual communication networks have made virtual teams possible, while globalization has made them a necessity. Leading virtual teams presents new challenges to leaders and managers. Virtual team leaders must find ways to successfully manage people who are separated by distance, time zones, and cultural differences. This course offers leaders a framework for successfully leading virtual teams. It outlines the key competencies that members of virtual teams should possess and offers guidelines for specific virtual team activities, such as teleconferencing and decision making. It also highlights a variety of tools and technologies that are commonly used for collaboration on virtual teams and presents guidelines for knowing how to choose the right technologies for specific situations.


Launching a Successful Team

Among the most important things to know: good team development begins on day one. Forming an effective and cohesive team is fundamental to the success of the team later on, and pulling the right team together from the start has benefits far beyond just completing tasks on time. In this course, you'll learn techniques for setting up successful teams that can be applied to a variety of team environments. This course outlines the benefits of business teams and the importance of taking proactive measures to ensure a smooth transition during the initial phase of team formation. It reviews the five stages of team development and offers strategies for dealing with issues that may arise during the first stage, Forming. You'll learn strategies for selecting high-performing team members most suited for your project or team, as well as recommendations for performing proper introductions, clarifying team purpose and context, and making sure team members understand their responsibilities.


Establishing Goals, Roles, and Guidelines

The way in which a team is built is an important factor in determining team success. Leading a team quickly and smoothly into high performance mode requires the groundwork of setting team goals, identifying project tasks and assigning the right people to them, and defining the standards of team behavior to ensure team members work together so that team objectives are met. This course covers techniques for laying the foundation for a successful team. These techniques include setting team goals, assigning roles to individual team members, and defining specific guidelines that outline how team members should behave to minimize conflict and optimize team performance.


Developing the Team and its Culture

Henry Ford once said that coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success. Mr. Ford knew the importance of teamwork. Ask anyone who has worked in a project or team environment, and he will tell you that team dynamics make a huge difference in terms of getting work done and in the whole working environment. A positive, constructive atmosphere can keep team members motivated and productive, while a negative atmosphere can have the opposite effect. Developing effective project teams is one of the primary responsibilities of a team leader. This course outlines the role of the team leader on a high-performance team and highlights the importance of taking steps to develop the team culture early on during team formation. It offers methods used to encourage team participation and provides some key strategies used to build a cohesive team culture by encouraging social interactions, establishing team member competencies, and promoting interdependence.


Dealing with Conflict

In the early stages of team development, leaders must set up structures and processes that support the development of these team characteristics. Effective leadership is particularly required during the Storming stage of team development when conflict tends to be at its highest. The survival of the team depends on a team leader who can quickly recognize conflict, diagnose its cause, and use strategies to resolve the issue. In doing so, the leader restores trust and positive working relationships among team members. This course offers you an understanding about what causes conflicts on a team and the important role of healthy communication in handling conflicts. It presents many best practice approaches to resolving conflicts and illustrates the tenets of principled negotiation. By learning the principles and strategies presented in this course, you will have the skills to keep your high-performance teams away from destructive patterns of conflict and on track to achieving their goals.


Motivating Employees

Imagine what your organization would be like if you and your colleagues were not motivated. Motivation is what drives people to accomplish things, whether it be small tasks or large undertakings. Without motivation, things simply would not get done. The ability to create an environment that encourages motivation takes both practice and skill as it's not a quality inherent in most people. As a leader, your capacity for motivating plays a key element in the success of your organization. This course provides you with an understanding of why motivating strategies are important as a leader. It also provides you with practical techniques for encouraging motivation among employees in your organization.


Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Poised, outgoing, cheerful, having empathy for others, being able to express feelings directly but appropriately, and having the capacity for developing relationships. All of these abilities distinguish individuals with high emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a more reliable predictor of success than intellect! Leaders with a strong mixture of emotional awareness, self-management, and social skills navigate relationships more effectively and are more likely to be successful in their personal and professional lives. This course provides you with an understanding of why emotional intelligence abilities are important as a leader. It also provides you with practical, positive techniques for promoting and improving emotional intelligence as a leader within your business environment.


Leading Innovation

Creativity and innovation are critical components of just about every organization. But innovation doesn't pertain only to new inventions, products, or reworked designs. It also involves incremental improvements to the way things are done. Knowing how to build and support an innovative culture is an important skill for any leader to master. The impetus for innovation can come from the top of the organization, and it can come from the people engaged in day-to-day production. Building an innovative culture is a responsibility for leaders and employees across organizational hierarchies. This course provides you with an understanding of what an innovative culture is and what qualities a leader needs to best foster innovation. It also provides you with practical techniques for cultivating and leading innovation.


Leading Business Execution

How many times have you and your team decided on new plans to make day-to-day processes more efficient, only to watch months slip by with those plans unexecuted? Why don't certain tasks get executed? Why do things stay the same, even when the change is critical to your team? This course provides you with techniques and strategies for executing business strategy, and more importantly, ideas on how to cultivate a culture that supports the active business execution needed to keep pace with today's fast-changing world. Specifically, the course will explore techniques for fostering a culture of business execution, one that leverages planning, people, and practice in an integrated approach to business execution.


Creating Your Own Leadership Development Plan

Creating your own leadership development plan is a significant part of any successful and valuable leadership-development strategy. Leadership development plans help to ensure that you remain focused on what is required to continually grow and develop as a leader. This includes assessing your own style, values, and requirements, as well as identifying development goals, objectives, and actions. This course explores ways to assess yourself as a leader, establish a vision for the future, and identify obstacles to that vision. It also teaches practical approaches for setting development goals, objectives, and actions designed to move you toward your vision. Lastly, it provides useful criteria for evaluating a personal leadership development plan.


Using Different Coaching Styles

Every coachee has different needs, and an effective coach can identify those needs and tailor a coaching style to maximize results. Coaches typically use two general coaching styles – directive and nondirective – depending on their coachee's skill and motivation, as well as how far along they are in the coaching relationship. This course highlights the importance of using an appropriate coaching style with your coachee. Specifically, you will learn how to use different techniques for directive and nondirective coaching.


Getting Ready to Coach

Coaching offers organizations a win-win method for developing their employees. It not only helps individuals reach their potential but also helps the organization improve its productivity and competitiveness. In a rapidly changing business world, coaching can also help employees adjust and adapt their skill sets. Coaching is about encouraging, confronting, challenging, questioning, as well as consistently respecting and supporting coachees in developing and achieving their goals. This course introduces the skills you need to be an effective coach, including listening and observing, providing feedback, questioning, and setting goals. It also covers how to identify which coaching role is most appropriate for a given individual or situation. The course also details the importance of selling the idea of coaching to those you feel need it.


Building the Coaching Relationship

Establishing a positive and respectful coaching relationship is integral to the success of your coaching efforts. It lays the groundwork for accomplishing the goals you and your coachee set. This course highlights the importance of a strong coaching relationship. It describes how to establish rapport with your coachee by showing interest, finding common ground, and matching your coachee's demeanor and language. In addition, the course covers ways to develop a positive coaching relationship, including letting coachees act autonomously and take responsibility, and helping them to learn and develop.


Decision Making Tools and Techniques

This course introduces a variety of tools and techniques to use at the three most important steps of the decision-making process: generating, evaluating, and choosing between alternative courses of action. Nominal group technique (NGT) is used to brainstorm and prioritize options as a team. Return on Investment (ROI) measures distill the costs and benefits of each alternative into a monetary value, thus enabling you to easily compare your options on financial terms. Three other decision-making tools – the devil's advocate technique, Plus/Minus/Interesting (PMI) analysis, and the ease-and-effect matrix – provide alternate methodologies for challenging and evaluating alternatives before making a decision. Equipping yourself with these tools will ensure you have an edge when you're facing an important decision.


Making Tough Decisions

Making decisions in your personal and professional life is not always easy, especially when you're dealing with an uncertain or unknown future. And there are many situations that can make decision making particularly challenging, such as when you have to weigh very similar or very disparate alternatives then make compromises and trade-offs between them. Another situation is when you have to determine whether to trust logic, intuition, or some combination of the two.

This course reviews a number of these decision-making challenges and introduces strategies for dealing effectively with uncertainty, making informed trade-offs using a systematic process, and placing appropriate trust in your intuition when making difficult decisions.


Decision Making The Fundamentals

It's been estimated that most human beings make thousands of decisions in the course of an average day, many of which are unconscious decisions. It is important for your personal and professional success that you become an effective decision maker. This involves following an established decision-making process and adapting your decision-making style to suit different situations.

This course introduces you to the fundamentals of decision making and illustrates techniques to help you become an effective decision maker. The course first walks you through the steps of a widely accepted decision-making process. Then it leads to a description of the factors influencing your decision-making style and shows how to adapt that style to suit a given situation. So you'll have everything you need to start on the road to becoming an effective decision maker.


Retaining Talent

Retaining talented employees is a constant challenge for any organization. The costs of turnover can be high. That's why talent retention is a strategic issue requiring focus, time, and resources. This course highlights the importance and benefits of putting effort into retaining talented individuals. It also covers ways to determine the causes of talent departure and effectively manage talent retention by using strategies that foster job satisfaction.


Developing and Engaging Talent

Organizations depend on talented employees to help them achieve their goals. But without a talent management strategy focused on keeping these employees engaged, they may be sending out resumes rather than working to achieve those goals. Employee engagement and commitment are key success factors for any organization. This course describes how to begin building employee commitment with an effective onboarding process that creates a positive first impression. It also covers how to create individual development plans that prepare employees for higher levels of responsibility and keep them challenged. In addition, the course outlines ways to engage employees so they continue to deliver superior performance.


Talent Management: Basics

Would you be able to define talent management if someone asked you what it was? And would you be able to explain why it should be a top priority for organizations? Talent management focuses on recruiting, hiring, developing, and retaining the right talent to drive an organization's performance. This course helps clarify talent management's key role in helping an organization perform at its peak. It introduces and defines talent management, describing key concepts related to it. It also points to why effectively managing talent is so important. In addition, this course identifies the key activities associated with talent management and describes the roles played by managers in implementing a talent management strategy.


Internal Customer Service

Do you know who your customers are? In a customer-focused company, everyone knows they are responsible for excellent external customer service, but who meets the needs of internal customers? Whether you realize it or not, when you do things to help other people within your company do their jobs better, you are providing internal customer service. Internal customer service occurs every time you or a colleague requires information or a service from someone else within the company, and the quality of that service often has a huge impact on the overall quality of service delivered to external customers.

This course explores who internal customers are, the expectations placed on serving internal customers, and how to treat your coworkers as you would your external customers.


Customer Service over the Phone

Can you hear a smile over the phone? When you're providing customer service over the phone – without the benefits of face-to-face interaction with your customer – it can be challenging to establish the right relationship for excellent service. Just like for face-to-face customer service, there are many techniques for service over the phone that can help you to consistently deliver the best customer service.

This course covers the basic rules for answering a customer call including greeting the customer and offering your assistance. It includes information on how to make a good impression by listening and using questions to probe for more information, using your tone, and being able to empathize and be sincere with the customer. This course also describes ways of reflecting or adapting to your customer's style. In the end, customer service should focus on how to better serve and benefit the customer.


Customer Service in the Field

How do you make a good impression when providing customer service in the field? When you meet customers on their turf, your initial meeting forms the basis for their overall impression of you, your abilities, and your company. You can enhance the impressions you make in the field by using a few tried-and-true techniques, including being prepared, practicing customer recognition, and employing active listening so the customer feels reassured by your presence. To kick off your face-to-face service meeting, you should try to start on a positive note, clearly set the expectations for resolution time and scope, and help customers fully understand your products and services, as well as your intentions. This skill-building course takes your customer service proficiency up a notch toward excellent customer assistance.


Fundamentals Building Rapport in Customer Relationships

Good customer service and strong customer relationships begin with building rapport. Building rapport requires knowing your customer, understanding their situation, and providing an empathetic ear for them to voice their concerns. Building rapport can lead to great customer relationships between individuals as well as the company they represent.

This course covers how to build rapport with customers by being customer-focused. This includes being able to connect with your customers, being positive, paying close attention to the customers' needs, and understanding their feelings by empathizing with them.


Confrontation and Conflict

How do you handle angry and confrontational customers? One of the most challenging, and potentially uncomfortable responsibilities of a customer service person is dealing with angry customers. By following a few simple techniques such as letting the customer vent, and expressing empathy towards the customer's situation, you can usually defuse tense situations without incident.

This course explores typical trouble spots in dealing with angry customers, including reasons for customer dissatisfaction and things customer service people should refrain from saying or doing to avoid adding to the customer's frustration.