Training for Customer Service & Leadership Development
in Canada | USA | Asia | Europe
- 1 (613) 836-3559
- info@beldingtraining.com
Training for Customer Service & Leadership Development
in Canada | USA | Asia | Europe
On-site and live-virtual programs customized for your team
Every organization has service failures, and the occasional difficult customer is inevitable. What happens next is in your control. Customer expectations are higher than ever and patience is at an all-time low, so the way your team handles a frustrated, upset or unreasonable customer has never mattered more.
Belding Training has been helping teams win over difficult customers for more than 30 years. Our courses are led by a live trainer, on-site or in a virtual classroom, and customized specifically to your teams, your customers and the situations they face every day.
Your course will not be generic. Every organization has its own kind of difficult customer, from the guest whose holiday has gone wrong to the client whose system is down. We build your program around the real situations your team handles, so the skills apply from day one.
Most difficult customer behaviour comes from frustration, fear or a sense of unfairness. The goal is not to win the argument. It is to calm the situation, solve the problem and keep the customer’s trust.
Belding’s courses are built on Talk Judo, a model that applies five principles of Judo to the way we communicate:
For a quick place to start, read Have an angry customer? Do this first.
Organizational researchers Roger Mayer, James Davis and F. David Schoorman identified ability, benevolence and integrity as three factors in perceived trustworthiness in their model of organizational trust. Belding’s Trust-Based Customer Experience model applies these principles as Caring, Competence and Integrity.
A difficult interaction is a moment when trust is at risk. When your team shows they care, knows how to fix the problem and keeps its word, even an angry customer can leave with more confidence in you than before.
Service recovery is what your team does after a mistake, delay or failure has upset a customer. Done well, it does more than fix the problem. A study by The Belding Group found that 71.5% of WOW customer experiences began as a service failure.
The basic steps are simple: listen, acknowledge the problem, apologize, fix it and follow up. Doing them well under pressure takes practice, which is the focus of our Situational Service Recovery course.
Effective training gives people skills they can use in the moment, under pressure. Based on our difficult customer courses, these are six elements to look for:
Dealing with difficult customers training is for anyone who serves customers: frontline and contact centre staff, technical support teams, sales and account teams, and the managers and supervisors who handle escalations.
It is especially valuable when complaints or escalations are rising, employees are stressed or burned out by tough interactions, negative reviews are growing, or customers’ patience is being tested by change, delays or price increases.
Talk to us about the situations your team is facing.
All of our courses are customized specifically for your team, with skills and practices focused on your customers, your environment and your objectives. Your team will practice with real situations drawn from your business.
Here are three difficult customer and service recovery programs:
Frontline skills to prevent conflict, de-escalate and regain trust. Half day to full day.
Talk Judo and 20 targeted techniques for the toughest customer behaviours. Full day.
For managers and senior staff who resolve escalated issues and rebuild trust. Full day.
All of our difficult customer courses are delivered live by a Belding certified trainer, on-site or in a virtual classroom. On-site programs run from a half day to a full day. Virtual programs can be delivered in shorter segments, so your team can practice between sessions.
Your program will include a four- to eight-week reinforcement component to help your team keep using their new skills with real customers. It includes a blend of components, such as email reminders of key skills, related videos, self-assessments, micro-modules and other bite-sized learning.
Every participant gets secure access to a private learning portal with the course materials, including session recordings, assessments and exercises, so they can refresh their skills before their next tough conversation.
Difficult situations often end up with a supervisor or manager. Our Handling Customer Escalations course and service leadership training give your leaders the skills to resolve escalated issues and coach their teams through difficult interactions.
Why organizations choose Belding for difficult customer training
Decades of experience with difficult customers. Shaun Belding wrote the book on the subject, Dealing with the Customer from Hell, and we have been helping teams handle angry, upset and unreasonable customers for more than 30 years.
A proven model. Talk Judo gives your team a simple, memorable way to stay calm and steer any conversation toward a solution.
Evidence-based, built on trust. Every skill we teach traces back to research on how trust is built and lost, including our own study, The Science of WOW.
Customized, never off the shelf. Every program is built around your organization and the customers your team actually serves.
Proven across industries and borders. We have worked with organizations in 26 countries spanning hundreds of industries.
“The training for our team were so very specially geared to our daily, real life work that it would be impossible to not take valuable, usable information from it”
– Baldor Electric
