Customer Experience

Customer F.I.R.S.T. Training

Since creating the Customer F.I.R.S.T. System in 2002, Brent has delivered this one-of-a-kind training program to more than 10,000 employees in various industries around the globe. Customer F.I.R.S.T. is the ultimate system of practical, proven tools and skills to manage customers and colleagues in any situation.

Key Behavioral Competencies Taught in Customer F.I.R.S.T.

Competency 1: Maintaining an Optimal Mindset.

Showing empathy, concern and a sense of urgency. Building trust. Creating and maintaining a positive, solution-focused attitude all day long.

Competency 2: Clarifying Needs.

Verifying urgency. Ensuring compete, valid and current information. Asking well-designed questions to reveal more info.

Competency 3: Managing Expectations

Checking capacity. Making highly reliable commitments. Educating customers to align expectations with capacity.

Competency 4: Developing Reliable Plans.

Creating a sense of urgency. Establishing options. Creating gates & dates. Developing Plan-B’s in case of problems.

Competency 5: Influencing Others.

Building & maintaining relationships. Connecting requests with priorities and concerns. Building immediate rapport & trust. Framing requests to align with priorities. Overcoming resistance.

Competency 6: Maximizing Productivity.

Establishing key outputs and priorities. Scheduling for maximum efficiency. Anticipating deliverables and being proactive. Handling scheduling conflicts. Controlling email and maximizing email effectiveness. Dealing with distractions and walk-ins.

This engaging, practical course is customized to include exercises and examples of your organization’s real customers and the challenging situations your front-line faces with them. It can be delivered in a 1- or 2-phase structure.

The Premium Service Workshop

Sometimes a service team needs extra help. The Premium Service Workshop is a completely customized week-long intervention to support a specific service team with unique service challenges or current negative customer feedback. The 5-day schedule allows service to continue for customers during the workshop.

Depending on customer feedback data and needs identified during the planning and customization phase, the schedule usually includes:

Joint development of a new set of premium service standards for the team. A participative mini-workshop that puts the team in the customer’s shoes and facilitates the development of a new set of non-negotiable standards for communication, responsiveness and proactiveness in customer service.
Roll out of behavioral competencies (reviewed by team before workshop). One week before the workshop, participants are given material to study based on the 6 behavioral competencies of the Customer F.I.R.S.T. course. During the workshop, the competencies are reviewed for understanding.

Individual assessment centers and specific coaching for improvement. Each participant is assessed on ability to use the critical skills from the 6 competencies in a series of role plays that reflect the real-world challenges of their current customers. Participants are given immediate, supportive feedback on their performance and then given time to reflect and create an individual development plan (IDP).
1-on-1 coaching sessions. Each participant has a 30-minute session with Brent to discuss their IDPs and to further debrief assessment results. The focus is on setting targets and finding the resources to learn and grow. These sessions are completely confidential.
Mapping of new standards and competencies onto existing processes and checklists. The final key event of the week-long intervention is the mapping of the non-negotiable service standards and the lessons learned collectively from the assessments onto the team’s existing playbook/checklist of service processes. This creates permanence and ensures everyone uses the new behaviors on the job.

The Customer Experience Workshop

(with Journey Mapping)

How can you get everyone in your organization – especially those who seem insulated from the customer – to finally see how their actions affect customers and then to care deeply about improving?

The Customer Experience (CX) Workshop is a highly participative 3-day workshop that creates dramatic change by bringing both customer awareness and commitment to every corner of your organization.

Employees from all corners of the organization (production, quality, engineering, legal, logistics, sales, service and finance) come together and begin with a clear articulation of the company’s Value Proposition – what does the company promise its customers? Using customer feedback, the group then learns how they’re currently performing against that Value Proposition.
The group then learns what the Customer goes through at each step of their journey with the company. Using a unique form of Journey Mapping combined with Contribution Mapping, everyone is able to clearly see their respective contribution

when things go wrong for the customer. They compare this to the Value Proposition and see the gap.

The learning discussions that take place during the workshop create a very strong appreciation for each department’s challenges and reveal opportunities to synergize more effectively for the sake of the CX. Barriers slowly come down.
Each participant then creates their own personal and their own departmental set of actions that will directly improve both the customer’s journey and their own experience. Each participant studies the commitments of the other departments and has the opportunity to ask questions and offer feedback. This process continues until everyone in the room is satisfied with each other’s action plans.
The final segment in this 3-day experience is the collaboration mini-workshop. Formerly rival functions come together like never before by creating their own set of collaboration agreements binding the entire team together as one to deliver a World-Class Customer Experience. Everyone agrees on 1) The value of collaboration and the impact on the CX and the company, 2) The precise behaviors that will constitute collaboration, 3) The precise meetings and pieces of work where collaboration will be key, and 4) A plan to sustain the new collaboration agreement.

Service Design

(Executive-level management consulting)

Service design is a strategic discipline that is spreading rapidly worldwide. At its core lies the belief that services can and should be designed with as much care as products, so your customers get the experience you want them to have every time.

Service design is the elusive bridge between strategy and customer experience. It is grounded in your company’s identity, capabilities, and chosen competitive path. It is activated when you rethink, reimagine, and re-create every stage and aspect of interaction between customers and your company, regardless of what is being sold and whether a transaction actually occurs. It succeeds when you delight the customers you have chosen to serve and advance your strategic goals at the same time.

Four key ideas in the service design philosophy:

Service design starts with what you, the seller, want; it is about delivering on your promise to customers in accordance with your strategy, not acceding to everything a customer asks.
Service design is proactive, not reactive; it involves choices, actions, and consequences.
Service design creates consistency, and consistency is no accident.
Each step is meat to reduce hassle, avoid pain points, and please customers.

Brent works with senior management teams to create new, improved customer journeys that both improve the customer experience and reduce costs.