Workshops & Masterclasses

My workshops are aimed at the key people in your organization that are responsible for defining, developing and operationalizing your customer experience strategy. They are designed to provide inspiration, innovation and regeneration for your people and enable them to make a real and immediate difference in their daily lives and to enhance the company as a whole.

These can be half-day or full day session, but can be tailored to your specific situation and the availability of your people.

Customer Experience Principles That Count!

Discovering the Four Principles that drive customer experience strategy

  • Identify why the Four Principles are critical elements in Customer Experience strategy
  • Benchmark your company’s alignment to, and adoption of, these principles
  • Apply these principles to define or re-energize your Customer Experience strategy
  • Lay the foundations for a Customer Experience framework – What good looks like
  • Create some quick wins to get Customer Experience off to a running start

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Changing Channels - Tune into your customers before they turn you off

Developing the channel strategy that gives customers what they want and need

  • Clearly define your customers. Who are they, where are they and what do they want?
  • Explore and evaluate your current customer experience journey and channel strategy
  • Map your tactics and technology to your strategic ambition – Where are the gaps?
  • Identify short term opportunities for operational improvement
  • Introduce a truly collaborative, company-wide channel improvement process

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A Day in the Life of a Customer™

A Day in the Life of the Customeris designed to uncover the most pressing operational and technology issues that can stand in the way of progress. This approach can be a vital first step for those organizations looking at implementing cloud based model offices and innovation hubs as a way to conduct discovery exercises and fast track strategic, procedural and operational developments that are necessary for customer experience and digital transformation. While this isn’t a new or revolutionary idea, completing the process in a single day, with a high level findings report closely following, definitely changes the landscape. Here’s what it includes;

  • Senior executive meeting to review the current customer interaction status
  • Front line discovery session/focus group discussion
  • Agent side-by-side observations and call review
  • IT overview and current technology analysis
  • The view from team leaders, BI and insight team
  • Customer service – marketing alignment status and business development plans
  • Exploration of current HR & training programs
  • Initial findings and senior leadership feedback session
  • High level report including outline roadmap to move from current state to future state

The end result is a realistic assessment of your current customer contact environment and an associated technology roadmap with clear, logical steps for making your customer experience ambition an operational reality. Download PDF

Customer Experience Acceleration – A New Dawn

 

While there are no easy answers or quick fixes, customer experience improvement isn’t so daunting as to not be worthy of investment for all businesses, irrespective of size or market segment. Customer Experience Acceleration – A New Dawn™ is a short, sharp introductory program to uncover and document the most pressing customer experience (CX) issues. It’s conducted with senior executives, front line teams and support staff to get a rounded, frank and honest assessment of the current state of CX in a business. It will cover the following:

  • An analysis and assessment of the organizational experience from the customer’s perspective
  • Company immersion and senior management feedback to gain an honest and candid view of the current state
  • Experience evaluation: Identifying Obstacles to Success
  • Defining the culture: What do we need to stop, start, maintain?
  • Identifying the specific values that drive customer loyalty
  • Identifying the enablers and barriers to delivering great experience
  • Identification and documentation of the top priorities for action & generate some quick wins to get Customer Experience off to a running start

This approach is a vital first step in the customer experience journey and can provide the framework and a blueprint that will achieve your future state goals and desired customer outcomes. Download PDF

Can We Talk? – Conversation not Confrontation

 

 

Do your people make the right impression on your customers every time?

The key to success is the ability to find the right words delivered in the right way at the right time, which sounds simple enough. The gift of language, whether the written form or the spoken word, was bestowed on us long ago. When its power is used creatively by those in a customer service role to eloquently address many of the challenges that we face us as customers, it becomes a calming and positive influence. But this gift has been squandered, abused and rendered impotent in the name of conformity, regulation and the fear of litigation. This has led to the creation of bland, restrictive and impersonal statements, often read without feeling or recognition of the circumstances, in order to meet a company’s’ quality assurance metrics, to the detriment of both the customer and the employee. So rather than conversation we have confrontation!

For those organizations that haven’t yet got personal with their customers this workshop will help identify the key steps to building a more informed, personalized, and emotionally connected customer interaction program. Don’t forget that other people’s words are music to their ears! Attendees will take away practical idea and next day actions that can be implemented quickly and cost effectively to make a positive and measurable impact on your customer service operation and overall customer experience strategy.

Some Program Highlights:

  • Learn how and why, vivid, descriptive, empathetic language can guide your team to ask customers more of the right questions, at the right time, for the right customer outcomes
  • Help polish the content, structure and performance of the team to better guide emotional decisions when dealing with difficult and challenging customer service issues
  • Introduce, develop and practice real play scenarios that can bring the user to life with characteristics, opinions, emotions, feelings and a voice.
  • Apply these principles to help your people gain invaluable insights and skills they can draw on  to define or reenergize your Customer Experience strategy
  • Boost the confidence, performance and enjoyment levels of your team

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Measuring What Matters for Positive Customer Outcomes - The End is Insight

Measuring customer satisfaction is often as unreliable and surprising as election or referendum polls. The downside of believing what people say they will do and what they do can have many politicians and business people going in entirely the wrong way politically and strategically.

Using a single question or number, whether It relates to a customer’s willingness to recommend or how easy they found the transaction may be mildly interesting but is sadly lacking in the kind of insight that businesses need to deliver consistent, memorable and differentiated customer experiences – and to stay in business.

Really understanding your customers’ needs and wants, the differences between them, and how they truly feel about your company are critical, non-negotiable elements in measuring what is important to them and their decisions to continue to do business with you.

This workshop delivers a practical and flexible approach to truly understanding customer needs and designing the questions to ask to meet them, the metrics to use and how best to action them.

The high level agenda:

  • Differentiating between Needs and Wants and their relevance to your business
  • The role and importance of emotion in customer feedback
  • Review & appraisal of your current Voice of the Customer (VOC) metrics and methods
  • How to determine their efficacy in customer and employee experience terms
  • What different metrics can and/or can’t tell you
  • Design principles for a successful feedback and insight ecosystem

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Talk isn't Cheap - It Could be Costing your Company Millions!

Do your people make the right impression on your customers every time?

The key to success is the ability to find the right words delivered in the right way at the right time,
which sounds simple enough. Treating your customers fairly with empathy and courtesy and
recognizing and addressing their emotions, brings your organisation closer to them – and brings
you closer to the results you want.

Our Conversational Analysis Review (CAR) will lift the lid off the emotions that your colleagues are
creating and examine the words and phrases that they use in their interactions with customers.
The analysis is based on a range of conversational metrics that we convert into an Emotional
Score (E-Score) that will provide deep, actionable insight into what is working, what isn’t, and how
subtle, but meaningful changes in conversational skills can make all the difference in generating
positive customer outcomes.

The CAR is an excellent and logical starting point to enhance your customer experience program and
provides a base line for evaluating, assessing and developing colleague conversational skills.
It lays the foundation, and provides a blueprint, for a more in-depth and inclusive customer experience transformation program

The review consists of the following key elements:

• One on one colleague interviews and focus groups 
• Listening to live conversations via agent side-by-sides and previously recorded calls
• Detailed review and analysis of these calls to identify habits and speech patterns 
• Identification of the five most frequently occurring metrics or conversational roadblocks
   and their associated E-scores
• A detailed report assessing the impact from a customer and colleague perspective 

Download PDF

Start saving your customers today

Learn the 4 key principles for delighting your customers and transforming the fortunes of your organisation

Gerry brings his extensive industry experience and expert insight to the challenges of establishing a world class customer experience.

Charles McLachlan

Academy of Chief Executives

“Gerry has both presented, and been a co-chair, at a number of our Engage Customer conferences. He brings infectious energy and professional and personal experiences that makes customer experience come alive. Delegates have praised his enthusiasm, passion, subject knowledge and entertaining style. If you are seeking an engaging, eloquent and inspirational speaker on all things customer related, then Gerry should be your first call”

Steve Hurst

Editorial Director , Engage Business Media

“The Customer Lifeguard Workshop was a eye opening for me. As a mobile and web app developer this subject is so vital for both my own business as well as the businesses I work with. The highlight for me was the understanding the four principles of great customer experience, how it breaks down and even helping me evaluate my culture, commitment, communication and community aspect of my business. It showed me that I need to improve my communication level and got some clear action points I can implement right away in my business. Thank you!”

Daniel Vlad

Founder , DV Mobile

“The Customer Lifeguard Workshop was a eye opening for me. As a mobile and web app developer this subject is so vital for both my own business as well as the businesses I work with. The highlight for me was the understanding the four principles of great customer experience, how it breaks down and even helping me evaluate my culture, commitment, communication and community aspect of my business. It showed me that I need to improve my communication level and got some clear action points I can implement right away in my business. Thank you!”

Daniel Vlad

Founder , DV Mobile

“Providing Customers with a positive experience, even, perhaps, especially when things go wrong, as inevitabally they will and do, requires a certain mindset and suite of both corporate and personal capabilities. Having attended one of Gerry’s workshops, I recommend anyone who wants to know how to formulate and then implement an effective Customer Experience Strategy to sign up today”

John Busby

Managing Director, BKC

Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a seminar run by Gerry where he introduced his Four Principles of Customer Experience and combined them with a focus on simplicity and agility applied to the business problem rather than the IT solution. Gerry’s seminar helps contextualise the need to deliver flawless CX as a business initiative that can be implemented as an organisation wide cultural focus, and not just at the points of customer contact or the supporting customer contact technology platforms. We finished the seminar, taking away some commitments to “what can I do today”.

Nick Duggan

Sales Director, Cyara