World-class customer communications must be delivered with a heart. World-class organisations are those who know what it takes to connect with their customers, build customer loyalty, and maximise customer delight with every communication. Increasingly, customers will communicate their satisfaction and dissatisfaction through email, feedback forms, letters and social media channels such as blogs, forums and Facebook, and expect a prompt reply that addresses their needs and expectations. Writing replies to customers is therefore an art that requires careful thinking, thoughtful analysis and astute writing skills. This course is designed to help executives and managers shortcut their writing and thinking process with strategies that enable them to communicate and connect with tact, empathy and clarity on offline as well as online platforms.

Course Benefits

Learning Outcome:

• Understand the importance of listening and responding well to customers
• Learn to better engage customers by adapting the style of writing that reflects understanding of customers’ expectations and needs  
• Know the importance of showing empathy in each correspondence that focuses on customers
• Know how to write clearly with tact to get the difficult message across
• Enhance the corporate image of your organization with professionally structured writing

Target Audience

This course is designed for executives and managers who need to communicate with customers through email messages, letters and the social media, and who want to connect with their customers and build customer loyalty through the way they write. Managers who need to vet and coach others in the art of writing to customers will also benefit from the strategies and techniques shared in this course.
 

Course Outline

Corporate Image & Your Writing: It's close relationship

• Common mistakes in responding to customer’s feedback
• Presenting a positive image in your writing

• Write correctly - check your grammar
• Write concisely - less is more
• Write simply - natural sounding is key & avoiding big words
• Write courteously - positive service language
• Short exercises

• The two purposes of responding to compliments
• Connecting with customer at a more personal level
• Skill practice - Let’s reply

• Customer complaint behavior - understand customer expectations and needs in their complaints
• Elements of a good service recovery
• Writing that reflects empathy and tact
• Empathy Index in writing
• Avoiding triggering words and phrases
• Writing refusals politely
• Skill practice - Let’s reply

• Understand the customer behaviour on social media
• Responding to positive review/feedback
• Responding to negative review/feedback
• How to remove a negative feedback
• Skill practice - Let’s reply

Available Course Sessions

Please click here to stay updated on upcoming sessions.

Trainer Profile

Michelle Lim

Michelle Lim brings with her more than ten years of experience in training, people management and customer service with multinationals, SMEs as well as government organisations. Companies which have benefited from her insight and experience include Standard Chartered Bank, Singapore Press Holdings, Changi Airport Group, Singapore College of Insurance, American International Group, Institute of Banking & Finance, Inland Revenue
Authority of Singapore, Ministry of Defence, Public Service Division (Prime Minister's Office) and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Michelle was formerly from Citi (Global Consumer Banking), where she managed high customer-impact projects in a complex cross-functional and multi-cultural environment. Her experience launching and managing major services for the bank provides her with the insight and depth in managing the end-to-end customer experience from the employee as well as organisational point of view. Her customer service background extends from B2C
to B2B and G2C markets. In her B2B experience, she handled key client accounts such as SingTel, DBS, Sony and Zone Telecom. In the government sector, she was with the Ministry of Manpower, where she was one of the pioneer managers of strategic manpower planning and was involved in setting up the relationship platforms and processes of the department in relation to other statutory boards and ministries.

In her workshops, Michelle also helps participants to transform the way they speak, write and communicate with a practical inside-out approach. In her many years of communications experience in both private and public sectors, she has presented to and written reports for Ministers, CEOs, Directors and others; groups large and small; and different types of audience as well as in different types of business situations. Michelle is also trained as an image consultant by London Image Institute and Imageworks Asia, accredited by AICI (Association of Image Consultants International) based in United States.

Michelle strives to create learning that inspire, engage and transform individuals and organisations. Her workshops focus not just on the theories of training but more importantly, incorporates a practical yet powerful approach to enable participants to build confidence, apply transforming techniques and improve their workplace performance and capabilities.