Occupational profile
The role of a customer service practitioner is to deliver high quality products and services to the customers of their organisation. Your core responsibility will be to provide a high quality service to customers which will be delivered from the workplace, digitally, or through going out into the customer’s own locality. These may be one-off or routine contacts and include dealing with orders, payments, offering advice, guidance and support, meet-and-greet, sales, fixing problems, after care, service recovery or gaining insight through measuring customer satisfaction. You may be the first point of contact and work in any sector or organisation type.
Your actions will influence the customer experience and their satisfaction with your organisation. You will demonstrate excellent customer service skills and behaviours as well as product and/or service knowledge when delivering to your customers. You provide service in line with the organisation’s customer service standards and strategy and within appropriate regulatory requirements. Your customer interactions may cover a wide range of situations and can include; face-to-face, telephone, post, email, text and social media.
Who is it aimed at?
Customer Assistant
Customer Representative
Customer Agent
Plus other job roles in which Customer Service Skills complement Technical Skills
What you will learn?
Knowledge
Knowing your customers
Understand who customers are
Understand the difference between internal and external customers
Understand the different needs and priorities of your customers and the best way to manage their expectations, recognising and knowing how to adapt style to be highly effective
Know your responsibility in relation to this and how to apply it when delivering service
Understanding the organisation
Know the purpose of the business and what 'brand promise' means
Know your organisation's core values and how they link to service culture
Know the internal policies and procedures, including any complaints processes and digital media policies that are relevant to you and your organisation
Meeting regulations and legislation
Know the appropriate legislation and regulatory requirements that affect your business
Systems and resources
Know how to use systems, equipment and technology to meet the needs of your customers
Understand types of measurement and evaluation tools available to monitor customer service levels
Your role and responsibility
Understand your role and responsibility within your organisation and the impact of your actions on others
Know the targets and goals you need to deliver against
Customer experience
Understand how establishing the facts enables you to create a customer focusd experience and appropriate response
Understand how to build trust with a customer and why this is important
Product and service knowledge
Understand the products or services that are available from your organisation and keep up to date
Skills
Interpersonal skills
Be able to use a range of questioning skills, including listening and responding in a way that builds rapport, detemines customer needs and expectations and achieves positive engagement and delivery
Communication
Use appropriate verbal and non-verbal communication skills
Use an appropriate tone of voice in all communications, including written and digital that reflects the organisation's brand
Influencing skills
Provide clear explanations and offer options in order to help customers make choices that are mutually beneficial to both the customer and your organisation
Personal organisation
Use appropriate sign-posting or resolution to meet your customers' needs and manage expectations
Dealing with customer conflict and challenge
Demonstrate patience and calmness
Show you understand the customers' point of view
Behaviours
Developing self
Take ownership for keeping your service knowledge and skills up to date
Consider personal goals and propose development that would achieve them
Being open to feedback
Act on and seek feedback from others to develop or maintain personal service skills and knowledge
Team working
Share personal learning and case studies with others, presenting recommendations, and improvement to support good practice
Equality - treating all customers as individuals
Treat customers as individuals to provide a personalised customer service experience
Presentation - dress code, professional language
Uphold the organisations' core values and service culture through your actions
Demonstrate professional pride in the job through appropriate dress and positive and confident language
"Right first time"
Use communication behaviours that establish clearly what each customer requires and manage their expectations
Take ownership from the first contact and then take responsibility for fulfilling your promise
Frequently and consistently communicate and work with others in the interest of helping customers efficiently
Duration
Typically this apprenticeship will take 12 months
Qualifications
Apprentices without level 2 English and Maths will need to achieve this level prior to taking the end-point assessment.
Level
Level 2