It’s so easy to identify great and bad customer service when we think of our own experiences, so why do we sometimes find it difficult to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes, when we are the ones they’re complaining to? Why do we get defensive or argumentative and afterwards say to our colleagues, ‘That customer was a real moaner, she just went on and on, I could not wait to get off the phone.’
Key Topics Covered:
- What does a customer want when they complain?
- Examples of when a complaint is handled badly.
- Examples of when a complaint is handled well.
- What is important about your communication style when a customer is complaining to you?
- How should you handle an angry customer?
- How do you resolve a complaint?
- Do you know your empowerment level?
- Is it your responsibility to prevent a problem from happening again?
- Top tips for customer service problem resolution.
Fi Morrison-Arnthal
Fi is a qualified training and development specialist who has spent her career leading, training, coaching, developing, and recruiting within travel and hospitality.
Her career started as a junior manager with a boutique hotel chain, learning all areas of hotel operations including sales, service and management, before moving into leisure travel with Lunn Poly (TUI), first as a travel consultant, and latterly as Progression Regional Sales Manager. Winning several awards, Fi’s achievements included ‘Shop of the Year’, ‘Highest Revenue Increase of the Year’ and ‘100% Mystery Shopper Awards’.
As Co-op Travelcare’s Training and Development Manager, Fi led a team of national training officers, providing training and development to over 400 branches, call centres and business travel operations. She was responsible for winning national training awards from Travel Weekly and TTG for the design and results generated from innovative courses.
Moving to Cape Town in 2005, Fi became Go2Africa.com’s Head of Sales, Operations and Organisation Development. Growing the sales team from 16 to over 50 high-performing Africa Safari Specialists, she was given the autonomy to strategically lead and manage multiple departments and functions, achieving high year-on-year profitability consistently throughout her tenure.
Returning to retail leisure travel, Fi joined Pentravel, South Africa’s largest independent retail travel chain, as its National Sales and Organisation Development Manager. Implementing people, training, sales and organisation development initiatives, policies, and procedures, she led the business to exceed all previous year profits and annual budgets.
Forming Big Ambitions, a business consultant company in 2013, Fi helped prominent international travel businesses recruit and train travel people. Recognised as ‘the’ travel sales trainer in South Africa, she was the Mystery Shopper for South Africa’s Travel News Weekly and ETNW and chosen by South Africa’s number one Travel Industry Portal, ‘Travel Info’, to write its e-learning sales programme.
Fi returned to the UK in 2015, and is now the Managing Director at Ambitions Travel Recruitment and eLearning She is relied upon and chosen by some of the world’s largest travel, hospitality, and technology brands to assist with their people plans.
Pamela O’Donnell – Global Customer Resolutions Director
Pamela has worked within the travel industry for over 30 years for some of the UK’s most well-known industry brands such as TUI (Thomson Holidays), Thomas Cook and Expedia.
Her career started with Thomson Holidays, progressing from overseas representative to supervisor, head representative then area manager.
Having lived and worked in more than 15 countries during her career, including Barbados as area manager for the Caribbean, the Seychelles as head representative for the Indian Ocean and a Far East area manager position in Thailand, she’s also spent time working and living in Russia, Morocco and Tunisia, and managed ski seasons in France, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. Until recently, Pamela had been living in Sorrento for ten years, holding an area manager for Italy and Croatia position.
During her career overseas, Pamela’s focus was primarily on quality and customer excellence; achieving, a high level of customer satisfaction through her teams being the main objective.
Moving back to the UK, she took up a purchasing manager role, contracting overseas properties around the world. The key focus of this role was relationship building and negotiation with overseas suppliers, however quality and customer satisfaction was at the core of every contract negotiation.
With her career in travel moving into product planning as well as purchasing, so her experience spanned the full cycle of planning, purchasing and operating the customer’s holiday experience within leisure travel.
Moving into the corporate travel sector was a significant change, where Pamela broadened her knowledge of travel. In her time with Expedia Corporate Travel, she was responsible for teams of travel consultants throughout the UK, and the booking of travel for corporate clients including London Stock Exchange, Pepsi and Proctor & Gamble as well as managing the Executive VIP teams and Group/Meetings and Events teams. The corporate travel customer presented different challenges in terms of customer service delivery, yet the principles of customer excellence remained.
With the company restructuring, she moved into a truly global role as director of global customer resolution.
Building a global team of 120 agents in 13 locations, including the Nordics, China, India, Australia, the EU and North America, and covering 25 points of sale, the team handled all global complaints and service failures, and responsible for resolving the customer issues, identifying root cause, analysis, recovering any losses from suppliers and ensuring continuous improvement within the business.
Pamela now splits her time living in the north of England and Menorca, enjoying the sun, sea and natural beauty of the island. She enjoys daily swimming, walking along the Cami de Cavalls, a 180 km ancient coastal bridleway on Menorca, cycling, yoga and immersing herself in Spanish culture.
Course Content
Course Includes
- 1 Lesson
- Course Certificate
