Customer Experience & Service Excellence

This course aims to help retail staff leverage organisational resources effectively to engage customers across the many platforms that they use alternately. In today’s omnichannel environment, retailers must be well-equipped to reach their customers through both physical and digital platforms effectively and in a relevant way throughout the customer service journey. It is imperative, as such, that retail frontline staff must be upskilled on these platforms, as well as gain the necessary understanding of the business knowledge base in order to optimise service delivery. Service excellence is a key differentiating factor contributing to business competitiveness and in turn business success and sustainability. Learners will acquire the knowledge and skills on how to leverage key platforms together with the use of effective communication methods for enhancing customer interaction and engagement, as well as exercise sound judgement in the customer feedback escalation process for appropriate resolutions to be applied.

It is a challenging time for brands and businesses today as the retail landscape is continuously evolving and ‘The Experience Factor’ in the retail environment has vastly heightened. Businesses will need help with technology and data science combined with human ingenuity to forecast trends thereby provide insight to design for tomorrow’s consumers and be future-ready. In the Customer Experience Innovation – Future Of Customer Experience module, participants learn the importance of Customer Experience and the need to modernise business structures – with consumers’ ever-increasing demands and expectations cum the many shifts and changing dynamics of retail mutations forming blurred lines between industries … fashion, beauty, food, interior sectors to big data and new tech, pushing the limits of marketing and business strategies.

The future of retail is being shaped by the changing demographics of a new generation of shoppers, who are influencing the way businesses operate and disrupting traditional selling methods. Ecommerce and social commerce are becoming increasingly prevalent in the retail industry. These new channels and platforms provide unique opportunities for businesses to reach and engage with customers in innovative ways. To stay ahead in this evolving landscape, it is crucial for companies to embrace emerging technologies and trends. Experiential selling AI and new innovations, allows businesses to create immersive and personalized experiences for customers. These technologies create enhanced interactions brought about by the seamless integration and convergence of physical and digital realms, blurring the boundaries between online and offline retail. This New Retail format has resulted in the Customer Experience Factor becoming a crucial brand differentiator and a core strategy for many companies. To be future-proof, retailers must leverage technology and data science, combined with human ingenuity, to forecast and provide insights for designing products and services that meet the needs of tomorrow's consumers. Additionally, sales professionals must also learn to cultivate meaningful engagement and foster connections with customers through a creative and interactive approach to selling.

Although more customers are doing their shopping online, the human element remains an integral part of delivering amazing customer experience. This is especially true for physical stores where frontline retail associates are the major touchpoint between your brand and the customers.

The rapid transformation of the retail landscape has brought about new challenges for retailers. To meet the shifting demands of increasingly diverse customers, sales professionals need to take a creative and interactive approach to sell in the digital age. Besides being product experts, sales professionals must also cultivate meaningful relationships with customers, while adopting new technologies and sales strategies.

In Singapore's rapidly evolving retail landscape, retail frontliners face a myriad of challenges exacerbated by advancing technology. As customers gain access to vast amounts of information, their expectations for seamless service continue to evolve, spanning across various channels of interaction. To thrive in this demanding environment, retail frontliners must equip themselves with the knowledge and skills to not only enhance their sales performance and customer service delivery but also effectively manage customer challenges.

Coaching someone means guiding another person towards attaining a particular goal where the coach also has the responsibility for the outcome achieved. A coach’s goal is to help another discover, enhance and apply their capabilities to achieve a set goal to the best of their potential. In many industries, and in Retail in particular, Service Excellence is one of the most important factors critical to the success of the business. Acquiring the ability to coach your Service staff to deliver at their top performance will effect not just greater business success, but boosts staff morale and teamwork. Being able to deliver a memorable and remarkable customer experience through service is especially important in today’s environment of aggressive competition where many businesses are hard put to find a unique selling point to drive customer acquisition and to cultivate customer loyalty effectively. Leading the forefront in providing valuable coaching to your Service staff can deliver extensive benefits that also includes staff retention, and in turn positive service continuity contributing to business sustainability and success.

At this (managerial) level, managers are expected to establish and leverage value-creating strategic partnerships to create new customer experience. By following a practical and comprehensive ‘6-Steps Partnership Process’, participants will learn how to bring their Service Innovation ideas from vision to reality. They will learn useful knowledge and skills on how to plan, present and execute their ideas to create winning partnerships and jointly deliver Service Excellence. The course covers the following areas: • Appreciate and identify ‘Win-Win-Win’ partnerships • Understand the ‘6-Step Partnership Process’ • Sell to influence and win over partnerships • Lead, plan and execute a ‘Service Excellence’ project. • Develop skills to manage relationship & strengthen collaboration

To ensure that businesses thrive in the future of work and business, the focus must shift from the traditional product and sales mindset to cultivating a culture of humanizing service, with a strong people-orientation in interactions and engagements. This in turn sets the stage for the business to deliver Service Excellence, imperative for businesses to survive in today’s low barrier-of-entry, highly competitive global market. Every employee plays a critical role in building this service culture, and this course aims to equip Supervisors and Managers with the knowledge and skills to not just be able to drive this business vision, but also equip their teams to execute it accordingly. Learners will gain insights to developing service plans centered around being customer-focused and service-oriented, and the skills to inspire their teams to deliver service excellence to successful fruition.

At the retail operations manager level, cultivating service leadership skills is essential to elevate the customer experience and drive business success. This course focuses on empowering managers to foster a customer-centric culture within the organization, enabling them to champion service excellence and and fostering lasting customer loyalty that ultimately benefits all employees and the business itself. Participants delve into the components of an organization's customer-focused strategy, learning how to design and implement strategies that align with a service excellence culture. Managers will acquire the skills to advocate for service excellence internally, rallying stakeholders behind the organization's customer-centric vision. The course equips your managers with methods to evaluate the effectiveness of customer-focused strategies, enabling them to understand, adapt and refine approaches to meet evolving market trends and opportunities. By honing their Service Leadership skills, managers not only elevate immediate transactional engagements but also drive sustained business growth through cross-selling, upselling, and increased customer loyalty.

In today’s highly digitalised environment in a physical world, people interact and engage on a multitude of platforms and devices. Businesses in turn must adopt an omnichannel approach, but driven by a sound Customer Experience strategy. Service excellence is without question a key competitive differentiator, but it is also a key challenge to sustain consistently across the multitude of channels in meeting customer expectations satisfactorily. In the highly competitive Retail industry, retailers must ensure that they invest wisely in providing their Sales and Service staff with the essential knowledge, skills and resources to support a seamless omnichannel customer experience that equates service excellence to its customers. In this module, Sales and Service Supervisors are given key insights to the digital and physical retail and consumer landscapes. Alongside, they will learn how to navigate them effectively to deliver a seamless service proposition through optimal approaches in resource allocation, planning and management, and operational execution.

Did you know that your job at the store is one of the most important connections that your company has with customers? Even though more people are shopping online, these same people also visit physical stores along with many others who enjoy the actual shopping experience of being able to see and touch the items that they are looking to purchase. In this course, you will discover how you are able to create such a positive Customer Experience that not only creates customer loyalty but also have them refer even more customers to your business. You will learn how you can develop a greater sense of understanding what customers want and how they can enjoy shopping at your store that gives your business a greater share of mind to drive future purchases.

Globally, brick-and-mortar sales is in the decline as consumers are increasingly going online to make their purchases. At the same time, consumers are searching for an exciting offline experience with brands. As a retailer, how can you capitalize on this opportunity?

In today’s competitive retail and service environment, it is essential for businesses to keep up with the latest developments in the industry. This program aims to equip retailers with visual merchandising knowledge and techniques that will help to revitalize their store's appearance, enhance customers' experience, and increase sales. The program will be facilitated through personalised 1-to-1 training by Visual Merchandise Specialist. The practical in-shop training sessions seek to build merchants’ capabilities in both visual merchandising and content development to guide businesses through the process of transforming their stores.

First impressions matter in both personal and business aspects and have a profound effect on human behaviours. A well-defined strategy in your store design and layout is crucial in helping you to create a strong and positive first impression. When customers walk past rows of retail stores, an attractive storefront will entice them to visit the store.