Text Box: Here are some examples of the Point of Contact Group’s unique training approach in action with real clients: 1. “We towed your car away. Can we help you?” The Point of Contact Group was invited to work with the parking and traffic bureau of a major university, to help improve their service quality. So, what does a parking and traffic bureau do? Among other things, they tow people’s cars away! The problem: Their standard responses - such as “I’m sorry, sir, you were parked illegally” and “You’ll have to pay a fine” - frequently led to angry and unpleasant confrontations with people. They found that traditional customer service training - with its emphasis on attitude change and “creating magical moments” - did absolutely nothing for them when they were toe-to-toe with people whose cars had just been towed away. The solution: We taught them about a powerful principle of behavioral psychology known as social cognition - a survival instinct that causes us to decide in the first few seconds whether someone is a “friend” or a “foe” - and then helped them re-engineer phrases that would trigger this friend versus foe reflex in their favor every time, such as: “Your car is in a safe place.” “I know where your car is.” “I can help you get your car back.” “I get frustrated when things like this happen to me, so I understand how you feel.” The result: In role-play - and later, in real life - this team discovered that by making simple changes to what they said, people could not stay angry with them. This, in turn, dramatically changed their service quality. 2. Creating “hometown” service for a global help desk A major international consumer products manufacturer brought the Point of Contact Group in to work with their global call center operations. The problem: This firm had relocated some of their call centers offshore, and found that customer satisfaction ratings for their offshore agents were lower than those of their North American agents. After monitoring phone traffic to their offshore call center, we observed a group of polite, intelligent, and hard working agents who were often simply following the norms of their culture - for example, not acknowledging a caller’s emotions for fear it would represent a “loss of face” for the customer. This led to encounters like this: Customer: “Help, my product crashed and I’m on a deadline! I’m really upset about this!” Agent: “Sir, what is your serial number?” The solution: The Point of Contact Group delivered a custom training intervention via videoconference where we taught and coached simple, procedural techniques - such as paraphrasing the caller, or substituting specific phrases for their normal “boilerplate” responses - to automatically show interest and empathy to all callers. The result: Follow-up call monitoring showed nearly two-thirds of the team had improved their skills, with the best offshore agents now sounding virtually indistinguishable from North American agents - and an end result of improved service quality at lower costs. 3. Coaching people to a new level of service One of the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges brought in the Point of Contact Group to help them increase their service quality, as well as examine how to implement their broader mission of creating leadership experiences for students. The problem: Different departments had different “cultures”, and it was often hard to motivate employees - many of whom had been there for many years - to change the ways that they interacted with customers and each other. The solution: After training the college’s entire academic support staff using our flagship Great Customer Connections program, we worked with the college’s deans and senior administrators to set a new standard for how to coach and motivate people - by moving to strength-based coaching techniques aimed at developing each team’s own interpersonal and leadership skills. Later, we held a retreat-style workshop for their senior administration to explore their own core values, and how to put these into practice to achieve their mission. The result: According to the Dean of the College, ““(Point of Contact Group founder) Rich Gallagher is that rare person who has the mind of a management guru and the soul of an educator. He was able to introduce easy to grasp concepts that gave people techniques to manage complex and ever changing situations. His work literally transformed how we have been working with parents, students, and others, and some of our staff who were struggling became stars.” 4. Transforming your workplace Our best case study is yet to come - the one where we quickly and inexpensively change the performance of your workplace! For more information on any of our programs, or to discuss your own specific training and consulting needs, please contact us at: The Point of Contact Group PO Box 4023 Ithaca, NY 14852-4023 USA Telephone: 607.564.9878 E-mail: solutions@pointofcontactgroup.com www.pointofcontactgroup.com

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