9 Responses

1. Active participation
   Have you considered simulations and role play?

2. Try and get participants to volunteer real life example
   Ask for one or more volunteers to come up with a real experience they’ve had where they experienced bad customer service. Ask how they dealt with it (or didn’t). Then get the group to role play different alternatives. As a summary ask original volunteer if one of the options suggested in the session would have resulted in a better outcome for them. By making it a real experience people buy into the exercise a bit more.

3. No role play, we’re British
   thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately, we use the ‘good/bad’ example in our Customer Service training, and our staff would rather do aqnything other than role play.

4. Have you tried a competition?
   Divide them into teams, each team to produce lists of the impact on the business of excellent and poor complaints handling, with a prize for the best team.

5. Discuss it then rather than role play
   Still using a real example from one (or more) of the participants get them to discuss possible ways of dealing with it in groups. One group could come up with solutions from customer perspective, another from supllier perspective, yet another (if enough people) from organisation perspective i.e. is there a skills gap or training need to be identified etc. Get them all to feedback – it should generate plenty of discussion and the 3 different perspectives should make it a bit more interesting???

6. Something different?
   What about using Forum Theatre – no direct role-playing, so the participants explore and dynamically adjust the behaviour of the characters within a situation.
   Nigel

7. Take them out of their everyday situation
   We have just written a complaint handling course. Unfortunately the best way to measure that learning has taken place is in role play. We have found that if you make the scenarios ‘general’ and not ‘work related’ they are far more accepting of them.

8. Consider using fictional “characters”
   Lee – Something I have used in relation to giving feedback to learners with different attitudes and needs: You could use fictional (or even real life) characters. Think of several different types of personality (I use Winnie the Pooh characters, but you could use, e.g., cartoon or film characters, public figures, etc.). Divide people up into groups of 3 or 4 people and give each person a “character” with a description and a scenario (a complaint), and ask each group to work out how they would deal with their complaint. Each group writes their ideas on a piece of flip chart paper, and, at the end, the scribe explains their approach to the full group, referring to the answers on their flip. If you have a toy or card they can talk to (I use Pooh stuffed toys), it can be almost like a role play but without the anxiety element.

9. Vidoe may help
   There is a video from Video Atrs I use when discussing complaint handling. Called the difficult guest, american and quite cheesy, lots of laughs, but deals with why and how customers get angry and complain. Lots of techniques to employ during follow up role plays, which I have always found interesting and have often been the subject of extremely positive post course evaluation feedback