Lean Manufacturing is Important for Operations!

Lean manufacturing is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful. Value is any action or process that produces the product or services that customer is willing to pay for. The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste.

What is the power of Lean Manufacturing?

Course Title : Lean Manufacturing

Date : 19 & 20 December 2016

Venue : Armada Hotel, Petaling Jaya

Objectives

15 Customer Service Skills that Every Employee Needs

1. Patience

If you don't see this near the top of a customer service skills list, you should just stop reading.

Not only is patience important to customers, who often reach out to support when they are confused and frustrated, but it's also important to the business at large: we've shown you before that great service beats fast service every single time.

Yet patience shouldn't be used as an excuse for slothful service either!

Derek Sivers explained his view on "slower" service as being an interaction where the time spent with the customer was used to better understand their problems and needs from the company.

If you deal with customers on a daily basis, be sure to stay patient when they come to you stumped and frustrated, but also be sure to take the time to truly figure out what they want — they'd rather get competent service than be rushed out the door!

2. Attentiveness

The ability to really listen to customers is so crucial for providing great service for a number of reasons.

For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that your software's dashboard isn't laid out correctly. Customers aren't likely to say, "Please improve your UX!", but they may say things like, "I can never find the search feature," or, "Where is the _____ function at again?"

3. Clear Communication Skills

Make sure you're getting to the problem at hand quickly; customers don't need your life story or to hear about how your day is going.

More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it's best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.

An example: The last time I went to get work done on my car, I was told by an employee that if I wanted to get an oil change, it would be "included" in my final bill.

4. Knowledge of the Product

The best forward-facing employees in your company will work on having a dep knowledge of how your product works.

It's not that every single team member should be able to build your product from scratch, but rather they should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it everyday would.

Without knowing your product from front-to-back, you won't know how to help customers when they run into problems.

5. Ability to Use "Positive Language"

Sounds like fluffy nonsense, but your ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns can truly go a long way in creating happy customers.

Language is a very important part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use.

Here's an example: Let's say a customer contacts you with an interest in a particular product, but that product happens to be backordered until next month.

Small changes that utilize "positive language" can greatly affect how the customer hears your response...

Without positive language: "I can't get you that product until next month; it is back-ordered and unavailable at this time."

With positive language: "That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse."

The first example isn't negative by any means, but the tone that it conveys feels abrupt and impersonal, and can be taken the wrong way by customers.

Conversely, the second example is stating the same thing (the item is unavailable), but instead focuses on when/how the customer will get to their resolution rather than focusing on the negative.

6. Acting Skills

Sometimes you're going to come across people that you'll never be able to make happy.

Situations outside of your control (they had a terrible day, or they are just a natural-born complainer) will sometimes creep into your usual support routine, and you'll be greeted with those "barnacle" customers that seem to want nothing else but to pull you down.

Every great customer service rep will have those basic acting skillsnecessary to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who may be just plain grumpy.

7. Time Management Skills

Hey, despite my many research-backed rants on why you should spend more time with customers, the bottom line is that there is a limit, and you need to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner.

The trick here is that this should also be applied when realizing when you simply cannot help a customer. If you don't know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support member will get a customer over to someone who does.

Don't waste time trying to go above and beyond for a customer in an area where you will just end up wasting both of your time!

8. Ability to "Read" Customers

You won't always be able to see customers face-to-face, and in many instances (nowadays) you won't even hear a customer's voice!

That doesn't exempt you from understanding some basic principles of behavioral psychology and being able to "read" the customer's current emotional state.

This is an important part of the personalization process as well, because it takes knowing your customers to create a personal experience for them.

More importantly though, this skill is essential because you don't want to mis-read a customer and end up losing them due to confusion and miscommunication.

Look and listen for subtle clues about their current mood, patience level, personality, etc., and you'll go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.

9. A Calming Presence

There's a lot of metaphors for this type of personality: "keeps their cool," "staying cool under pressure," etc., but it all represents the same thing: the ability that some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic.

I've had my fair share of hairy hosting situations, and I can tell you in all honesty that the #1 reason I stick with certain hosting companies is due to the ability of their customer support team to keep me from pulling my hair out.The best customer service reps know that they cannot let a heated customer force them to lose their cool; in fact it is their job to try to be the "rock" for a customer who thinks the world is falling down due to their current problem.

10. Goal Oriented Focus

This may seem like a strange thing to list as a customer service skill, but I assure you that it is vitally important.

In my article on empowering employees, I noted that many customer service experts have shown how giving employees unfettered power to "WOW" customers doesn't always generated the returns that many businesses expect to see.

That's because it leaves employees without goals, and business goals + customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service.

11. Ability to Handle Surprises

Sometimes the customer support world is going to throw you a curveball.

Maybe the problem you encounter isn't specifically covered in the company's guidelines, or maybe the customer isn't reacting how you thought they would.

Whatever the case, it's best to be able to think on your feet... but it's even better to create guidelines for yourself in these sorts of situations.

Let's say, for instance, you want to come up with a quick system for when you come across a customer who has a product problem you've never seen before...

Who? One thing you can decide right off the bat is who you should consider your "go-to" person when you don't know what to do. The CEO might be able to help you, but you can't go to them with every single question! Define a logical chain for yourself to use, then you won't be left wondering who you should forward the problem too.What? When the problem is noticeably out of your league, what are you going to send to the people above? The full conversation, just the important parts, or maybe some highlights and an example of a similar ticket?

How? When it comes time to get someone else involved, how are you going to contact them? For instance, at Help Scout we prefer to solve small dilemmas over chat, and save bigger problems for email, keeping inbox clutter down to a minimum.

12. Persuasion Skills

This is one a lot of people didn't see coming!

Experienced customer support personnel know that oftentimes, you will get messages in your inbox that are more about the curiosity of your company's product, rather than having problems with it.

(Especially true if your email is available on-site, like ours)

To truly take your customer service skills to the next level, you need to have some mastery of persuasion so that you can convince interested customers that your product is right for them (if it truly is).

It's not about making a sales pitch in each email, but it is about not letting potential customers slip away because you couldn't create a compelling message that your company's product is worth purchasing!

13. Tenacity

Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done (and not take shortcuts) is a key skill when providing the kind of service that people talk about.

The many memorable customer service stories out there (many of which had a huge impact on the business) were created by a single employee who refused to just do the "status quo" when it came to helping someone out.Remembering that your customers are people too, and knowing that putting in the extra effort will come back to you ten-fold should be your driving motivation to never "cheat" your customers with lazy service.

14. Closing Ability

To be clear, this has nothing to do with "closing sales" or other related terms.

Being able to close with a customer means being able to end the conversation with confirmed satisfaction (or as close to it as you can achieve) and with the customer feeling that everything has been taken care of (or will be).

Getting booted after a customer service call or before all of their problems have been addressed is the last thing that customers want, so be sure to take the time to confirm with customers that each and every issue they had on deck has been entirely resolved.

Your willingness to do this shows the customer 3 very important things:

That you care about getting it right

That you're willing to keep going until you get it right

That the customer is the one who determines what "right" is.

When you get a customer to, "Yes, I'm all set!" is when you know the conversation is over.

15. Willingness to Learn

If you came across this article and read all the way to the bottom, you likely already have this skill (nice job!).

This is probably the most general skill on the list, but it's still necessary.

Those who don't seek to improve what they do, whether it's building products, marketing businesses, or helping customers, will get left behind by the people willing to invest in their skills.

We love how the Buffer team approaches this skill with their wonderful monthly customer happiness updates.

The updates are public, detailed, and go through how the support team (and the company at large) handled incoming emails for the month.

What better way can a startup's support team learn as it goes then breaking down their own customer happiness metrics each and every month, for the public to see?

Credit to : Gregory Ciotti 

Hereby, we would like to announce that we have the course that related to customer service. Need more information, Click Here

#1: Teaching The Right People The Wrong Skills

Teaching ALL the skills to ALL the employees in your company might seem like a decent way to cover your bases, but it’s time-consuming and ineffective. By trying to devise a one, size fits all training you will likely not fit anyone very well.  

Example: If you have a sales team, and half of the team is tasked with drumming up new accounts while, the other is supposed to maintain existing accounts, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to teach the entire team about cold calling techniques. This wastes time and money for both employee and employer.

Similarly, teaching things your employees already know will make them feel as if they are being talked down to and as if you don’t know them or their jobs well enough to understand what skills they already have.

It is also important to avoid shallow needs analysis, meaning a simple survey of employees and managers to find out what skills they require is not enough. Effective training needs analysis will answer at least these questions:

Who needs training?

What do they need to learn?

What skills are needed and for what reason?

What skills are already in place?

What is needed but is not accessible?

What is missing from existing training?

#2: Teaching the Right Skills to the Wrong People

Why do the wrong people get trained?

An overlap of skills/training occurs when new employees come in with existing knowledge.

Company policy says each employee requires a certain amount of training no matter if that employee is already knowledgeable or not.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of using up the budget so the same budget can be asked for again the following year.

Knowing your students is the best way to avoid redundancy in training; so starting with what you do know is a reasonable strategy while filling in blanks with a needs analysis. Without a training needs analysis, you can expect to have other projects suffer due to employees’ attention being taken up by the unnecessary training. Employees who are forced to relearn information may become bored and stressed, letting their work suffer as well. 

#3: Teaching the Right Skills the Wrong Way

While training is a great way to address many problems and skill gaps within a company, it is not always the answer. Often, training is thrown at an issue once it has already become urgent. A kind of panic sets in as a problem becomes critical, and training is the go-to answer. 

Determine if training is really the best option by asking yourself these questions:

What is the actual problem this training is attempting to solve?

What are the causes of the issue and are they actually being caused by internal or external forces?

In what ways will training address these causes?

Was training already attempted and, if so, what was the outcome?

If there was previous training, why did it fail and what could have been done to make it better?

Are there things already in place that we can utilize to rectify this issue?

Even if you do decide on training, there are still questions that need to be answered to decide on what type of training would be most effective.

Source by : Karla Gutierrez

 Hereby, I would like to announce that we have the course for Training Needs Analysis on January 2017. Need more information,Click here

                                                                                                                                          

Reasons Why Your Business NEEDS Social Media Marketing.

Why is Social Media Important?

Why is social media important to businesses? Because your brand doesn’t really exist online if you’re not represented across all social channels – and regularly interacting with your followers, journalists who cover your industry, thought leaders and tastemakers, etc.

Here’s one very important reason you may not have considered — it’s fun! Hosting a Twitter chat to celebrate a new product launch, getting your geek on while you test Facebook ads, or sharing pop-culture polls for your followers to weigh in on — these are all activities that build brand awareness, boost web traffic and lead to loyal customers. But unlike many traditional marketing tactics with the same goals, these tasks are actually fun in addition to driving real value for your company.

Myanmar has long persecuted the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, denying it basic rights to citizenship, to marry, to worship and to an education. After violence unleashed in 2012 by Buddhist extremists drove tens of thousands of Rohingya out of their homes, many risked their lives to escape in smugglers’ boats; more than 100,000 others are living in squalid internment camps. Now, a counterinsurgency operation by Myanmar’s military is again forcing thousands of Rohingya to abandon their villages.

Over the weekend and on Monday, according to Reuters, hundreds of Rohingya Muslims crossed from Myanmar into Bangladesh seeking shelter from the escalating violence. An official from the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency, told the news agency that he had seen more than 500 people enter its camps in the hills near the border. Meanwhile, Reuters also reported fighting between security forces and rebels on Myanmar’s border with China.

The military’s counterinsurgency operation began as a response to an attack on Oct. 9 by armed assailants that left nine police officers dead in Rakhine State. It is not clear who the assailants were, and theories range from drug gangs to Islamist terrorists. Since then, more than 100 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by the military. Satellite images published by Human Rights Watch indicate that at least 430 homes were burned in villages in northern Rakhine State between Oct. 22 and Nov. 10.

There are credible allegations of soldiers looting, killing unarmed people and raping women. The government denies this. U Aung Win, the chairman of a Rakhine State investigation into the Oct. 9 attack, said soldiers would not rape Rohingya women because they “are very dirty.”

The Oct. 9 attack may have been set off by an earlier government announcement that it planned to destroy illegal structures in the area, including more than 2,500 homes, 600 shops, a dozen mosques and more than 30 schools. “That was saying we have to reduce the population of Rohingya,” said U Kyaw Min, a Rohingya who is the chairman of the Democracy and Human Rights Party.

Source :The New Work Times