Writing Back!™ Writing Back!™ teaches participants to easily and effectively write back to customer complaints and compliments for service recovery (when necessary) and building customer loyalty (always). In increasingly competitive markets, customer loyalty and “positive word of mouth” are important keys to maintaining profitability and building a winning edge.

Customers do complain.
And those customers who take the time to write are often badly treated. They are considered irritants to the system, aberrations to be quickly handled...and just as quickly forgotten!

Writing back to complaining customers is often delegated to ill equipped administrative staff, or taken on by senior managers who spend inordinate amounts of time writing labored letters of apology and explanation.

Both groups lack proper training on how to leverage a “writing back” opportunity into a successful service recovery and loyalty building exercise.

Customers write to praise, too!
While letters of compliment and congratulations are certainly more welcome, they are rarely answered in a manner that boosts customer loyalty or increases the likelihood of even more “positive word of mouth”. And in many organizations, these letters of compliment are not answered at all!

Once again, lack of proper training lies at the root of this missed marketing and public relations opportunity.

This Writing Back!™ workshop provides the essential training necessary to help you respond easily, quickly and effectively to customers complaints and compliments.

You Will Learn How To:
Reply to angry and upset customers Restore customer’s trust and good-will Gain additional loyalty and “positive word of mouth” Avoid legal liability in your letters Use complaints as a tool for organizational improvement Leverage compliments as a tool to increase business and boost staff morale.

Methodology:
This two-day course is taught in a highly interactive manner. Participants work individually, in pairs, and in small groups to craft written replies to a variety of complaint and compliment letters.

Participants are taught the style and skillful use of a universal ten-point outline for replying to customer complaints and compliments. Customization of the outline to each industry and each company is accomplished during the progress of the course.

This course includes two pages of reading as homework at the end of the first day. This homework is reviewed and discussed on the morning of the second day.

The workshop is not a grammar class, nor a course in fundamentals of sentence construction. This is an effective course on what to say, what not to say, plus why and how to say it!

Who Should Attend:
Marketing, sales, public relations and customer service managers and executives are appropriate participants for this course. Secretaries and administrative staff may also attend if they are given the responsibility to compose letters of reply to customer complaints and compliments.

Since this workshop is highly interactive, it is a good opportunity to send participants from “mixed levels” in the company: managers and their secretaries may attend together, executives and administrative support staff can attend and benefit together.

This multi-level approach enables easy rapport and understanding to grow between the letter “writers” and the final letter “signers”. The result is both parties will work more effectively together back at the office.

Course Outline:

1. Introduction: Review of your experiences in Writing Back!
   
   
2. Who actually invests the time to write? A realistic review of customer profiles.
   - What are they like as customers? What do they really want?
   - Complaints, Compliments, Suggestions & Recommendations
   
   
3. What are these customers worth to an organization?
   - What value can they contribute to help you improve?
   - Understanding positive word of mouth.
   - Calculate the lifetime value of a loyal customer.
   
   
4. Identifying Key Values in each customer's Complaints or Compliments.
   - How to identify the Value Dimension of greatest importance to your customer.
   
   
5. How and why to cite improvements your organization is making to improve in your customer's preferred Key Value.
   
   
6. Everyone Loves a Compliment!
   - Working with the Letter Response Outline for compliments.
   
   
7. How to Love Complainers, too.
   - Working with the Letter Response Outline for complaints.
   
   
8. The Jamaica Rule
   - How to avoid legal liability and unnecessary difficulties in your written reply.
   
   
9. Building a Culture for Consistently Bouncing Back
   
   
10. How - and Why - to Follow-Through to ensure customer satisfaction.
    

Course Graduation, Course Evaluation and Certificates of Participation.