Do you know who your customers are and what they want? Are you meeting their expectations? How do you handle customer challenges? Join us to learn best practices in communicating with customers, sending the messages you want your customers to hear, and overcoming obstacles your difficult customers may present.

This nine-hour course will be offered in three, 3-hour sessions in both Bemidji and Crookston.

Session One, Best Practices in Building Customer Relationships
· Establishing a vision for customer relationship building
· Listening
· Effective use of questions
· Presenting information
· Effective language
· Concluding interactions

Session Two, Customer Service: Sending the Right Message
· Establishing a professional image (environment, culture, and appearance)
· Professionalism when the customer isn’t physically present (Email, telephone, and social media)

Session Three, Dealing with Difficult and Diverse Customers
· Rationale for why we need to deal with difficult customers
· Why customers complain
· How to handle customer complaints
· Understanding what dissatisfied customers really want
· Handling anger: theirs and yours
· Turning dissatisfied customers into loyal, repeat customers

Meet the Trainer: Kerry Ross, trainer for the course, has ten years experience with a Fortune 500 company specializing in Human Resource management and delivering training on various human resource topics including leadership and supervisory skills, conflict management, teambuilding, time management, delivering effective customer service, and managing change in your organization.  She has worked successfully with the management teams of several different businesses in Northwest Minnesota to develop curriculum specific to their business needs and delivered the training to their entire organization.   She is an energetic, innovative professional with demonstrated results.

Workplace coaching is all about encouraging, correcting, and challenging individuals or members of a work team to excel in the workplace. Workplace coaching is one of the most important drivers of productivity, customer satisfaction, and increased revenue in business and industry today.

Whether you’re a front line manager, a supervisor, or an employee who wants to become an effective team leader, workplace coaching is an essential skill in today’s business environment.

This twelve-hour course—offered in Thief River Falls, Bemidji, and East Grand Forks—will provide instruction on how to interact with employees to encourage good work and correct poor work.

Participants will learn:

Session One,
What is Workplace Coaching
· Creating a coaching culture
· Establishing expectations
· Using adult learning concepts
· Generational diversity and coaching

Session Two,
Coaching for Sustained Effort
· The art of positive feedback
· Coaching on the fly
· Feedback methods
· Video case analysis

Session Three,
Coaching for Improvement
· Using constructive feedback
· The power of demonstrations
· Using examples and evidence
· Video case analysis

Session Four,
Putting it all Together
· The importance of follow-up
· The “recycle” process
· Reacting to nonperformers 

Meet the Trainer: Galen Cariveau is the Director of the Office of Workforce Development at The University of North Dakota. Galen brings more than 35 years of corporate training experience to his position. His expertise is in the areas of human resources, workplace coaching, customer service, workplace communications and many more supervision, management, and leadership topics. Past & current clients include Altru Health System, Nodak Electric Cooperative, the Grand Forks Park District, the Internal Revenue Service, LM Wind Power, Marvin Windows & Doors (Grafton), the North Dakota Mill, the City of Grand Forks, and many others.