Customer Care (1-2 days)
For Housing Support Workers

Dealing with the public can be a highly rewarding experience. It can also be an activity that can be stressful and indeed distressing and frightening for staff. People who work in the area of housing are faced with particular challenges from their customers and this course aims to provide them with a deeper understanding of what leads to people behaving in a difficult way. The course also highlights a range of approaches that might help staff deal with challenging behaviour.

Learning objectives:

By the end of this course participants should understand:

• What is meant by Customer Care
• What is good and bad Customer Care
• How good Customer Care benefits the worker, the customer and the organisation
• Why some customers behave unreasonably or in a challenging way
• How we might contribute towards this
• How far we should go in pleasing the customer
• Behaviour patterns that are particularly difficult to deal with
• An assertive approach when communicating with ‘difficult’ people
• Techniques to help deal with ‘difficult’ people
• Our physical and emotional responses to people we find difficult
• Ways we can work out effective strategies to dealing with them
• Techniques we can adopt when dealing with different types of people/clients who we may find difficult

Training methods:

• Ice breakers
• Tutor presentations
• Chalk & talk
• Group work
• Pairs work
• Discussion
• OHP/PowerPoint
• Questionnaires
• Simulations