Communication is one of the key foundations to successful business - and indeed to life. Being able to interact with people skillfully leads to better outcomes, less stress and more business - so it is important to keep honing these skills whenever possible. 

Skillful Mind offers a half day workshop covering all the basic skills that are useful in a business environment. These skills not only cover how to obtain agreement with each other, but also how to deal with difficult members of the public. The skills taught are useful for both face to face communication and phone conversations.

Specifically, the workshop contains four sections:

Rapport is the art of creating a positive and engaging interaction between two people and is the basis of all good communication. The skills that increase rapport include using correct body language, tonality and language patterns that will put a person at ease quickly. Rapport can also be used over the telephone.

Two skills required for getting agreement with people include:  ‘Pace and Lead',which is firstly gaining rapport and then leading  into agreement using special language patterns that do not create confrontation; and 'Changing levels of abstraction' which requires finding areas of general agreement before moving onto specifics. This is the basis of negotiation.

Participants will learn how to deal with angry and frustrated people in the most efficient manner. There are seven different methods to use including ‘reframing' and in some cases ‘confusion patterns', to disrupt a person's negative state before continuing with a conversation.

The final topic includes how to deal with a person's own stress that may come as a result of having to deal with negative or abusive customers. This is important not only from an OH&S perspective, but also because calm people are more likely to have a calming effect on customers, thus making the above skills more effective.

The workshop is taught over a 3 hour period using a PowerPoint presentation, interactive discussion, practical demonstrations and role play. Handouts for all the techniques will be available for quick, easy reference by participants for future prompting and recall.

Each half day workshop session (3 hours) will cost $550 plus GST. Ideal class sizes are between 4 and 8 people.

A full on-line training course, valued at $57.00 per person will be offered free to each participant. This course covers all the subjects taught in the workshop and over 40 other techniques also useful for staff dealing with the public.

For staff who wish to have a private consultation to discuss individual issues, a 30 minute consultation may be arranged for individual coaching.

Some additional options that may be considered include:

For organisations where customer service requirements mean that not all staff can leave at the same time, the course may be held in the morning and repeated in the afternoon. This will allow for the front desk and other vital customer service positions to be staffed at all times.

For advanced skills in staff and customer management, weekly skills session are also available covering a range of skills useful for senior management.

Peter Radcliffe is a qualified NLP practitioner and meditation teacher. With over 15 years of corporate experience in customer liaison, Peter also has the necessary practical experience to understand first-hand the issues being faced by customer service staff.