Design a ‘five-star’ customer experience with this one-day course

March 4, 2020

This paid piece is sponsored by the University of South Dakota Center for Professional Development.

When your entire business revolves around customer care, providing outstanding service is critical to success.

At Five Star Call Centers, the company has found a formula that works. And you can learn from its expertise at an upcoming one-day course.

Building a Five-Star Customer Service Plan: Design Your Customer Experience will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 24 as part of the spring offerings from the University of South Dakota Center for Professional Development in Sioux Falls.

It will be taught by Joel Sylvester, chief marketing officer at Five Star Call Centers, which has grown from its roots in Sioux Falls to locations in five cities. The company provides world-class customer contact centers to partners nationwide in fields including health care, financial services, retail, product support and technical support.

As CMO, Sylvester works with new and existing partners to develop solutions to fit their customer care needs.

He also offers training and has presented the course material he will deliver in Sioux Falls nationwide. He said he’s excited to bring it to South Dakota.

“As Midwesterners, we are already a step ahead in providing customer care, and I’m excited to see how quickly organizations can make an impact,” he said.

“In addition, while I’ve worked with organizations across the country, I have the strongest understanding of the Sioux Falls talent market, and the plans the teams build will be even easier to implement here.”

We sat down with Sylvester to talk about the evolving field of customer experience and get a preview of what professionals will learn from him.

What are some best practices you’ve established for customer service at Five Star that might be helpful to others?

We have developed and implemented a model we call SOAR.

  • Selection: One of the keys is putting the right person in the right role, so we do a variety of skills, aptitude and attitude testing to make sure team members are in the best role to excel.
  • Onboarding: Training must provide specific expectations of what the organization sees as keys to team member attitude, connections to customers and ways to thank customers. Team members must understand what is always expected from every interaction and what can never be part of a customer interaction.
  • Achievement: We focus on the customer experience process from end to end and put controls in place to ensure expectations are achieved at all levels. This has led to large increases in customer satisfaction and net promoter scores.
  • Responsibility: Results are constantly tracked and measured to celebrate success and identify areas for improvement. Everyone is responsible for customer experience, and measurement ensures this because it’s part of the culture.

What does “designing your customer experience” look like? And how do you start?

More and more organizations are putting senior leaders in charge of customer experience. Positions like chief customer officer and chief experience officer are becoming more prevalent. Looking at the amount of dollars spent to attract and retain customers as well as the ultimate impact customer experience has on brand reputation and overall profitability is driving this change.

Once a champion in the organization has been defined, the organization needs to define exactly and specifically what they want the “attitude” of their company to look like, how they can uniquely “connect” with their customers and how they want to recognize or “thank” their customers. Once those items are defined, that is really where the fun starts because I’ve seen time after time when team members are giving specific definitions of success, they really thrive and have fun putting processes in place to drive world-class customer experience.

Employees are critical to customer service. How do you hire the right people and keep them engaged to deliver that service?

The easy answer is ask them three questions:

  1. What does great customer service mean to you?
  2. Give me an example of a time when you provided great customer experience?
  3. Would you consider yourself passionate about providing a great customer experience?

The answers will make your choice easy.

How do you measure your customer experience at Five Star? And is it something other companies can emulate? 

Three measurements we use are customer satisfaction scores, net promoter scores and quality scores. These are all things that any organization can implement.

How will your course be structured? What can participants expect?

I really break it down into four sections:

  • State of customer service: We will outline specific trends by industry in the area of customer experience. This gives participants an idea of what is on the horizon and what they need to focus on. 
  • Building a world-class customer service plan: Every participant will walk through the steps for their organization of defining and implementing a real-world action plan.
  • Implementing a customer service plan across generations: This is a way to test your customer service plan looking at the different generations of team members and customers. 
  • Building high-performing teams: This is a second test of your customer service plan and way to put real-world metrics into place.

Who would be a good fit to attend your course? What career stage or industries?

Anyone looking to implement strategies to improve customer service in their organization or business. Anyone that feels their organization’s current customer service doesn’t meet the standards they strive for. Anyone that is in an industry in which they feel customer service is a differentiator. 

What are you hoping people take away from the course?

Putting the tools in place to provide world-class customer care is a game-changer. Employees are happier, are more engaged and stay with your company. Customers are happier and spend more and refer business. I’ve even had people that have completed this course tell me they have used the strategies they learned to help their children and families, and other organizations they are part of. This course is generally a springboard to make customer experience part of the culture and continue the conversation, and that is where the fun starts.

To learn more and register for these and other upcoming courses, click here. Group discounts are available. 

Want to stay in the know?

Get our free business news delivered to your inbox.



Design a ‘five-star’ customer experience with this one-day course

His entire business revolves around customer service — and has figured out how to excel. Now you can learn from their best practices.

News Tip

Have a business news item to share with us?

Scroll to top