videos
The Customer Service Connection
(Kantola Productions, (800) 989-8273, $89.95)
Essential customer-service skills are the feature of this low-cost video.
Viewers learn both how to provide extraordinary service and how to identify
and communicate essential information about customers.
Quality customer service has always required tact, consideration and conflict-management
skills. This video teaches how to: greet, listen, observe, evaluate and
respond; manage rushed and overly busy situations; resolve customer complaints;
handle angry and manipulative customers; identify critical customer-service
information; and communicate customer information to your organization.
Vignettes, conducted in a number of different organizations and settings,
maintain the entertainment quality of this 26-minute video. It comes with
a study guide and a leader's guide.
Building a Customer-Focused, Quality-Based Organization
(Quality Learning Services, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, (800) 835-4730,
$179)
This two-hour video presentation features James Belasco of San Diego State
University, author of Flight of the Buffalo.
He compares the differences between leadership styles of buffalo and geese.
The buffalo are blind followers, and if their leader goes over a cliff,
so will they. On the other hand, geese will break from the pack to do forward
scouting, go down with a wounded member of their group and stay with them,
and so on. Belasco explores two processes for implementing a customer-based
quality initiative: the "Performance Interlock" process shows
you how to produce shared goals and measure and reward throughout your organization,
and the "Scorch Boarding" process gives you real data for your
teams to measure customer service and employer satisfaction.
Belasco is a high-energy man, and I guarantee you won't be bored.
Race Without a Finish Line
(CRM Films, (800) 421-0833, $395)
This film makes a very good session starter. Using a cartoon format and
the analogy of various ships, officers and crews vying for market share
in the coconut-processing and delivery business, this animated video reveals
the recent evolutions in business and customer satisfaction-from the days
when employees followed orders without question to successful organizations
that treat employees as "hired heads," not "hired hands."
The video makes it clear that the race is not necessarily against the competition,
but against ourselves, a race spurred on by continual adaptation to change.
This is a perfect video for companies embarking on a TQM journey. It does
a remarkable job of introducing the essentials of TQM in the short space
of 10 minutes.
Meetings, Bloody Meetings
(Video Arts, (800) 553-0091, $870)
This is the revised edition of Video Arts' most popular title ever. The
original was produced during the mid-1970s. The revised edition has replaced
typewriters with computers, increased the ethnic and gender mix, and banished
smoking. The revised edition is designed for anyone who chairs meetings.
It gives unequaled instruction on how to shorten meetings and make them
more productive.
John Cleese is featured as a thoroughly inefficient chairperson who dreams
he is hauled before a court for negligent conduct of meetings. This nicely
improved rewrite runs for 35 minutes and is accompanied by a helpful leader's
guide and participant's manual.