E-Learning

Customer Service Skills

Training needs analysis: a broad view by Brooke Broadbent and Lise Froidevaux provides a brief account of Training Need Analysis and provides with a lot of questions that are asked during a TNA data collection.

http://www.e-learninghub.com/articles/training_needs_analysis.html

This article on Managing Customer Expectations focus on factors that influence customer satisfactions and provides methods to measure and influence customer satisfaction.

http://www.nkarten.com/mce.html

Do you want to know what your customers think about your service? This article will give ideas on collecting feedbacks from your customers.

http://www.nkarten.com/feedbk.html

Best Practices in Customer Relationship Management by Bernie Greenberg provides best practices  in CRM and tactics such as calculating the current and potential value of each customer, determining the specific rewards, etc.

http://www.executivetechnology.com/ViewSOFull.cfm?SOID=25

Is the Customer Always Right? Customers are people too, and they want to feel special, important and treated with respect. Read this article to find out the answer !

http://www.halbecker.com/articlesby/column26.html

Good customer service is essential for all businesses, and providing it isn't that difficult ! This brief article that gives you 10 rules for great customer service comes in a short and sweet package.

http://www.allbusiness.com/articles/content/25486.asp

Four Ways to Motivate Service Professionals- A Guide to Getting Wow Performance by Mary Sandro is a good article for those of you in the business of managing customer service professional.

http://www.proedgeskills.com/Customer_Service_Articles/four_ways_to_motivate.htm

Ways of making your needs and desires known is a great skill. This brief article on assertive communication provides examples and practice exercises.

http://www.usu.edu/arc/idea_sheets/assertive.htm

Listening Skills

Be an Effective Listener! By Dianne Schilling talks about the the importance of listening skills and barriers to good listening. It also provides tips on developing listening skills.

http://www.womensmedia.com/seminar-listening.html

Practicing Listening Skills.  This article gives some good tips on developing listening skills.

http://www.va.gov/adr/listen.html

Another good article on listening skills. It provides tips on differentiating effective and non-effective listeners.

http://www.usu.edu/arc/idea_sheets/listening.htm

Improving ESL Learners' Listening Skills: At the Workplace and Beyond by Carol Van Duzer is a very good article on Knowledge of the listening process and factors that affect listening

http://www.cal.org/ncle/digests/LISTENQA.HTM

American Accent, Culture & Geography

American English As It's Spoken: Contractions and shortcuts used in daily speech. This article also provides examples and sound clips on some common American English phrases.

http://www.spokenamericanenglish.com/

It is one such place where you get free practice exercise on American English Pronunciation. It also gives some songs and tongue twisters for practice.

http://www.manythings.org/pp/

This is another good resource site you may be interested into. It is a dictionary purporting to define American in terms of British, and vice versa. It also includes a number of articles outlining reasons for, and instances of differences between American and British english.

http://www.peak.org/~jeremy/dictionary/

A brief article on American work practices and work ethics. If you are dealing American customers, it is worth reading this article.

http://globalgateway.monsterindia.com/wa/jobhunting/gg010517_000/

A comprehensive site on American Geography. Provides information on State Capitals, major cities, maps and lots more.

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/GEO/homepage.htm

Do you want to test your knowledge on American Geography? Take this online quiz.

http://www.llsh.univ-savoie.fr/lea/Perdrieau/exercices/geoquizz.htm

It is a comprehensive site to familiarize yourself on American culture and traditions. It provides information on family traditions, holidays, cost of living, values, etc.

http://www.americanfamilytraditions.com/

Business Processes

Re-engineering of Business Processes in Multinational Corporations by Prof. Dr. Michael Kutschker. The article discusses the management of ongoing business processes in multinational corporations and reports empirical findings.

http://www.gsia.cmu.edu/bosch/kut.html

Process mapping is a well-known technique for creating a common vision and shared language for improving business results. You may like to read this article on 'How to Avoid the Four Most Common Mistakes of Sales Process Mapping'.

http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c030217a.asp

The Role of Process in CRM by Steve Phinney is a good overview on process mapping explained with relevant examples.

http://www.gantthead.com/article.cfm?ID=18536

A Model Management Approach to Business Process Reengineering by Levent V. Orman is a good overview to business process reengineering approaches and gives a lot of reference for further reading.

http://hsb.baylor.edu/ramsower/acis/papers/orman.htm

This white paper on Business Process Improvement by Proforma Corporation is a good article for Managing Process Change. It discusses about Process Modeling and experimenting with change before implementation.

http://www.proformacorp.com/downloads/whitepapers/wp-bpm.pdf

This is an excellent module on using Flowchart as a Process Improvement Tool. This module provides a lot of examples and practice exercises, which can be used for process training. A good resource for trainers and provides presentation slide as well !

http://www.balancedscorecard.org/files/flowchrt.pdf

Eliciting process models from software projects is a first significant step towards process improvement. In this
article on 'Elicit: A Method for Eliciting Process Models' by Nazim H. Madhavjiyz, Dirk Holtjey, WonKook Hongy and Tilmann Bruckhaus  present a method called Elicit, for eliciting software process models from industrial software environments.

http://www2.umassd.edu/swpi/McGill/ICSP3.pdf

What is HIPPA? Read this article to get a brief overview on HIPPA. It also provides links for further reading. http://cms.hhs.gov/hipaa/online/modules/terms.asp?record=010481

COPC: The world's leading authority on customer contact center operations. Find out how COPC helps organizations like yours reduce costs while increasing profitability and customer satisfaction.
http://www.copc.com/

The ABCs of Contact Center Certification. A comprehensive page on various Contact Center Certification such as COPC, CIAC, ISO etc. available, and the link for respective websites provided by Cincom.

http://www.cincom.com/financial/needs/retention/certification/

COPC's Smart Move Helps Call Centers Reduce Costs

http://www.contactcenterworld.com/html/ns/ns_%7B22554B59-298A-4819-A316-CBE08A79410E%7D.asp

Six Sigma. A very good website to get information, quality analysis tools, articles and white papers on Six Sigma quality processes.

http://www.isixsigma.com/