Customer Service Practitioner Level 2 Apprenticeship

The role of a customer service practitioner is to deliver high-quality products and services to their organisation’s customers. Your core responsibility will be to provide a high-quality service to customers, delivered from the workplace, digitally, or by going out into the customer’s locality.

These may be one-off or routine contacts and include:

• Dealing with orders
• Payments
• Offering advice
• Guidance and support
• Meet-and-greet
• Sales
• Fixing problems
• Aftercare
• Service recovery
• Gaining insight through measuring customer satisfaction

You may be the first point of contact and work in any sector or organisation type.

Your actions will influence the customer experience and their satisfaction with your organisation. You will demonstrate excellent customer service skills and behaviours and product and/or service knowledge when delivering to your customers.

You provide a service aligned with the organisation’s customer service standards and strategy and within appropriate regulatory requirements.

Your customer interactions may cover a wide range of situations and can include:

• Face-to-Face
• Telephone
• Post
• Email
• Text
• Social Media

Providing customer service products and services for businesses and other organisations, including face-to-face, telephone, digital and written contact and communications.

The apprentice must receive off-the-job training for a minimum of 6 hours per week. The hours will be pro rata for part time learners. There are many activities that can be calculated towards the off-the-job training hours such as; Shadowing a colleague, Online Learning, Internal Training, Team Meetings and Appraisals/1-2-1 Visits.

Knowing your customers 

Understand who customers are.

Understand the difference between internal and external customers.

Understand the different needs and priorities of your customers and the best way to manage their expectations, recognising and knowing how to adapt style to be highly effective.

Understanding the organisation

Know the purpose of the business and what ‘brand promise’ means

Know your organisation’s core values and how they link to the service culture.

Know the internal policies and procedures, including any complaints processes and digital media policies that are relevant to you and your organisation.

Meeting regulations and legislation

Know the appropriate legislation and regulatory requirements that affect your business.

Know your responsibility in relation to this and how to apply it when delivering service.

Systems and resources

Know how to use systems, equipment and technology to meet the needs of your customers.

Understand types of measurement and evaluation tools available to monitor customer service levels.

Your role and responsibility

Understand your role and responsibility within your organisation and the impact of your actions on others.

Know the targets and goals you need to deliver against.

Customer experience

Understand how establishing the facts enable you to create a customer focused experience and appropriate response.

Understand how to build trust with a customer and why this is important.

Product and service knowledge

Understand the products or services that are available from your organisation and keep up-to-date

Interpersonal skills

Use a range of questioning skills, including listening and responding in a way that builds rapport, determines customer needs and expectations and achieves positive engagement and delivery.

Communication

Depending on your job role and work environment:

Use appropriate verbal and non-verbal communication skills, along with summarising language during face-to-face communications; and/or

Use appropriate communication skills, along with reinforcement techniques (to confirm understanding) during non-facing customer interactions.

Use an appropriate ‘tone of voice’ in all communications, including written and digital, that reflect the organisation’s brand.

Influencing skills

Provide clear explanations and offer options in order to help customers make choices that are mutually beneficial to both the customer and your organisation.

Personal organisation

Be able to organise yourself, prioritise your own workload/activity and work to meet deadlines.

Dealing with customer conflict and challenge

Demonstrate patience and calmness.

Show you understand the customer’s point of view.

Use appropriate sign-posting or resolution to meet your customers needs and manage expectations.

Maintain informative communication during service recovery.

Developing self

Take ownership for keeping your service knowledge and skills up-to-date.

Consider personal goals and propose development that would help achieve them.

Being open to feedback

Act on and seek feedback from others to develop or maintain personal service skills and knowledge.

Team working

Frequently and consistently communicate and work with others in the interest of helping customers efficiently.

Share personal learning and case studies with others, presenting recommendations, and improvement to support good practice.

Equality – treating all customers as individuals

Treat customers as individuals to provide a personalised customer service experience.

Uphold the organisations core values and service culture through your actions.

Presentation – dress code, professional language

Demonstrate personal pride in the job through appropriate dress and positive and confident language.

“Right first time”

Use communication behaviours that establish clearly what each customer requires and manage their expectations.

Take ownership from the first contact and then take responsibility for fulfilling your promise.

The End Point Assessment (EPA) will only commence once the Employer, Apprentice and Smart Training Advisor are confident that the apprentice has developed all the knowledge, skills and behaviours defined in the apprenticeship standard and that these are clearly evidenced through the progress review meetings and records. The independent end point assessment ensures that all Apprentices consistently achieve the industry set professional standard. The EPA can commence at any point once the apprentice is competent and after the twelve-month minimum period of learning and development. Prior to independent end point assessment the functional skills English and maths components of the apprenticeship must be successfully completed.

Apprentice Showcase

The apprentice showcase is compiled after 12 months of on-programme learning. The apprentice showcase enables apprentices to reflect and present examples of their development over the whole on- programme period.

Practical Observation

The practical observation will be pre- planned and scheduled to when the apprentice will be in their normal place of work and will be carried out by the Independent Assessor.

Professional Discussion

The professional discussion will be a structured discussion between the apprentice and the Independent Assessor following the observation, to establish the apprentice’s understanding and application of knowledge, skills and behaviours.