Employee Guidelines and Resources

Communicating with Confidence 

Most people are afraid of speaking in public, but effective oral communication is a key skill in business. Jeff Ansell provides simple communication tools, strategies, and tips that are easy to use and produce immediate results. He'll help you sound more confident, use body and language to better express ideas, and overcome anxiety. In the last chapter of the course, all these concepts are brought together in two real-world coaching exercises that will help you see the techniques in action.

1 hr. 16 min. / LinkedIn

 Influencing Others

Have you ever had trouble persuading someone to do something, even if it was in their best interest? Sometimes people don't budge, but thankfully you have more than rewards and penalties at your disposal. Join John Ullmen, PhD, as he explains how to influence others when you're at the "pivot point of influence," by applying 18 scientifically confirmed methods. Whether you're influencing at work or at home, you can learn what the best influencers do before they influence, and see how to choose the best steps for your situation, and have people want to be influenced by you.

Communicating Effectively with Customers

Effectively communicating with customers is essential to the success of any customer-oriented business. Adapting to the different communication styles and emotions of customers will help you build customer relationships through better customer conversations. Improving conversations with customers enables an efficient, high quality client service (CS). This course explains how to adapt to the different communication types and identify the common emotions that customers experience when contacting a support center. It also explains how to adapt your writing skills to communicate through email and to document incidents.

 30 min. / CSU Learn

Communication Tips

In order to lead or manage others, you need to master your communication skills. In this series of tips, communication experts Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes help you hone your communication skills in order to deal with difficult people, influence others, confidently speak in public at a moment's notice, and much more.

Controlling Conflict, Stress, and Time in a Customer Service Environment

Working at a customer support center or help desk environment can be challenging. Customers can sometimes be demanding and unreasonable, leading to conflict and stress. The customer service representative (CSR) who aims for service excellence can improve customer relationships by understanding the emotional needs of each customer and adapting to how they communicate. In this course, you'll learn how to identify and resolve conflict, negotiate with customers, and develop strategies to better manage time and stress, and you'll explore how a positive approach and attitude can benefit client service (CS) 

Managing Conflict

While often considered destructive, conflict can prove beneficial if properly managed. This challenge focuses on methods for managing conflict.

15 min. / CSU Learn

Conflict Resolution Foundations

Improve your relationships with your coworkers, clients, and managers and find your way through conflict back to cooperation. In this course, negotiation and leadership coach Lisa Gates shares the secrets of effective conflict resolution and reveals simple, repeatable techniques that apply in most business situations. She presents "The Resolution Roadmap," a practical framework for exploring and navigating conflict resolution, including identifying the issue and distinguishing fact from fiction. A scenario helps take you through best practices for opening the conflict conversation, brainstorming solutions, and coming to an agreement. In addition, she shares powerful conflict resolution techniques that can help you enhance your listening skills and reframe problems to find common ground.

Improving Your Conflict Competence

Workplace conflict is inevitable. But it doesn't have to end badly. In this course, author and conflict expert Craig Runde helps you manage workplace conflict more effectively. He first explains the dynamics that create conflict, and helps you become aware of what your conflict response is. Once you are aware of how conflict arises, learn some practical steps you can take to manage your emotions and engage with others constructively

Customer Service Skills 

(Recommendation to complete within 90 days of employment)

1.1. Interacting with Customers (30 min.)

1.2. Communicating Effectively with Customers (30 min.)

1.3. Controlling Conflict, Stress, and Time in a Customer Service Environment (32 min.)

1.4. Dealing with Customer Service Incidents and Complaints (30 min.)

1.5. Polishing Your Skills for Excellent Customer Service (24 min.)

Facing Confrontation in Customer Service

Achieving service excellence is very challenging when dealing with angry customers. By following a few simple techniques to avoid confrontation, you can manage difficult customer relationships and project a high-quality client service (CS). In this course, you'll learn about typical trouble spots in dealing with angry customers and guidelines for avoiding conflict. You'll also learn how to handle a customer complaint by defusing the tension, investigating the problem, and coming to an agreement on a solution.

Providing Telephone Customer Service

When you're providing customer service over the phone, without face-to-face interaction, it can be challenging to establish the right customer relationships. There are many techniques that can help you consistently deliver service excellence over the telephone. In this course, you'll learn basic etiquette tips for answering, managing, and ending client service (CS) calls. You'll also learn how to make a good impression by listening, using questions to probe for more information, minding your tone, and empathizing with the customer. Finally, you'll learn ways of reflecting or adapting to your customer's style.

31 min. / CSU Learn

Innovative Customer Service Techniques

Help customer service teams unlock hidden potential and take customer service to new levels. In this course, designed to benefit managers and frontline employees alike, instructor Jeff Toister shares research and offers insight into what elite customer service professionals know and do, and discusses the two basic needs of every customer. Find out how social pressure can affect quality of service, learn what highly motivated customer service employees have in common, and discover ways to encourage people to work together as a team.

49 min. / LinkedIn

Rapport Building in Customer Service

Strong customer relationships are key to projecting service excellence. Building rapport is essential and requires knowing your customers, understanding their situations, and providing an empathetic ear for them to voice their concerns. In this course, you'll learn how to improve client service (CS) by building rapport with customers. It covers paying close attention to customer needs, connecting with the customer, and being positive. You'll also learn how to empathize with customers by relating your own experiences, reflecting their emotions back to them, and normalizing their difficulties.

Providing On-Site Customer Service

When you meet customers on their turf, your initial meeting forms the basis of their overall impression of you, your abilities, and your company. You can enhance customer relationships by improving the impressions you make in the field using a few tried-and-true techniques. In this course, you'll learn about guidelines and techniques for each stage of an on-site client service (CS) visit: preparation, arrival, service, wrap up, and follow up. You'll also learn how to project service excellence by making a good impression in the field, through starting on a positive note, setting clear expectations, listening actively, and working to improve customer understanding.

Customer Service Foundations

Do your customers feel valued? When they do, they keep coming back. When they don't, your business suffers. In this course, writer and customer service consultant Jeff Toister teaches you the three crucial skill sets needed to deliver outstanding customer service and increase customer loyalty. Learn how to build winning relationships, provide the right assistance at the right times, and effectively handle angry customers. He also shares ways to find out what your customers really think about your service, and use their feedback to improve.

 Dealing with Customer Service Incidents and Complaints

Failing to realize the importance of customer service and effective complaint handling leads to increasingly dissatisfied customers. Organizations must be able to address the needs of customers in an effective manner to succeed. This course is intended to show the proper procedures and processes needed to provide an efficient client service (CS). It covers how to improve customer relationships to reduce conflict and enable service excellence. You'll also learn how to provide accurate documentation for incident reporting.

 Providing Effective Internal Customer Service

When you do things to help other people within your company do their jobs better, you are providing internal customer service. The quality of that service often has a huge impact on the overall quality of client service (CS) delivered to external customers. In this course, you'll learn about types of internal customers and how to identify internal customer relationships. You'll also learn about the importance of getting to know your internal customers, identifying their expectations of you, and taking action on those expectations. Finally, you'll learn guidelines for providing internal customer service excellence.

 Polishing Your Skills For Excellence Customer Service

As a customer service representative (CSR), creating a support culture that focuses on your customers' needs is key. In this course, you'll learn how to enhance your interactions with customers to project service excellence. You'll explore how to establish effective customer relationships that involve customers in problem solving. Finally, you'll discover how to improve communication for a better client service (CS) in a cross-cultural customer support center or help desk environment.

Unconscious Bias

We're all biased. Our experiences shape who we are, and our race, ethnicity, gender, height, weight, sexual orientation, place of birth, and other factors impact the lens with which we view the world. In this course, diversity expert Stacey Gordon helps you recognize and acknowledge your own biases so that you can identify them when making decisions, and prevent yourself from making calls based on a biased viewpoint. Stacey explains some of the most common forms that a bias takes: affinity bias, halo bias, perception bias, and confirmation bias. She helps you recognize the negative effects of bias within your organization, as well as the benefits to be realized by uncovering bias in decision-making processes. Finally, she outlines strategies for overcoming personal and organizational bias.

Understanding Uncouscious Bias

No matter who you are, you are prey to unconscious biases. To be part of a complex, diverse team you must take steps to overcome implicit and explicit biases and reject social stereotypes. Understanding you own bias, whether conscious or unconscious, is the key. In this course you'll learn about the characteristics of unconscious bias and the nature of buried prejudice. You'll discover how they can inadvertently affect your thinking and decision-making. And you'll learn about the positive things that can happen when you take an anti-biased approach to people and situations in the workplace.

Unconscious Bias in the Workplace

Ensuring a diverse, welcoming, and productive organization means overcoming biases. No matter who you are, you are prey to unconscious biases. To be part of a complex, diverse workplace, you must take steps to overcome them. In this course, you'll learn to recognize how superficial differences can contribute to bias and lead to prejudice and social stereotypes. You'll learn specific tactics for combatting unconscious bias and adopting an anti-bias approach. You'll also learn how to be an inclusive leader by using these tactics to overcome explicit and implicit bias across the organization and in the hiring process.

Overcoming Your Own Unconscious Biases

Each of us is a member of a society that is often partitioned into groups and tribes. While this is common to most societies, it can have harmful effects in the workplace, interfering with productivity and organizational success. We all hold biases, whether conscious or unconscious. Part of understanding the role of unconscious bias in the workplace is admitting to yourself that you, too, hold biases. Once accepted, you can take an anti-bias approach to overcoming unconscious prejudice. In this course, you'll learn how to recognize your own unconscious and implicit bias and how they can fall prey to social stereotypes.

Polishing Your Feedback Skills

The ability to give genuinely constructive feedback is vital in the workplace. If you’re a manager and are responsible for developing others, you’ll likely have to inform employees if their performance doesn’t meet the standard required. This is a delicate situation, and one that requires tact and preparation. But, if done effectively, providing feedback can not only improve performance, but also motivate people and strengthen relationships. In this course, you’ll learn how to plan a feedback session and how to give feedback in a positive manner. You’ll also learn techniques for handling bad reactions to feedback and your own nervousness, as well as how to give feedback to people at different organizational levels.

Giving Feedback to Coworkers

Giving effective feedback requires skill and tact. This Challenge Series exercise focuses on the formal process of offering guidance to coworkers.

 Gaining a Positive Perspective on Feedback

Though it's invaluable, getting feedback can sometimes be a difficult process. Adopting a positive mindset can make all the difference. This course will teach you how receiving feedback differs from getting simple praise or criticism. You'll discover how listening to constructive feedback with a positive mindset can help you to manage your reactions and responses. You'll also learn how applying feedback can help your professional growth and self-development

Giving and Receiving Feedback

All professionals are trying to get better at what they do. No matter where you work, or what your role, the only way to improve is with feedback. Giving—and receiving—feedback is a skill that's relevant to every member of an organization.
Watch this course to learn how to give and receive high-quality feedback. Whether it's with peers, managers, colleagues, team members, friends, or family, the same principles apply across the board.

Interacting with Customers

Effectively communicating with customers increases customer satisfaction and projects service excellence.  It covers how to improve conversations with customers by speaking effectively, using vocal cues, listening actively and using paraphrasing to convey your understanding of the customer’s needs.

Listening with Skill                                 

Effective listening requires focus and active concentration. This challenge explores skills and methods for listening for comprehension and productive communication.

Listening is one of the most singularly powerful tools anyone involved with customer service has in their arsenal. Yet, it's often the biggest area where customer service professionals lack specific training and understanding. In this short course, join customer strategy expert Noah Fleming as he helps you bolster your critical listening skills, providing you with a framework designed to help you succeed. Noah covers crucial, surface-level skills like body language and rapport. He also explains how to listen to and empathize with customers, while continuously adding value by asking the right questions to create further listening moments.

Active listening skills are used by professionals in a wide range of occupations to enhance their work. In this course, you'll learn listening skills that can help in the workplace, and techniques for becoming an effective active listener.

Listening is a critical competency, whether you are interviewing for your first job or leading a Fortune 500 company. Surprisingly, relatively few working professionals have ever had any formal training in how to listen effectively. In this course, communications experts Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes show how to assess your current listening skills, understand the challenges to effective listening (such as distractions!), and develop behaviors that will allow you to become a better listener—and a better colleague, mentor, and friend.

Successful people are generally excellent listeners. They’re able to give others their full attention so that they can understand their needs and ask the right questions, even in difficult or stressful situations. They can also use their listening skills effectively to communicate their own goals and to build strong relationships with others. In this course, you'll learn common misconceptions about listening, how to hone your listening skills, and what to do when you encounter roadblocks to actively listening. You’ll also learn how being receptive to what others are saying can go a long way to breaking down the barriers to clear communication

Listening is a critical competency, whether you are interviewing for your first job or leading a Fortune 500 company. Surprisingly, relatively few working professionals have ever had any formal training in how to listen effectively. In this course, communications experts Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes show how to assess your current listening skills, understand the challenges to effective listening (such as distractions!), and develop behaviors that will allow you to become a better listener—and a better colleague, mentor, and friend.

How to Listen - Best Tip Ever

If you think listening is easy, you aren't doing it.

Developing Self-Awareness

While a multitude of factors can go into the making of a successful person, nearly all individuals who achieve high levels of personal and professional success have a keen sense of self-awareness. In this course, learn how to become more self-aware in order to develop yourself personally and enhance career progression. Organizational psychologist Gemma Roberts helps you learn how to develop your self-awareness so that you can understand how others see you, and better align your actions with your intentions. She explains how to identify beliefs to enhance self-awareness, step outside of yourself to gain a different perspective, leverage a self-awareness action plan, and more.

Finding Your Introvert/Extrovert Balance in the Workplace 

Introversion and extroversion are core parts of human personality theory. Even though people tend to demonstrate more of one behavior than the other, growing professionally often demands that we be able to understand and appreciate both types. In this course, Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes explain the psychological and physiological differences between introversion and extroversion. They show you how to build on your strengths, and they provide stretch goals to help you develop as an introvert and an extrovert. The course is illustrated with real-life examples from Tatiana and Brenda's own professional partnership, and scenarios to help you work more effectively with others.

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Emotions are all around us in the office, and it's important for leaders to understand how to harness them to cultivate productivity and positive relationships. In this course, Britt Andreatta shares how to boost your emotional quotient (EQ) to better lead teams, work with peers, and manage up. Learn what emotional intelligence is and how it factors in at work, and discover concrete techniques for raising your own EQ. This includes perceiving yourself accurately, exercising emotional self-control, understanding and managing your triggers, and developing empathy. Then, turn those lessons around to build your awareness of others and become a more inspiring—and effective—leader.

Managing Your Time                                                              

In this short course, author Todd Dewett, PhD, shares four time-management tips that help everyone from busy executives to new employees get more out of their work day. Learn how to think differently about time management, embrace the 80% rule, find your "Einstein" window, protect that window, and broadcast your availability to ensure others know when you'll be available.

Creating Great Workplace Habits                                     

Gretchen Rubin on Creating Great Workplace Habits is a practical and focused approach on how to apply noted happiness and habits expert Gretchen Rubin's eye-opening research to the workplace. Gretchen explains the Four Tendencies individuals have and how they drive our habits, as illustrated in her book Better Than Before: What I Learned about Making and Breaking Habits—to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life. She introduces practical strategies to create better work habits and tips for ongoing success. With these techniques, you can build the foundation for a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

Getting Things Done                                                         

Join world-renowned productivity and time management expert David Allen as he walks you through his five-step process for Getting Things Done®. He shows you how to stay on top of your work and avoid feeling buried by it, while carving out space in your life to do more meaningful things. Learn how to capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage with tasks that are demanding your attention, and come away with a clear head and a clear focus.

Getting Time Under Control         

You have a limited number of hours in your working day, so how can you manage your time effectively? This Challenge Series exercise explores the symptoms of poor time management and looks at the techniques and tools that can be used to handle the problem. The learner plays the role of senior support engineer at a networking product company who needs to address some serious time-management issues.

Beating Procrastination by Boosting Your Creativity and Drive  

Everyone could benefit from a boost in creativity. Whether you're in marketing and advertising, management, or software development, all professionals need to be able to come up with original ideas and think outside the box every now and then. But sometimes the pressure to think creatively is the very thing that blocks the flow of fresh ideas and results in the type of procrastination that is an obstacle to efficient time management. This course focuses on the relationship between procrastinating and creativity. You'll learn about how the optimal amount of procrastination actually boosts creativity and efficiency. You'll also learn how to use creativity boosters to help you past those times when you procrastinate a little too much.