The Ultimate Guide to Training for Customer Service and Support

Which of the following aspects of a company — marketing strategies or customer service — has stuck out to you as a shopper? Probably the latter. Yes, comprehensive customer service training allows a company to engage with consumers, solve problems, and demonstrate that they care. When done well, customer service leaves a lasting positive impression on buyers.

That’s why customer service training is just as vital (if not more so) than marketing or sales training. Your customers’ service experiences are what generate reviews and word-of-mouth advertising.

You cannot overlook customer service. Happy clients are your finest advocates, even better than your most talented marketers because they receive excellent service. That is why we have put together this guide. By the conclusion, you’ll have a clear grasp of how customer service training benefits your company, when different forms of training may be helpful, and what materials you’ll need to put up a comprehensive training program.

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Customer service training: Definition

Customer service training is the instruction given to staff to improve customer assistance and satisfaction. It’s an iterative process that entails teaching customers the skills, abilities, and tools they’ll need to serve them better and get more value out of products and services.

Customer service training is available to any employee who interacts with customers. And, because your customers are your best growth opportunity, every employee — whether a marketer, executive assistant, or customer service representative — should be working hard to keep them pleased.

What are the benefits of customer service training?

It’s common for companies to regard their customer service departments as an afterthought. Isn’t it true that the hard work is already done once a person becomes a customer and pays for your goods or service? Wrong!

Customer service excellence is a competitive advantage. It’s also a significant factor in your consumer retention strategy. Consider it for a moment. What do you believe would make a consumer happy and inclined to remain around if they had an urgent query about your product and contacted your customer care team? Is it better to get a generic email response or a well-researched response from a customer service agent who cares about their success? It’s most likely the latter.

Better yet, this consumer may 1) be pleased with their interaction with your company and customer service team, and 2) advocate your brand as one that provides excellent products and services. What a fantastic idea!

Happy and satisfied clients are your best bet for bringing in new business; thus, customer service staff must go above and beyond their customers’ already high expectations.

This reason is why customer service training is crucial. You’re preparing your employees to deal with some of your most important people — your clients. Now, you could be thinking to yourself, “Why can’t I just hire the appropriate people from the start and leave it?”

Well, you should always hire the best person for each job, including customer service. However, merely hiring qualified people and expecting the job to get done is a disservice to your staff and your clients. Regardless of how talented your new hires are, you still need to do training to ensure that everyone is on the same page about how to collaborate and best represent your company.

Of course, you’ll hire highly qualified individuals, but that doesn’t negate the fact that they’ll need training as new hires and as members of a larger team with a larger aim – serving and pleasing your consumers.

Customer service recruiting

While customer service training is the major issue here, we will take a short detour and talk about customer service hiring as well. We are doing this because the best way to develop a strong foundation for your customer service team — and eventually ensuring that your staff is open to your training — is to hire the best people possible.

Some talents and strengths can be taught or fine-tuned through training, while others must be present when hiring your team members. You can not fill in such gaps with software, training activities, or instruments.

When it comes to hiring for customer service positions, there are a few things to consider. While interviewing and screening customer service applicants, these are some abilities to look for – even if it’s only a hint.

• Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
• Effective Communication
• Inventiveness
• Dedication

If employing the appropriate people is like planting seeds in suitable soil, then training your customer service representatives is like tending and growing your garden to its full potential. Let’s get started with customer service and support training.

Customer service training types

You can use Customer Service training in a variety of scenarios. While the overall concept is the same — train your team to serve and delight customers — the specific training methods and practices will differ depending on the situation.

Let’s look at some scenarios in which you might do customer service training and what you might expect as a hiring manager or business owner.

Customer service training for new hires

The initial month or two of training can determine an employee’s long-term performance, as with any new job. Customer service training and onboarding are no different for new hires. This form of training will assist new employees in adjusting to a new job, organization, and culture, as well as ensuring that they are prepared to communicate with your valued clients.

Read More: High-Impact Employee Onboarding and Induction Training

Quarterly or annual training

Your customer support crew should undergo training every quarter, half-year, or year, whether they’ve been with you for six months or six years.

Such rigor will help your team to check in on their abilities or competency. Your customer care personnel will benefit from quarterly or half-yearly training. Skill-based training is constantly changing, and if particular talents are not maintained over time, they can deteriorate. Routine training keeps everyone on the team aligned, energized, and performing at their best. Regular team-building events and training can assist in maintaining healthy connections and eliminate distractions so that your staff can concentrate on their jobs.

Training for emergencies or time-constrained situations

Customer service training isn’t always possible to plan. A product recall, a significant rebranding, or a nationwide advertising campaign are all possibilities.

Your customer support team would be on the front lines, so they’d have to be ready to handle calls, respond to questions, and resolve any issues. In this situation, customer service training would entail providing your employees with all the information they require to do their duties.

Telephonic customer service training

Today, 48% of customers prefer to connect with businesses over the phone. As a result, teaching your salespeople how to give a wonderful experience over the phone is vital to your success. In terms of phone training, here’s what you should concentrate on:

• Maintaining a cheerful tone and demeanor during the conversation
• Even during stressful calls, maintaining a calm and professional demeanor
• Speaking slowly and plainly
• Asking customers straightforward and open-ended inquiries that help salespeople arrive at a quick and effective solution
• presenting solutions in a way that is understandable to each consumer
• Using language that is consistent with your brand
• Being a good listener

Customer service basics and soft skills

Interpersonal communication skills

Reps should look inside and focus on personal qualities crucial to creating solid and trustworthy relationships with consumers to be effective in customer service.

Positivity

It’s not only about smiling when you’re positive. It’s also essential to keep your tone and comments upbeat and promising so that customers remain optimistic. Train your employees to replace negative statements with positive ones while serving clients via social media, email, chat, or the phone. This approach maintains a good tone while remaining truthful with customers.

Empathy

Empathy is essential for helping clients and sincerely wanting them to be successful and happy. Being able to put yourself in a customer’s shoes and be equally as involved in finding a solution to a problem might help your customer care team get to that resolution much faster and convert a one-time customer into a repeat customer.

Encourage your customer service employees to spend time with people different from them to help them develop empathy.

Communication with clarity

Although technically an interpersonal skill, communication is critical for efficient customer service and support that warrants its coverage. When discussing a product, clarity in communication can enhance customer support encounters tenfold – it’s the difference between sending ten emails versus one.

Although clarity is easy to detect during interviews and onboarding, it is a talent that customer service professionals should continue to polish throughout their careers, mainly if new products or updates are released.

Directness and assertiveness

Customer service representatives must be forceful as well as direct. Reps will be able to keep clear communication as a result of this. It would also enable them to assist clients in finding and sharing the best solution for whatever problem they are experiencing.

Consider this: clients are looking for rapid and practical solutions to their problems. They don’t want to wait for a flimsy answer that might or might not work. Reps make clients feel confident in the information they’re given by being assertive and direct.

Skills in product features and applications

Companies are continually changing and evolving – from product updates to new branding, your customer service team, in particular, should be educated on your firm regularly. Given that you’re effectively training them how to teach, they should be well-versed in your product.

Exercises in product feature and application training

Here are some suggestions for product and corporate training:

Assign a mentor to each learner: Make arrangements for your staff, particularly new ones, to have a mentor. The mentor should be from a different department; this offers the employee exposure to diverse aspects of the business and keeps them informed about company-wide events.

Job shadowing is highly recommended for new hires, but it can also benefit seasoned customer service professionals. Shadowing exposes your staff to fresh customer service approaches, replies, and applications that they would not otherwise be exposed to.

Hold demonstration sessions: This is similar to the training mentioned above suggestion, but it entails your team presenting to their teammates. This methodology will test their ability to communicate and comprehend the product. Attendees should be encouraged to give constructive feedback.

Create a knowledge base: It’s been said that the best way to learn is to teach others, and the same can be said for customer service. In the form of a guide or directory, have your team construct a knowledge base of your product or service offering. This approach will not only test your team’s expertise and clarity, but it will also benefit customers by building a long-term company resource.

Skills in crisis management

According to research, 70% of dissatisfied consumers who have their issues resolved are willing to buy with a company again. Just because a consumer arrives disgruntled, furious, or unpleasant doesn’t indicate they’ll leave feeling the same way. You can serve and maintain consumers in the long run by appropriately addressing each customer’s crisis and aggressively striving to improve their attitude.

Some demanding customers will be hard to relate to, despite extensive training in abilities such as empathy and patience. This situation is where techniques like thoughtful listening and LAST (Listen, Acknowledge, Solve, and Thank) can help. Teach your employees to take a breath, listen, and acknowledge clients who are upset. These actions can differ between resolving an unhappy client’s issue and converting an angry customer to a satisfied one.

Mock calls that mirror a real customer service issue might assist your team in becoming more accustomed to the realities of angry clients. Encourage veterans on your team to leverage real-life problems they’ve dealt with in the past to help your team work together.

Skills in teamwork and camaraderie

Camaraderie and community among professional teams can improve overall performance in any business, but it’s especially vital in customer service. Train your employees to look after each other so they can look after your consumers.

Customer service training entails a lot, and it might be challenging to handle on your own. Fortunately, there is a wealth of customer service training material available on the internet. Also, our experts at PlayAblo can guide you through this journey.

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Using games and activities, for example, can make client training considerably more enjoyable. You may use games to teach vital skills while also boosting teamwork and collaboration among your staff, whether they require resources such as a whiteboard or involve your team. Incorporating outside expertise or viewpoint during customer service training is sometimes beneficial, and videos from thought leaders and industry experts provide just that.

Conclusion

Customers consider customer service to be a litmus test for how much a firm regard them. That indicates that roughly three out of every four consumers believe customer service contacts to be more important than marketing or sales, which is why customer service is an important growth driver.

Your customer care personnel should be fully prepared and ready to tackle any problem that comes their way because they are on the front lines of customer service and retention. If you use these customer services and support training ideas, you’ll notice that your customers and employees are happier in general.

Ad: PlayAblo’s Enterprise-Grade Micro-Learning platform is built for the corporate learner. Micro-Learning, along with assessments and gamification features, ensures learning outcome measurement along with sustained engagement.
Find out more and request a custom demo!