Tips to Create a Successful Customer Service Training Plan

Viren Kapadia November 5, 2020
Tips to create a successful customer service training plan

Your customer service executives are often the first point of interaction between your brand and your target customers. As such, the better the first impression of your brand, the higher are the chances of your brand doing better commercially. As many as 96% of customers say that the quality of customer service determines whether they would stay loyal to a brand or not. And therefore, it is essential to creating an effective training plan for your customer service executives (CSEs). Here are some tips for the same:

Product Awareness

You cannot sell a product which you do not have much idea about. As such, your CSEs need to be thoroughly cognizant of the various specifications of your products and how the products can be solutions to specific pain-points of the customer that they are trying to sell the products to. Therefore, your training plan needs to incorporate modules that offer a substantial amount of product knowledge.

Empathetic Communication

Empathy cannot be coached into a person, but one can be certainly trained to communicate empathetically. This involves training your CSEs to actively understand the emotions of the person they are communicating with, what the target buyer might be looking for in a product, as well as understanding the nature of their frustration if any. This will allow your CSEs to communicate in a way that can improve the customer experience with the brand.

Training on Company Vision and Values

Your CSEs are ones who represent your brand to the target buyers. As such, it is necessary for them to thoroughly imbibe the values that your company espouses and enable the person who they interact with to experience the same. Also, it is essential for the CSEs to have the organization’s vision in mind at all times, to be able to channelize their communication and efforts towards achieving the vision. Therefore, your training program for CSEs should involve modules on your company’s core values and how to demonstrate them in practical work, possibly through a case-study and roleplay-based approach.

Handling Crisis Situations

Whenever customers are faced with a crisis, often the CSEs are the ones who have to work towards allaying their fears, maybe by calmly guiding them about how to use their products to resolve the crisis. For this, CSEs need to be trained to have a reasonable amount of patience and confidence to be able to handle distressed customers.

The above are absolute must-haves when it comes to creating a training plan for CSEs to make them work-ready. However, certain additional factors could also be considered to make the training program holistic. The life of a CSE is often stressful, having to handle multiple calls of customers who may be angry or talk rudely every single day. As such, it makes sense to include some modules on psychological self-conditioning to make sure that your CSEs are mentally capable of handling the tough nature of their routine work. Apart from this, you may also include a few sessions of team-building activities within the program that could be conducted online via an LMS platform. For this, an LMS such as GyrusAIM could be immensely handy. Not only does it allow you to devise programs with different types of learning modules, but you could also conduct interaction-based practical training programs that can ensure that your CSEs can maximize the outcomes that they deliver.