How To Improve Customer Service With Training

How To Improve Customer Service With Training
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Summary: Good customer service is no small feat. Achieving good customer service equals achieving a better relationship with your customers. But where do you start? And how do you get there?

7 Ways To Improve Customer Service With Training

Support teams, especially in software companies, are the people your customers communicate the most with. Someone could easily assume they’re the face of your business. To improve customer service with training, you need a good customer service training plan focused on your company’s needs, short-term objectives, and long-term goals.

Improving your customer service team’s skills will help you create a more likable product that new customers will feel safe to use, and existing customers will definitely want to (at least) try. Why? Because by training employees in customer service, they’ll get the skills that will assure your customers that they’re in good hands.

The following advice will help you develop the best customer service training for your staff and, most importantly, for your customers. After all, they’ll be the ones who’ll be thanking you later. So, here are 7 ways to ensure you develop the perfect customer service training plan:

1. Have Clear Objectives

When you start with your training, think about what your business needs to get from your customer support strategy. Create your own metrics and KPIs that will guide you in the right direction, so you’ll know what type of customer service training your employees should get.

By having clear goals, you basically know how to turn training into a strategy with a purpose. Know what you want to achieve and your customer service training will drive the results you want.

2. Always Focus On The Customer’s Success

Customers use your products because they want to achieve a goal, too. Your support team should be able to identify their needs and help them succeed in the field they want the most.

With that said, keep in mind that assisting your customers the right way isn’t just a matter of good customer satisfaction ratings. It’s a matter of genuine guidance depending on your customers’ needs.

To do so, you need to train your team on communication, empathy, and help them improve the customer service skills they need the most. Train your customer support staff to help them identify your customers’ success criteria, and show them how your product will help them solve problems they might be facing.

3. Customer Service Training For Tough Situations

Managing customers can be extremely difficult. A customer support representative might be empathetic, a great communicator, or even the most helpful person on Earth. Some customers still might complain, though.

And it makes complete sense. When you spend 8 hours every day speaking with customers, at some point, bad stuff will hit the fan. To be prepared, you need to invest in customer management training.

It’s quite simple. Develop a training plan that includes the steps your customer support team should follow to properly manage frustrated customers.

4. It All Starts With Good Onboarding

Providing training to improve customer service should start with onboarding. Onboarding is crucial for the future development of your employees. After all, if your customer support agents feel better informed about your company, they will be able to perform better.

The first thing a company has to do is make their new hires feel welcome and part of the team from day zero. According to an Onboarding Survey by TalentLMS, 65% feel welcome and valued when being onboarded, and 63% feel accepted by their colleagues. If your support team is working remotely, one solution would be to allow a customer service training software program to take care of their onboarding.

Create a detailed introduction to your company that will give your new hires a good idea of what your company is about. Then, take it to a team level and explain everything about their job position, your expectations, and how they contribute to your company’s growth. This way, your customer support team will be happier. And you know what they say: happy (and well-informed) employees equals happy customers.

5. Training On Company Culture

To improve customer service with training, you can’t just focus your improvement plan on hard skills and on-the-job training. You also need to train your team with the purpose to be engaged.

So, one thing many businesses neglect is that employees should be trained on company culture, too. Expecting from a member of your team to do their best work just because you want them to is not enough. Their company has to provide a reason.

So, as part of your customer service training, explain your mission to your employees, and be open about where you want your business to be in five or ten years. Tell them how their role will change the way the company operates, and what part they’ll play in shaping this living organism called “business.”

6. Offer Peer-To-Peer Training

For some reason, many people believe that training is a managerial task. However, training shouldn’t be delivered exclusively by managers, supervisors, and/or high-ranking professionals within your company.

In a recent eBook on how to improve customer service in the workplace, Wrike, one of the biggest collaboration tools right now, say they’ve improved their customer service training by cutting back on managers' involvement. This way, learning turns from an isolated experience to a collaborative and shared learning practice.

Let’s be honest. Managers don’t have much time. People in managerial positions are, most of the time, swamped. And adding an extra task to their list will only lead to inadequate employee training.

Training employees in customer service requires time and connection between the trainer and the trainee. Getting a peer (instead of a manager) to take care of the training will strengthen the feeling of belonging in the workplace.

7. Practice Through Real-Life Scenarios

In theory, everybody’s a good customer support representative. In reality, we’re talking about one of the hardest professions today. The ugly truth is that customer service training can’t be delivered exclusively on a theoretical level. It demands some extra hands-on training and an effective LMS like TalentLMS.

To assure that your customer support staff is fully in line with your overall approach, you need to test how they’d perform in a real-life incident. Develop realistic scenarios and simulative material that will help them practice after the theoretical training part has ended.

Monitor their performance, and you’ll identify the solutions to improve your customer service training as a whole.

Conclusion

Nobody said that training employees in customer service was easy. But, between us and you, you will need to be creative, come up with some original ideas for improving customer service, and just begin. As time goes by, you’ll get better and better.

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