Good customer service is key to a successful business. Happy customers equal profit whether you work in retail, tourism, or web development. However, offering an excellent product or service is not enough to ensure customer satisfaction. You need to play around with customer service training ideas and see what works best for achieving your business goals, particularly when it comes to building a highly knowledgeable and resourceful customer support team.
Moreover, training every support team member and bringing them on the same page regardless of location is essential in a large or multinational company. It’s also important to have a flexible tool that can sustain all of your local and international training needs.
So, learn more about how to implement your best customer service training ideas and what the intelligent learning platform (ILP) can do for your training strategy.
The undeniable importance of stellar customer service
What company doesn't want happy customers? Satisfied customers bring positive reviews, which generate new sales that translate into business growth.
Stellar customer support is not easy to achieve, especially nowadays when everyone reads online reviews first before deciding to buy anything. According to surveys, 90% of people check online reviews before visiting a business.
Moreover, negative reviews can have a huge impact on your business, but you can prevent or overcome them. How? By offering the best customer support training based on the essential skills employees need to deal with customer demands.
Here are just a few customer service training ideas that can apply to any line of business:
Ensure your agents have an excellent understanding of your products
There is nothing more frustrating than calling the support team for an urgent matter and realizing the person you’re talking to doesn’t know how to help or who else can do it. The first step to ensuring excellent customer service is to thoroughly train your staff so they know the ins and outs of your product.
Focus on soft skills in your training programs
Teaching your staff all the technical aspects of your business is one, but training them to be good support agents takes more. They need technical knowledge and soft skills to perform their daily tasks effectively. Good time management, creative thinking, and teamwork skills can help your support agents thrive and meet clients’ demands promptly and professionally.
Offer a personalized training and support experience
Customers like to be pampered. One-size-fits-all solutions often don’t work, especially when you’re dealing with exigent clients. They want to feel a genuine interest and connection on the other side of the phone or email. Teaching your staff to provide a good level of personalization when dealing with clients is key to offering stellar support.
People are willing to pay more for good customer support. Moreover, customers value personalization more than speed when it comes to a customer service experience. This highlights the importance of a human approach.
In turn, employees need personalized training that suits their specific needs and skill level. With an ILP, you can offer next-level training in terms of personalization thanks to the system’s tailored recommendations and personalized learning paths we will discuss in a bit.
How an intelligent learning platform helps you implement the best customer service training ideas
An ILP offers dozens of features to help you streamline your training and turn your best customer service ideas into actionable tips and strategies.
ILPs are a combination of learning management systems (LMSs) and learning experience platforms (LXPs). They help manage training content and evaluate learners while also tracking their behavior and evolution to offer tailored recommendations.
Here are three ways in which ILPs support customer service training through their robust features:
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Automated training process
Both small and large companies can benefit from the powerful automation features an ILP provides. Especially if you work in a multinational company, you need a system that connects your globally-scattered support team and ensures everyone gets equal training opportunities.
An ILP can do just that as it promotes asynchronous training, which is ideal for people working across different time zones and in various shifts. This training system also ensures your learners automatically get enrolled in courses.
For example, once you create a new account for an employee, the ILP can automatically enroll them in their induction or compliance training. Then, trainers just have to monitor their progress in the system.
The evaluation process can also be carried out automatically from the platform, depending on the type of assessments you choose. For example, you can use quizzes the system checks and grades once users submit their answers. The results are available in real-time; both trainers and trainees can view them.
At the end of a course, trainees automatically get certificates. All instructors have to do is monitor the training’s progress. Besides, everything can happen exclusively remotely or in a hybrid format.
If you want to, you can mix these self-paced online courses with in-person training, whenever possible, to boost trainees’ engagement and implement communication-centered training ideas such as
- Role-plays
- Debates
- Short presentations
All these automated features help the L&D department save a lot of time they can invest in finding and implementing better training ideas.
Read more: Guide: How to make training more flexible using automation
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Skill development opportunities
ILP tools are specifically designed for skill development and provide each trainee a personalized learning experience. Here are some of them.
- Personalized learning paths - based on their actions on the platform (e.g. the courses they complete and their scores), trainees get access to different modules or assessments suitable for their level. This creates personalized learning paths that are tailored to each user’s progress.
For example, for fast learners or those with excellent results, the ILP can unlock more complex customer support courses that remain hidden for the rest of the users until they reach the same level.
- Personalized recommendations - content recommendations tailored to each person’s preferences and needs. The ILP generates them based on each individual’s interaction with the system and previously viewed content (just like Netflix) or their goals.
A trainee who wants to become a customer support team leader and sets this goal in the ILP can receive courses that will help them progress in this direction. The recommendations system is powered by an artificial intelligence mechanism. This automatically traces learner behavior, learns their interests, and sends resources and course suggestions based on previously completed courses, searches, goals, etc.
- Reports and notifications - these features ease trainers’ work and help them effortlessly keep track of learner progress. Every time a trainee in their group finishes a course or module, the trainer can get an instant notification.
The same is possible when new assignments are submitted. Reports also help L&D teams create and deliver their best customer service training programs thanks to the power of big data. ILP reports fetch all sorts of progress, learner, score, or attendance information and compile it in straightforward reports.
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Collaboration features
ILPs integrate a series of communication and collaboration tools that make it easy to train remote international teams and ensure good communication even among on-site employees.
- Forums, chats, and other communication tools - an ILP helps employees be more productive by enabling them to communicate via instant messaging, chat, video sessions or in a group setting. There are plenty of ILP communication features you can leverage both in your training and daily activities;
Groups, for example, allow you to create spaces where members with common interests get together and collaborate. You can create a large group for your global support team or smaller ones for local teams. Trainers can also set up groups for specific trainees based on their job profiles, skills, goals, or seniority.
Employees can quickly check out these groups to stay up to date, post helpful resources, and news, or ask for help. They can also get real-time notifications each time someone writes a new message on the group. Groups come with additional features, such as news feeds, separate chat rooms, forums, calendars, resource areas, wikis, and even blogs for those who want to post articles.
- Team assignments - besides communication tools, the ILP also offers additional collaboration features that allow trainees to work together on group projects. Team assignments are one example.
By using this feature, trainers can group support agents into several teams and ask them to work on joint submissions (e.g., writing together standard operating procedures, restructuring workflows, gathering or creating resources for new hires).
Each team will have its own group where they can collaborate and share materials and ideas. When the project is ready, they can submit it on the platform for trainers to review. Team assignments offer a great opportunity to bring global support teams on the same page and promote knowledge sharing in an international organization.
- Mentorship opportunities - an ILP also helps you create the best mentorship program for remote employees. You can implement a mentorship program in the ILP to enable older and more experienced customer support agents to guide their new colleagues.
You can easily assign learning goals for each of the two roles – mentors and mentees and track their related activities on the platform (e.g. assignments submitted by mentees and checked by mentors).
The best part is that an ILP helps implement this program globally. Someone from the U.S can get a mentor from Europe or Asia. Employees can also schedule 1:1 mentorship sessions via the ILP’s chat and video conferencing tools.
Are you ready to put into practice your customer service training ideas?
ILPs provide many features that help organizations implement effective training programs for their support departments. These systems are particularly useful for international teams that work across different time zones and need access to the same training opportunities.
With robust collaboration, automation, reporting, and personalization tools, ILPs promote camaraderie within support teams and enable trainers to track learner progress and ensure each trainee accesses the most suitable content for their needs.
