10 Customer Service Training Topics

Identifying the most important customer service training topics is a crucial step in developing your employees, and ensuring that they are fully equipped with relevant information and vital skills in representing the business to your customers. Check out these customer service training topics you shouldn’t miss out on. 

Customer Service Topic

The customer service topic in training highlights the important skills required to guarantee a fantastic client experience. Customer service is crucial for fostering brand loyalty and generating revenue. It includes giving clients the help they need to use your product or service smoothly both before and after they buy it, so they always feel appreciated and supported. It also requires responding to consumer concerns, which is essential for keeping current clients. A company with stellar customer service enables clients to connect with the brand on a personal level. Because of this, it’s critical to always provide clients with a favorable experience. On the other hand, according to the Netomi Pulse Report: State of Customer Service in 2020, 78 percent of US customers discontinued conducting business as a result of bad customer service. This demonstrates the value of excellent customer service. 

1. Company’s core values

Building foundational knowledge of your company’s core values is an essential customer service training topic, whether for onboarding or even as refresher training. With customer service employees serving as representatives of your brand or service, teaching customer service skills is important alongside the company’s mission, vision, and values. This topic allows your employees to have a clear understanding of how the organization wants to present itself and embody its values in every conversation with customers. It also helps develop accountability for your representatives in contributing to consistent and good customer service no matter what the situation. 

To avoid overwhelming your employees with loads of information, you can deliver this training topic through microlearning. This strategy breaks down information into bite-sized modules that are only focused on key information, which helps improve knowledge retention. EdApp is one of the free microlearning apps in the market that makes this easy and convenient for you. It provides an intuitive authoring tool to help you build microlessons using interactive templates.

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2. Product training 

Product training is another important customer service training topic that will provide your customer service representatives with core knowledge so they can properly assist customers with any kind of concern and avoid providing bad customer service. This topic can cover the features, principles, and insights about your product or service. Your representatives should also be aware of the important processes behind the scenes that can be relevant information for the customers as well. When equipped with thorough knowledge of your product or service, your representatives will be able to guide customers about your offerings. They will also be more clear and concise in providing answers or solutions to their questions or problems. 

You can reinforce this training topic among your customer service representatives through quizzes. It can serve as a refresher quiz after completing a course, or as an assessment test to check the level of their understanding of your product or service. This is made easy by using quiz software like EdApp that provides quizzing features such as Brain Boost (a system-automated personalized quiz feature) and Rapid Refresh (in-app quiz creator feature for standalone tests).

3. Active listening

Active listening is a skill that enables your customer service representatives to fully pay attention to a customer without interrupting before thoughtfully responding. This customer service training topic should tackle the importance of being an active listener and how to apply active listening in interactions with customers, especially when they are communicating a problem or frustration. By developing this essential skill, customer feedback will be clearly heard and understood. People who seek customer service assistance instead of self service should feel validated about their concerns, which can be easily achieved by actively listening. This helps improve customer satisfaction and customer engagement which can result in stronger customer retention and customer loyalty. 

You can deploy the free course on Active Listening that’s available on EdApp’s free, editable course library. This course highlights the main principles and barriers of active listening. It also provides other techniques on how to improve good communication and address customer complaints. 

4. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand problems and pain points from the customer’s perspective. By including this customer-centric topic in your program, you’ll be able to develop interpersonal skills among your customer support and customer success teams in tuning in to verbal and non-verbal cues of customers, as well as validate their feelings, worries, and frustrations. This allows your representatives to be more compassionate and responsive in dealing with the problems of customers. As a result, they’re able to work on providing assistance and solutions that will satisfy the customers. It’s also a way to build better relationships with customers and make sure that word of mouth is positive.

Contrary to common misconception, empathy is not a fixed skill but can be rather learned. Develop and strengthen this soft skill with courses like EdApp’s The Power of Empathy course. This course highlights the importance of empathy and provides techniques for developing this skill.

It’s also beneficial to provide your customer service teams with mental health training programs. This will help them to better understand and empathize with the customers they’re serving, and will create a more positive and inclusive customer service culture.

5. Effective Communication

Effective communication entails written and verbal communication skill that enables your customer service representatives to deliver the right message to your customers in a clear way, and with proper tone and delivery. It entails being well-versed in communicating effectively through a simple and easy-to-understand manner to avoid misunderstandings with customers. By including this topic in your customer service training, your representatives can effectively address the needs of your clients and meet customer expectations, whether they’re guiding customers through a process, or delivering good or bad news. This topic will also train them on how to read body-language and how to keep interactions friendly, but still professional. 

EdApp’s course on Excellent Customer Service Through Communication is created to guide your employees in developing proper enunciation, active listening, and confidence in speaking. These lessons can be applied especially in phone call interactions with customers. Deploy this to hone communication skills among your representatives!

6. Customer-focused mindset

Having a customer-focused mindset gives your customer service representatives the ability to go above and beyond to provide the best customer service. With this training topic, you should be able to introduce the different types of customers your representatives will encounter, which will be especially crucial for the new hires. This sets the expectation for the possible concerns your representatives will encounter with customers and allows them to have a clearer understanding of the people they are interacting with. This topic is equally essential as a refresher training to reinforce techniques and ways to develop this mindset.

Another course available on EdApp is the Building a Customer-Focused Culture course which will encourage your representatives to be customer advocates. It highlights the importance of customer focus. It also helps develop a customer-focused mindset and behavior so your representatives can better understand the customers’ buying habits. 

7. Telephone Skills

Enhancing telephone skills is a crucial part of honing your customer service teams. In this training topic, you can guide your representatives and reinforce phone call etiquette, policies, and techniques. This will help your employees leave a good impression, handle different situations, and communicate with confidence over a phone call. Customer service teams with exemplary telephone skills are able to apply their listening and communication skills to achieve more meaningful customer interactions. 

EdApp’s Call Center Customer Service course is designed to support your representatives in acing the call process in customer service. To help them develop essential customer service skills, this course covers call preparations, etiquette, how to properly hold and transfer calls, and more. It also tackles ways to deal with difficult customers.                                                                                                                 

8. Diversity and sensitivity training 

Diversity and sensitivity training is an essential topic, especially for industries like customer service that constantly interact with people from all walks of life. This topic will help you create a positive and inclusive customer service culture by breaking unconscious bias and preventing discrimination. Each customer that your customer service teams can encounter comes with different attitudes, viewpoints, and cultures. If your representatives lack knowledge of concepts of diversity and sensitivity, these factors can bring about misunderstandings and miscommunications with customers, which can result in poor customer service. Lessons from this topic will not only be applicable in customer interactions, but also in building diversity and equality in the workplace. 

To get started, you can share EdApp’s Diversity & Inclusion course to boost understanding of the value of key concepts of diversity and inclusivity. It also provides ways to recognize and eliminate unconscious biases, as well as guidelines on cultivating an inclusive culture. 

9. Problem-solving 

Problem-solving skills are a topic that needs to be constantly reinforced in customer service. It supports improving the decision-making process by covering topics like understanding motivations and behaviors. It can also include lessons on developing strategic skills, as well as handling challenges and situations with a logical approach. By honing these skills among your customer service representatives, they can easily recognize the main problem, especially when the customer is unclear in communicating them. As a result, it can speed up the process of solving the problem, while still not compromising the quality of assistance and solutions provided to the customer. 

EdApp provides the Problem Solver course that contains customer service tips for solving problems with a systematic and logical approach. This course highlights creative problem solving and its importance. It also covers the different principles and types of creative problem solving, and types of decision-making for any situation. 

10. Crisis Management 

Crisis management is a highly important customer service training topic as your representatives are the frontline of customer interactions, especially when crises arise. It’s crucial to prepare your teams for potential customer concerns and how to respond accordingly in times of unexpected crises. By emphasizing crisis management before any problem arises, your representatives will have the confidence to handle stressful situations and have the skills to soothe worried customers. It also helps ensure that relationships with loyal customers are still maintained by reassuring them and assisting in solving their problems. If representatives do not anticipate any issue and are not well-prepared, they won’t be able to address concerns or customers properly, which can potentially result in losing customers to the churn. 

To prepare your customer service representatives for any situation, you can use scenario-based training to create an immersive and interactive learning experience. It uses high impact learning strategies like eLearning gamification, virtual reality, and the like to help employees use and practice skills that they’ll need in times of crisis, in a controlled and simulated environment. Among other templates in EdApp’s template library, the Chat template is your best choice for creating scenario-based training with gamification. This template allows you to simulate common questions during a crisis using speech bubbles, and ask learners to pick the most appropriate response for a given situation.