Great Customer Service Training Is Essential
Poor customer service can significantly damage your bottom line. Companies are losing more than $40 billion in revenue a year due to negative customer experiences [1]. What's even more interesting is that many organizations don't even realize they have poor customer service. In fact, 80% of businesses believe they provide superior customer service, but only 8% of their customers actually agree.
These contrasting opinions are usually due to a lack of customer feedback. 91% of consumers who experience poor customer service leave and no longer do business with that company again [2]. 96% of these customers never tell the organization about their experience. However, they do tell up to 15 people they know about it.
This means many organizations are unaware that poor customer service is damaging their reputation and causing them to lose customers. All of this can easily be avoided by implementing a customer service training program. Teaching your employees how to provide excellent customer service will not only ensure that they exceed your customer's expectations, it will also boost your profits, increase brand loyalty, and attract new customers. Businesses that provide quality customer service earn revenues between 4% and 8% above their market.
There are numerous ways you can train your employees to improve customer service. To help get you started, below listed are points that can help employees focus to deliver a lasting customer service experience.
1. Company Mission And Values
It may seem like your company’s mission and values are irrelevant to customer service training, but it's quite the opposite. It is important to identify the values that your company communicates and relates to. These influence the behavior of your customer service reps and help motivate them in delivering quality service. Both your mission and values should help your employees understand how they contribute to the overall success of the organization and shape your organization’s culture. Including your mission and values in your customer service training will help you to set clear expectations for your employees.
2. Product Knowledge
One of the most common complaints when it comes to poor customer service is that the customer support rep doesn't have the knowledge or answers customers are looking for. Customers expect your reps to be Subject Matter Experts when it comes to your organization's products and services. This is why product knowledge training has become an essential part of training your customer service team. Training your customer service team thoroughly on your organization's products, services, and policies will boost your employee's confidence. It can also ensure that your customers are getting what they are looking for. This will build trust with your customers, help employees resolve issues faster and improve their selling abilities.
3. Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills are essential when working with customers. These are the skills that will help your employees communicate effectively and confidently with your customers. This ensures a smooth, error-free flow of information between your employee and the customer. Sometimes, dealing with a customer can be tricky. Even having great product knowledge and company information, customer service representatives suffer to answer questions. In such scenarios, it is the interpersonal skills, on which the employee has invested, can be really helpful in identifying the right resolution that is bothering the customer.
4. Create Personalized Experiences
It is delightful for customers to engage in a conversation that is personal to them. It helps you and your customer to relate with the problem and the hunt for solution amplifies in such case. For customer service executives, it is crucial to understand the customer’s persona and then analyze their behavior towards the problem. This assists in identifying the criticality of the issue and how much is the customer affected by it. Gestures, like calling out them with their name, contact on their preferred channel and delivering problem-specific solutions, make a huge difference in creating such great experiences.
5. Focus On Customer Advocacy
Customer Advocacy goes way beyond making happy customers. This is an integral part of the customer lifecycle. Your customer service teams are needed to put in extra effort to turn your existing customers into your brand advocates. It is not just about solving their issues and giving solutions, but doing what surprises them about you as a brand. Some basic ideas to bolster customer advocacy would be to collect their feedback and measure it as the success parameter for your team. Not only will this help each individual of the team to improve their potential, but it also leaves an impression on customers that they’ve been heard and cared for.
6. Feedback And Follow-Up
Knowing how the customer felt after the entire discussion has 2 major benefits. While you get to know the experience the customer had; you can identify the loopholes of your current training program and can make necessary amendments. This makes the customer feel valued and heard, because of which they can end up giving you suggestions to improve your training program. In the case of getting negative feedback, always ask them to address the issues they experienced during the conversation and review their recommendations.
Providing your employees with thorough customer service training is essential to guarantee excellent customer service and will help your employees supersede your customer expectations every time. Apart from losing business in terms of revenue, organizations end up suffering a damaged reputation because of poor customer experience. Most organizations don’t even know they have a problem with their customer service.
To prepare businesses in excelling their customer experiences, Infopro Learning has created this eBook, The Advanced Guide To Top Your Customer Service Training Game that highlights the most popular training methods. Companies who train their employees and provide great service improve their profits, increase customer loyalty and improve their overall reputation.
References:
[1] 16 Customer Service Skills That Drive Every Business
[2] 96% of unhappy customers won’t complain to you, but will tell 15 friends [infographic]
