Tips To Take Your Customer Service Training To The Next Level

Tips To Take Your Customer Service Training To The Next Level
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Summary: Customer service training has become a crucial element for businesses to look after to ensure satisfied customers and increased brand reputation. In this article, find 4 ways of boosting it the easy way.

4 Ways Of Boosting Your Customer Service Training

Providing poor customer service can cost your organization a lot of money and often leads to a loss of revenue, non-returning customers and damaged brand reputation. In current scenarios, it is non-negotiable for businesses to overlook customer satisfaction. Businesses in the United States lose $62 billion in revenue a year from poor customer service [1]. This is not surprising if you consider the fact that customers will cancel a transaction after even a single bad experience.

The Advanced Guide To Top Your Customer Service Training Game
Get actionable insights on identifying and solving problems with your existing customer service training program.

Why Is Customer Service Important?

A recent survey conducted by American Express found that nearly half of the participants reported that they had canceled a transaction after experiencing poor customer service. 33% of those surveyed said that they had switched companies after one single negative experience [2]. About half of consumers today will never do business with an organization that provided poor service again. According to Harvard Business Review, it's anywhere between 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one [3].

Providing high-quality customer service will help your organization to retain customers and improve your brand reputation. In fact, most consumers are willing to spend more for great service. 7 out of 10 consumers reported that they had spent more on better customer service [4]. This means it is needed for organizations to focus on excelling customer service skills, along with selling services and products.

How To Ensure The Best Possible Service?

The right method to ensure the best possible customer service is to provide teams with customer service training to learn the essential skills needed to create happy/good customers. However, not all customer service training programs are created with a single objective in mind. An effective training plan must use a blend of training methods and topics to teach new skills to employees in an engaging manner. Learner’s engagement is one of the top challenges for L&D professionals today. However, there are 4 things you can do to not only boost learner engagement but to take your customer service training to the next level.

1. Boost Engagement With Experiential Learning

The most successful training programs are significantly focused around experiential learning because it is a proven methodology to improve engagement and employee performance. Experiential training methods encourage employees to learn through experiences. There are different ways you can use experiential learning. Some, are as simple as aligning a co-worker or coach to help them learn skills on the job or providing on the job-aids which they can use as references.

However, many organizations have started to use simulations to help customer service teams learn the right skills with minimal risk. Simulations recreate workplace scenarios for employees using a digital platform. Employees then work through the simulation, making choices to gain on the job experience, receive automatic feedback and speed up the training process.

Irrespective of the method used for utilizing experiential training, teams need to ensure that the learners are engaged throughout the process.

2. Use Evergreen Content

It takes a considerable amount of effort to create content that is both engaging and useful. This is even truer when it comes to eLearning content. What's worse is when you put in the time and effort to create learning content that you can use only for a short period of time.

To avoid the cycle of continuous content creation, you must take things a step further by creating evergreen content. This learning content can be used for long periods and is unlikely to lose its relevance. 3 simple ways you can create more evergreen content are:

  • Avoid trendy and time-sensitive topics
  • Create graphics that don't heavily rely on statistics
  • Focus on real-world content

Using more evergreen content will help you improve your learning content and increase your training ROI. The weightage of content might tend to deplete with time but by using the right modernizing techniques, you can ensure its relevancy with minimum investment.

3. Promote A Culture Of Continuous Learning

Today's employees want more learning opportunities. Your organization can provide this by creating a culture of continuous learning and more self-paced learning programs. This comes in handy when it comes to all forms of training. However, it is especially useful when it comes to topics like customer service, where information changes frequently. Giving employees more access to training materials, when they need it, will significantly help them improve their skills. Facilitating communication amongst teams result in team-building and bring forth many scenarios that can help other members of the team for future implications. This not only reduces friction while working cross-functionally but also enhances communication skills which is a must for great customer service.

Promoting a culture of continuous learning helps employees learn faster even with today's time constraints and busy schedules. Giving the right flexibility to the workforce to learn and adapt to knowledge will help them tackle customer queries with more ease.

4. Align Your Services With Customer Needs

Customer service training often includes some form of product knowledge training where employees learn about your business offerings. This is incredibly useful information because it ensures that all your employees are on the same page and have the right knowledge required to assist customers. But most customers already have the ability to look up basic information about your organization's products and services.

It is more important than ever for employees to learn how each offering helps fill customer needs. Training content must include the basics but should also provide more information about customers and their connection with the products. Customers want to know what sets your offerings apart from other companies. The best training content helps employees learn how to answer these kinds of questions.

Conclusion

Providing excellent customer service will help your organization gain more loyal customers, improve your brand reputation and increase revenue. Creating a customer service training plan is one of the best ways to ensure that your employees have the necessary skills to provide the best service experience to the customers. It is advised to weave a customized program that can be modified basis the requirement of customers and the business, rather than having multiple training courses for customer service.

Creating a customized customer service training plan can also bring efficiency to your team members that in return will enhance productivity. Highlighting the key points of implementing experiential learning can be better understood in the eBook The Advanced Guide to Top Your Customer Service Training Game. The eBook throws light on the crucial aspects of customer service program and help identify problems with your existing customer service, solve those and explain benefits of experiential learning.

References:

[1] The $62 Billion Customer Service Scared Away [INFOGRAPHIC]

[2] American Express

[3] The Value of Keeping the Right Customers

[4] 75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics