Creating a successful customer service training program — 2021

Customer service plays an important role in every organization’s growth. Nowadays customer service has touched people to a great extent where people evaluate the entire brand experience and not just the quality of the actual product. A study by Forbes confirms this — 84% of companies who focused on improving brand experience have seen better revenues.

Customer care is one of the few departments in an organization that interact with customer and probably the only one that that has customer interaction after the purchase is complete. A company with good customer service will be able to develop an excellent brand identity.

In the past, customer service acted as the last line of defense to handle angry customers. Today, it is a part of brand strategy to ensure no customers get angry in the first place. The only way to achieve this is to train your customer service team by investing in the customer service training program.

How to create a great customer service training program?

Be it any training program, it will constitute three primary elements planning, execution, and evaluation. Every activity you perform to create a great customer service training program involves the following steps -

Understand your customers

The best way to know your customer and understand their needs is by conducting deep customer analysis. This will be a key process to build your customer service plan. Data plays an important role to perform these analyses. For this, you need to collect data that answers questions like -

• How would the customer like to interact with the brand?
• What does a customer think about your brand?
• What experience are your customers expecting from your band?

Most of these data would be readily available within the organization. By studying and understanding these data, an organization can create a customer service training course that would help the team to interact with customers in a meaningful way.

Find the blind spots

Once you have understood what your customers are looking for, you need to find out what are the things that are lacking in your team. This can be found by conducting training need analysis, that will give you important details like weakness at the organization level, the current role of managers in the customer service training, internal resources available for the training, what abilities and skills your team lack, what type of training does each employee require, and finally what motivates the employees to take part in the training program. When you have all the data you will have a clear picture of the skills and strengths your team has and what training needs are required.

The balance between different training methods

The customer service training should have different training models that fulfill formal, experimental, and social learning. 70:20:10 framework is one of the best to follow for this. In this framework, experimental learning should be given more importance (70%) followed by social learning (20%) and finally a small part to formal learning (10%). In experimental learning, real-life scenarios and simulations can be used to engage the employee’s emotions. Through this, they would retain more information and apply the knowledge directly. Also, simulations offer instant and unbiased results which show areas to improve. Social learning can be done similarly by grouping multiple employees and making them take the simulation. Formal learning can be in any format or combination of formats like video learning, quizzes, mobile learning, and PDFs.

Keep companies culture in tab

A customer service training must cover diverse topics. Apart from the team getting all the information regarding the product and sales skills, they should also gain knowledge about the company and the company culture. Since customers are more loyal to brands than products, the customer service team must understand the mission and vision of the organization. They also need to understand the uniqueness of the company which can be expressed to the customers during their interaction.

Soft Skills Training

The customer service team act as the company’s ambassador. So soft skills are critical for their training. Soft skills like good communication, active listening, positive language, and empathy would help a great deal with all the customers regardless of their mood. These skills are important to understand the mindset of the other person’s emotions. Persuasion is also an important soft skill for the employees as it is a driving force to get loyal customers.

Training Platform

Now that the organization has all the information regarding customers and the customer service team, the organization now has to explore the medium through which this training program will take place. A flexible and cost-effective training program can be developed using an LMS through which simulations, social and formal training can be developed with diverse and engaging content. Choosing an LMS which has an integration of popular teleconferencing tool is a bonus.

Measure Results

Steady improvement and development are important for any training program. Organizations should collect feedback regularly to upgrade the program and find if the program is helpful or not. The evaluation should be done in a proper way; measure the engagement level of the program through surveys and find out the dropout rates. You should also understand whether this program is helping the organization to fulfill its goal and also whether the training program is affecting the organization’s KPI. All these can be calculated by measuring the employee engagement with customers after training.

Give Feedback

Having just data won’t do any good if you don’t act on it. The organization should act on the data points to change all the negatives into positives and help the team to create more quality content and engage the employees more.

Customer service has come a long way from just being the back end of the organization to the face of the organization. It is therefore essential to understand the customer’s behavior and learn how to handle situations in a meaningful way. Answering the right questions and developing top-notch content in an effective training platform gives promising results to the organization’s image and its market value. One such training platform is KloudLearn, which offers several innovative features to take your customer service training program effective. To know more about KloudLearn, contact us today.