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Customer service training is essential for creating and maintaining a successful customer service team. In fact, 91% of customers agree that a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to make another purchase (Salesforce).
Customer support training is vital to the success of a business, but can become rather time-consuming. In fact, it takes an average of 24 days to hire an employee (Glassdoor). Plus, there’s high turnover of new hires, as nearly half (46%) of all new hires fall through within 18 months.
What Is Customer Service Training?
Customer service training is the process of educating and coaching customer service agents to provide quality support through the teaching of skills, competencies, tools, and product or service knowledge. It’s important to remember this is an ongoing process to set agents up for success and increase customer satisfaction.
Why is Customer Service Training Important?
It’s not just about the product or services a business offers, it’s also about how people feel when they interact with a brand. 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services (Salesforce). A customer’s experience is what drives them to become loyal customers and brand advocates. When executed well, the experience will resonate with the customer for years to come.
Remarkable customer service creates a competitive advantage for your business, as customers will remember you as the best option for products or services in the future. Great customer service not only increases retention but also leads to good reviews that bring in new customers.
Types of Customer Service Training
There are several types of customer service training including new hire training, ongoing training, and emergency or time-sensitive training. New hire training dictates an employee’s long-term success and helps them acclimate to the position, company, and culture. Ongoing training is a great way to check in on the team, assess competencies, and improve any skill gaps. Emergency or time-sensitive training must be done quickly in times of crisis with a product or important company updates and can often be an important way to handle issues.
Hiring for Customer Service
Hiring for customer service is a crucial step in building a company’s foundation. The biggest challenge during training is usually the time and efforts of internal resources. For context, the average job opening will receive up to 250 applications and the average time to hire takes 39 days. That’s why it’s important effectively train your employees.
How to Train Employees on Customer Service
Soft skills are just as important when it comes to customer support training. Customers want to feel heard, understood and taken care of. This highlights the importance of human-to-human interactions, as customers don’t want to feel that employees are reading from a script or don’t care about the outcomes.
How to Create a Customer Service Training Program/Plan
The top five things to consider when creating a customer service training program/plan are clear communication, positivity, empathy, assertiveness/directness, and product feature training.
Clarity in communication improves customer service interactions tenfold and can be the difference between sending 10 messages versus 1 effective message. Positivity training allows agents to turn a negative customer experience into a positive outcome. Empathy training puts employees in the position of a customer. Assertiveness and directness training teaches team members to regain control of a conversation and navigate to a resolution. Finally, product feature and application training allows the team to truly understand what your company is selling from all angles of the business.
What Should You Include in Customer Service Training?
Customer service training should map out end-to-end processes including all routines, tasks, escalation protocols, and company policies. In addition to the program/plan mentioned above, training should include interpersonal skills, customer advocacy, and conflict resolution.
Data and privacy
In addition to normal customer service expectations, customer service agents are now expected ensure the safety of a customer’s data and privacy. Customers want personalized experiences, but also expect the company to keep their personal data safe. In fact, 71% of customers would leave a company if it shared their data without permission. That’s why Influx provides a data and privacy policy that assures your company and clients are protected at all times.
How to Improve your Customer Service Training?
To improve your customer service training, it is vital to stay on top of what is working/not working. It’s a good idea to ask your trainees about their experiences via assessments and open ended feedback. Your current employees most likely have some effective ideas as well.
Try to include various methods in your training process to drive the major points home. Be sure the process is documented properly to easily make changes in the future. Ongoing training is also a great way to acknowledge skill gaps, assess product knowledge, and have stronger team members run trainings.
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Customer support is the most important thing a company can invest in. Our teams work on demand to provide 24/7 customer support with all management and training included. Ready to launch in one week, Influx teams can provide the CX support you need so you can focus on business.
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