Consumers know that they are entitled to excellent service. You may think that having customer support agents is enough to offer outstanding assistance.

On top of that, the role seems clear – they just have to help and guide the users. However, it is easier said than done. That’s why providing employee customer service training is important.

One of Deloitte’s research reveals that 60% of customer-centric companies are more profitable than others. So, make sure that improving the skills of an agent is an ongoing project by creating customer service training programs.

You can learn more about it by reading this article equipped with –

• Topics you need to cover,
• Training ideas and exercises,
• Needed resources and materials.

Customer Service Training Topics

1. Product Demonstration

Product demonstration is an in-depth assessment that makes sure that your staff knows inside and out of the enterprise’s products or services.

Without knowing everything about the goods and services, your customer support agent cannot offer the best solution.

2. Listening to Customers

Customer service employees need a special skill called “active listening”. This technique helps them to –

• know how to reply, 
• ask follow-up queries, 
• paraphrase,
• sometimes summarize the things they already said and clarify them.

Even though this ability comes naturally to some people, it is best to train all your agents to be active listeners.

3. Cultivating Empathy

The customer supporter should be able to feel the emotions and understand the users’ position. It helps them to empathize with callers and work together to solve the issue efficiently.

4. Improving Communication

Having good communication skills is important for a customer service agent because it enables them to explain complicated information in simple terms. 

They should relay the matter in a confident, well-organized, and structured way that is easy to follow for your users.

5. Expanding Knowledge

According to Salesforce research, 82% of users expect to solve complex problems by talking to one person. This is only possible if your staff has enough knowledge about the product or services you sell.

Therefore, along with emotional knowledge, your customer support team should go through product training as well.

Exercise These Customer Service Training Ideas

Staff can be resistant to traditional training, but it does not have to be that way. You can include creative exercises or games to make it engaging and fun. Since every organization faces different challenges, you can try out and adjust these customer service training ideas and exercises to your needs.

1) Mock Calls

Mock calls help in practicing a job before actually doing it. You can also use it to prepare your agents for ridiculous complaints that most companies have to deal with from time to time.

Pair the team members and give real case scenarios that an agent may face in the job. Have the staff take turns being customers and support agents so they can get an idea of how to handle different user issues and how to adapt to certain stress-inducing calls.

2) Peer Reviews

Allow the employees to review their peers’ customer interaction so they can tap into each other’s expertise and improve their skills.

The Harvard Business Review states that service organizations that enable peer-to-peer feedback sessions are 50% better than the ones that stick to the script and answer only from management.

There are even tools such as Klaus designed for peer reviews.

3) Game of “No”

In this customer service training game “no” is a forbidden word along with similar phrases like we don’t do that, I don’t know, and so on.

Here your employees will learn how they can be helpful even when they cannot give a consumer what they want. When users make big and bold requests, the support agents can’t say no, instead they have to figure out a solution-oriented response.

4) Personality Tests

Even though personality tests are not specific to customer service programs, they can be useful for your staff to understand their peer’s mentality. It can help the members to best coordinate and communicate with each other. After all, they have to work as a team.

5) Meditation

Working on the frontline of a user support system can be stressful. No matter how hard they try, the agents might get blamed for a problem that is completely out of their control. 

Sometimes customers take out their frustration on the staff and might leave blunt comments and non-diplomatic feedback.

Meditation will ease their mind and assist in overcoming stress and provides relaxation. Your employees can stay positive during those tough moments.

Apps like Headspace can encourage them to de-stress and practice mindfulness.

6) Crisis Management

Describe a scenario with a major problem and no straightforward solution. Divide your staff into teams and observe the way they respond and solve it.

Note that the situation does not have to be a customer service-related one.

Through this customer service training exercise, you can get insights into the relationship between employees and how each member reacts to it, for example, you can know who is being more active and taking initiative.

7) Cross Team Collaboration

Organize customer service training for employees from different departments. You will be surprised by how many insights and ideas the cross-team collaboration generates.

Each department works in a different way and faces separate issues that other team members might not be aware of. So spending a day with other sections of an organization might help to understand each other better and pick up advanced insights that will help to perform better in their jobs.

Also, read – Impactful Customer Appreciation Ideas for Your Business

Customer Service Training Resources and Manuals

When you do employee training customer service will improve. But you need to have the right material for that to happen. 

Here are three ways to get the resources.

1. Employ agencies,
2. Find free customer service training materials available on the internet.
3. Get access to certifications.

1) Employ Agency

The best way to train agents is by reviewing the experienced employee’s work. Saufter is such an agency that offers the training module and builds simulations based on the history of the trained agent’s support services.

Not only that –

• You can test the members,
• Track their performance,
• Hire professional agents,
• Add Slack integration.

Along with these features, it offers marketing, automation, and essential customer support services.

One benefit of hiring a customer service training agency is that you can concentrate on expanding or improving your business performance in other aspects while the company takes care of your user support agents.

2) Free Customer Service Training Material

If you do not want to utilize the agency’s services, then you can use the manuals or materials from blogs, videos, webinars, and so on.

To start, you can refer to the following customer service training resources.

• Bill Quiseng – an influencer in the user service space,
• Customer service blog by Helplama,
• Client Success,
• Customer Bliss by Jeanne Bliss,
• Forrester – research-driven blog,
• Shep Hyken – professional in customer service,
• 7 essentials to excellent customer service video,
• The six steps in a successful tech support session
• Hostmanship: the art of making people feel welcome TED talk by Jan Gunnarsson
• I was seduced by exceptional customer service TED talk by John Boccuzzi
• Gartner Customer Service Webinar
• Collection of videos and talks by BrightTALK
• Beyond theory: business training and coaching

3) Customer Service Training Programs with Certifications

Make sure that your support staff has knowledge of basic customer service training topics by enrolling them in online courses. Or else just book an offline training session for all your employees.

Here are some of the certification courses that you can get for your employees.

• Disney’s Approach to Quality Service
• Top customer support training courses by Coursera
• Chris Croft – Customer Service Mastery: Delight Every Customer in Udemy
• Kyoto University (Edx) – Culture of Services: New Perspective on Customer Relations

In case you are looking for free online courses, we have also got that covered in the below list.

• Oxford home study center – Customer service courses.
• LinkedIn online training course
• Brentwood Open Learning College – free online customer service training
• Vision2learn level 2 course
• Customer service skills by Allison: empower your skills

Also, read – 11 Practices to Handle Customer Complaints Like a Pro!

Conclusion

Utilize the above-mentioned employee customer service training ideas, exercises, and resources or materials to better the performance of your employees.

Remember that completing a course or customer service training program does not automatically make them excellent agents. For that, they need to have some practical experience which can be done through simulations.

The Saufter is the only company that offers such simulation-driven agent training. 

So, what are you waiting for? Start your 15-day free trial here!