How do you feel about customer service training?
More importantly, how do your employees feel about customer service training?
Unfortunately, a ton of companies treat customer service training as a huge, burdensome task. Other companies treat it as unimportant busywork and relegate it to the back burner, where it just sits there. Simmering, going stale, or maybe even burning.
This can leave employees feeling frustrated, bored, or overwhelmed by the job of caring for customers.
Want to know what innovative companies do? They understand that customer service training is not only important to building a great brand culture, but it is also a profit center!
Too many companies are using outdated methods of customer service management, and they’re losing sales and repeat customers as a result!
Excellent customer service isn’t just about helping your customers. It’s about helping your business! When you become customer-focused and choose to provide your employees with exceptional training, you are investing in your customers’ experiences.
That investment pays off when happy and satisfied customers who return again and again. And they tell their friends and family about their experience with your brand!
Prioritizing customer service is about making sure that everyone in your company understands the value of your customers.
It isn’t about “the customer is always right.” That’s an outdated adage. It is about “the customer is always important.”
Think about how you create happy employees. You make them feel valuable, right? Make them feel appreciated and important? As a manager, you know how important this is to develop morale and improve retention.
The same strategy works for your customers: make them feel valued, and they will be more valuable.
Here are some of the key benefits that we see when companies train their workers to care for their customers:
Of course, you can’t provide a stellar experience to your customers if you don’t train your employees on how to do that. But we’ll get to that training in a little bit. Next, we need to talk about the types of customer service that you could be providing.
Yep, absolutely! This is not a “one size fits all” scenario. Your team needs to be prepared to help people who call, email, complain online, post on your social media pages, and show up in person with concerns.
There are valuable soft skills you should teach your employees, including things like active listening, appropriately managing conflicts, taking ownership, how to speak or write confidently with a reassuring tone, and the importance of paying attention to details like the customer’s name and important preferences.
We have been offering customer service training for years, and one of the things we know for certain is that each company has different needs. Before we offer training to any company, we figure out what their most important needs are. Some of the most important trainings we provide are for really different purposes: launching new products, selling, communication, empowered decision making, and soft skills. Learn more about each of these types of customer service training here. Each is important, and they are all connected.
At Knowledge Force Consulting, we teach emotional intelligence strategies, how to be flexible and nimble when working with a customer (especially a challenging one!), and how to help people, instead of just trying to complete the sale. We find role-play activities to be incredibly helpful in training these soft skills. Read why here.
No matter where a person works within a company, everyone is part of the customer service experience. We want everyone to feel like they are contributing to the culture that makes customers happy and excited!
Everyone belongs in the customer service discussion, even employees who don’t think of themselves as “customer facing.”
That is a question we sometimes hear from skeptical workers who are walking into a training course or participating in an e-learning course.
Am I really going to learn something important, or am I just going to end up memorizing company values so I can parrot them back to my boss?
Is this training going to be useful to me, or is it going to be obvious stuff that I already know from working with customers?
How can what I learn today actually impact customers positively?
These are great questions! They also speak to the frustrating reality of the lack of training that many workers have received in the past. They worry that the content is going to be simplistic or irrelevant because they have sat through simplistic or irrelevant customer service training before.
Let’s break that cycle! Let’s make sure that your team experiences the full benefit of customer service training!
Here is what we know for sure:
Today’s consumers want to feel valued. They want to develop relationships with the brands they love. Training your team to recognize the ways that they can create this value and develop these relationships is an essential step for you as an employer!
Customer service should never be an afterthought to your daily operations.
It should be at the forefront of everything you do.
Your brand culture will benefit from prioritizing customer service. Customer service training can de-center the employee’s experience by centering on the customer. It can reduce worker stress, because each worker has more resources at their command.
Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the task of solving complicated problems or calming angry customers, workers feel confident that the problems can be solved! And angry customers can be made happy again!
It’s okay if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the idea of training your team to more effectively respond to consumer concerns. We can help.
When we work with a client, we look at the specific challenges that the client is experiencing and then create a targeted and effective strategy for addressing those challenges.
We “pull back the curtain,” so to speak, and examine your current processes and training programs. This requires you to trust us and place your confidence in us, which we know can be scary! But we promise to exceed your expectations! We have used our innovative and effective approach to train the workers at countless companies.
We want to create targeted, practical solutions that can be implemented at your company. Whatever your time frame or budget, we work with you to find solutions for your customer service training needs.