Customer Service Training Program Ideas

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We have said it time and time again – customer service is paramount to a company’s success. And when it comes to the efficacy of your organization’s customer service department, having a well-trained team is critical.

If the destination is a robust and supportive team culture, then proper training, onboarding, and development are the stepping stones to getting there.

Below, we have compiled a list of great training ideas to start building your customer support team or refine and shape the one you already have.

Customer service training goals

It’s important to have achievable and defined goals for your customer service training program. Below are some of the most important training goals you could implement into your program.

• Communication skills

  Improving communication skills should be one of your top priorities when assessing your training goals. Agents can transform into CX heroes through a human-centered approach that emphasizes positive language, empathy, patience, persistence, and professionalism.

• Team building

  Team building is key to any CX environment because it encourages and fosters company culture, camaraderie, unity, and collaboration. Simply put, team building leads to happy team members, which subsequently leads to happy customers.

• Defining processes

  When you define the customer service processes for your team, you’re establishing a clear, repeatable set of steps that will both make it easier for agents to work through customer issues while simultaneously improving efficiency. Without a clear, repeatable process for your agents to refer to, it can be very easy to devolve into chaos.

• Patience and emotion regulation

  A lot is expected of customer service representatives, and if they’re working with unhappy or frustrated customers, it’s important to continue to remind your team to remain mindful and patient. Creating activities or simply reminding your team members how to deal with difficult customers are all solid ways to maintain emotional regulation.

Training ideas for your customer support team

Once you’ve established your customer service training program goals, the next natural step is to provide training activities and programs in order to meet those goals.

Below are a few training ideas to help instill the kind of values you want your support team to carry.

• Mentoring/shadowing programs

  One of the best ways to onboard and familiarize a new employee is through a mentoring and shadowing program. On top of allowing for a more seamless onboarding experience, mentoring programs are great for building morale and providing a sense of the company culture. Allow new hires to learn from experienced team members, ask questions as they come, and build an important connection in the process.

• Encourage new agents to test products/services themselves

  Part of what makes a great customer service hero is not just their ability to understand their customer, but to understand their products or services. Encouraging new agents to test products/services themselves will give them the hands-on experience to answer questions and to understand the product/service from the vantage point of the customer.

• Chatbots

  In the same way that chatbots provide space for customers to handle issues on their own, intelligent chatbots can also provide new hires with another tool to learn the key components of their position. Chatbots can answer questions, provide support, and guide new hires through the onboarding process.

• Guidelines and scripts

  Guidelines and scripts are great ways to provide readily available, asynchronistic resources to employees anytime, anywhere. While scripts are great support resources for agents whenever they need a refresher or a reminder of their talking points, guidelines will ensure that representatives are always familiar with the kind of branding points and values that make your company unique.

• Communication exercises for the entire team

  Communication exercises create valuable space for a number of things. One of the things you get out of these exercises is a sense of community, allowing for the entire team to meet together, learn something new, and have fun. At the same time, valuable communication skills like tone of voice, emotion regulation, and positive engagement can all be honed through role-playing and other exercises.

• Incentivize team and individual goals

  Incentives and creating individual goals are both tried and true ways to motivate and maintain quality with your team members. Employees appreciate rewards and recognitions, and providing a point system, prizes, or friendly competitions are great ways to show your team they’re valued and contribute to a spirited company environment.

Why Gladly has you covered

Even with the most thorough and well-thought training program, it’s going to be difficult to take your support team to the next level without the right help desk software. This is where Gladly comes in.

Gladly’s radically personalized platform is a cutting-edge solution that provides omni-channel support, unique customer profiles, communication history logs, social media integrations, seamless automated workflows, and much more.

Pick a solution that places your customers at the center of the support experience, and turn your customer service representatives into customer service heroes with Gladly today.