The goal of every business is to have as many happy customers as possible, right? And how can a business achieve to make its customers happy? Through a great, efficient, and hard-working customer service. And how can you create such customer service for your company? Obviously, through training your customer support representatives to the best of your abilities.
You might not even think how big of a power the training process holds in your employees' jobs. If you teach them everything that is required for the role, including soft skills and knowledge of your products or services, the work becomes efficient without any interruption, and your customers will definitely be satisfied with your business.
So, let’s talk about the 5 essential steps you need in training your customer service representatives to create support that is great for the business and the customers alike.
1. Teach Reps about the Product You Provide
The backbone of every successful customer service is extensive knowledge about the product or service the business provides. All your customer service representatives must be able to answer incoming questions or queries about the product because, after all, this is what they are there for.
In order to obtain all the knowledge there is available about your business, you not only need to tell them the information, but also provide an extensive set of resources that they can come back to, learn, examine, or check when there is a question coming in.
For that, the best solution is maintaining a huge knowledge base, a Help Center, that is full of informative articles and documentation on even just nuances of your service or products. This can be available for the representatives or even for your customers, for self-service options.
Collaboration across departments (product development, sales, marketing) can also increase knowledge of the products. It provides a deeper insight into the why’s and how’s of the business, which can be handy when customer support agents need to deal with customer questions.
It is also very important to emphasize that this learning process should not stop at one point. It needs to be continuous and proactive. Most businesses are constantly updating their offerings, so your reps must be up-to-date about every new aspect introduced.
2. Situational Support Training
One of the best ways you can teach your employees how they can deal with different customer issues or questions is to simulate the situation and examine how they respond to such scenarios.
You can provide imaginary scenarios, with different types of customers and issues (impatient customers, frustrated customers, unsure customers, or expert customers). Ask them how they would treat each of them, and see if it’s up to your standard. If not, offer them a different approach, and teach them how they need to deal with the particular situation and person.
You can also provide them with real-life examples. If your employees have a chance to examine actual, complex customer conversations, they’ll have a better understanding of the nuances of how they need to address such scenarios in the future. Once they have an exact example in front of them, it’s much easier for them to learn and remember all you teach. Just provide as much context for them as possible. Research on training carried out by HBR says training or coaching that is immediately after interactions (integrated coaching) can enhance team performance by 12%, and that the greatest managers spend 75% of their time on immediate (at-the-time) coaching.
3. Talk about the Importance of Soft Skills
This is probably going to be the most tricky part of the training progress. Customer service representatives need to have specific soft skills in order to be able to deal with all kinds of customers with all kinds of questions or issues they may have.
One of the most important abilities of a good customer service agent is having empathy, and understanding the customer’s pain points, their frustrations, and their emotions. A study carried out by Salesforce concluded that customer service agents who are trained to be empathetic are about 2 times more likely to be high performers.
For that, they also need to be able to listen to the customers carefully. Listening is essential for communication with people in general. And in customer service, the importance of this triples. Actively listening to what customers are saying or asking will not only help build context but is a good starting point for digging deeper into what they really need.
In my conversation with Imran Carrim, Customer Success Team Lead at Applova Inc., when asked about the best advice he could give on training reps, he answered “Emphasize the importance of understanding the customer's goals and challenges. Trainees should focus on building relationships and becoming trusted advisors to the customers.” He added, “Stress the importance of empathy and emotional intelligence. Trainees should be able to understand and empathize with customer emotions, building trust and loyalty.”
And lastly, let’s not forget about the attitude of the customer service reps. You need to make sure they handle customer queries with positivity and respect. When people contact customer support, it’s often because they have a problem to be solved, making them already frustrated that there is a problem. It’s crucial that no matter what, your customer service agents handle these situations as positively as possible, with full respect, making the conversation productive and beneficial for the customers.
4. Be Open to Communication About Mistakes and Failures
No one is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. We all know that. You can’t expect to have perfect employees that know everything and never do anything wrong, these expectations would be way too high for any human being.
Be open to having conversations about any mistakes your employees may make, so they can be honest with you. Once they feel comfortable talking about failures, it will be much easier to improve anything that might need improvement.
Once you address the issue that has happened, make sure you are constructive and not disruptive with the way you tell them what to do next time. It can do way too much harm in the future if the critique is too harsh.
Make sure they know how they need to handle such situations in the future and acknowledge the willingness to learn, while also maintaining authority.
Ajay Kumar Jain, Team Lead in Customer Success at Automattic, said “Based on my experience, showing empathy for the customer service representative and advising them to do the same for customers goes a long way. However, the long reply is that it varies from organisation to organisation and their policy towards customer experience”.
5. Acknowledge Improvement and Success
Once the training part is over, and the customer service reps “are on their own”, it is crucial to give feedback on the things they did the right way. Ensure you communicate the positive things that they learned and implemented in their jobs.
Rewards, acknowledgment, and positive reinforcement are the most effective ways you can motivate your employees to keep doing the great job they do. Communicating the positives in a business will always create a pleasant and confident work environment, which your employees will love working in.
In addition, such feedback can also be a motivating factor for moving forward, learning more, and becoming better. It can encourage your customer service agents to acquire new skills, take a step ahead, and become more effective than ever before. It encourages continuous learning and a desire for improvement.
In addition, when asked about the best advice she could give, Ashley Edgell, Customer Support Team Lead at Zywave, answered something quite unique that offered an outstanding perspective on the topic: “My advice would be to ask the new customer service representative how they learn best. Everyone has different learning styles and the trainer should be adaptive of that and personalize training based on the individual. From past experience, every training session is unique. Although the information might be the same, the presentation may look different to tailor to personalities and learning styles.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, training your customer service representatives is essential for providing exceptional customer experiences. Focus on product knowledge, soft skills, and situational support, and empower your team to handle diverse challenges effectively. Encourage open communication about mistakes. Plus, recognize and reward success to motivate employees to continually excel.
Create a customer support team that all businesses and customers wish for.
