How Small Businesses Train Their Staff For Exceptional Customer Service

Is your organization providing excellent customer service? Can you still improve a few areas to provide exceptional customer service?

Regardless of your situation or circumstances, there is always room for improvement, which you can align with your business strategies. You must provide the relevant resources, tools, and motivation to help your workforce learn and develop their potential.  

But what can you do to give your workforce an opportunity to learn to provide the services? The answer is simple: Customer service training.  

In this article, I will provide you with every detail you need about customer service training. You will learn about the basics, how to prepare a document, and how to interact effectively with your customers.  

What Is Customer Service Training?

Whenever you think about training, the first thing that comes to mind is grooming oneself to learn and grow in a specific field. Customer service training is such a coaching process for the employees to help them improve both customer support and satisfaction,  

A properly designed customer service training can include exercising interpersonal communication, having product knowledge, and other details such as solving a conflict or acting during a crisis.  

Many customer service training methods can be found in the training and development domain, and this entire method is more like an iterative process where you can teach the employees, help them develop competencies, and serve the customers.   

It is important to understand that customers are the reason behind your growth and business revenue or profit. So, you have to keep them happy and satisfied. Whether you are a manager or a customer service representative, your responsibility is to handle your customers seamlessly.   

Why Is Customer Service Important For A Small Business?

If you are a small business owner, you would have the power of customer service already. The customers are the most crucial part of a small business and they play an immense role in business growth.  

Thus, customer service becomes important to help them have a better customer experience. In order to achieve that, we must train our agents with better customer service.  

Customer service training is crucial. Because it has a better effect on your bottom line.  

Why?  

1. The acquisition of new customer service can cost you five times what you will need for an existing customer.    

2. You are more likely to be making a sale to an existing customer than a new ones.  

3. If you can secure a 5% increase in your customer retention, you can generate up to 25% to 95% increase in your overall revenue. 

This highlights the customer lifetime value or CLV. There is one way to maximize the CLV, which is better customer service.   

It cannot be achieved overnight. If your employees do not possess the skills of how to interact with the customers, the customer service is going to be less effective. This could also result in negative customer experience.  

Remember, a satisfied customer can only help by bringing more customers to the business. Successful customer service training can help you with:  

• Happy and satisfied customers where they will feel valued.  
• Boosts utmost loyalty and makes them come back for more, ultimately increasing sales.    
• Saving monetary resources and time on the customer’s negative complaint handling.  

What Are The Types Of Customer Service?

You can see five different types of one-on-one interactions between the customers and the customer service representatives: 

• On-site 
• Email 
• Social media  
• Online live chat  
• Telephone 

Apart from customer service training, some companies also offer customer self-service where the customer is able to find answers to their own queries. These companies provide portals, frequently asked questions or FAQs, online forums, and chatbots to help the customers.  

Things You Need To Know About Customer Service

This training is more like an opportunity for the company to deeply connect with the customers, mitigate their problems, and show them that you value them.  

You need to have a few customer service skills to manage the customers and do a better business properly.  

1. Interpersonal Skills 

As a customer service representative, you must build a positive relationship with customers. The three major components of customer management are empathy, active listening, and clear understanding.  

2. Clear Communication

Clear communication is another important aspect that helps ensure that customers have received accurate information. It is also important for customer service representatives to maintain clarity in conversation.   

3. Assertiveness And Directness

For the customer representatives, the blend of politeness and assertiveness can be useful in addressing customer issues more quickly.  

The customer service representatives can be direct if necessary but must also maintain respectful behavior when necessary.   

4. Product Feature And Application Knowledge

In a business landscape, understanding your products is a must; It enables your ability to hope you will provide the services or assist the customers.  

It is important to remember that product knowledge might help you to build trust.  

5. Crisis Management Skills

Customers may come to you with urgent situations, or you may face some challenging situations while handling your customers.  

In these cases, customer service training might help the representatives resolve the situation empathetically and efficiently.  

6. Team-building And Camaraderie Skills

Through the training, customer service providers gain the ability to collaborate with co-workers. As a result, it might help you to help an effective team manage customer service.  

7. Customer Advocacy And Success Skills 

The advocacy of the customer service is very helpful to meet the customer needs. This also strives to build trust and greater loyalty.  

8. Conflict Resolution Skills 

Addressing and resolving disagreements can help a customer service representative secure a win-win situation. This helps the service providers turn the negative conflict into a positive experience.  

Different Methods Of Customer Service Training

When it comes to following a proper method for customer service training.

Here are the top few methods that you can use to provide training to your customer service representatives:  

A. Role-Play Scenarios

The role-play method allows the customer service representatives to conduct real-life interactions with peers, allowing them to learn how to handle customers in a controlled environment.  

This also trains the service providers to learn how to provide services in a controlled environment.  

B. Scripted Responses

The new joiners can have access to the scripted responses. This method ensures that employees are providing accurate services during service.  

However, you have to remember that a personal touch in a conversation can lead to a successful interaction between the representative and customers. So, through the training, they also need to learn how to balance scripted content and personalized interactions to avoid robotic responses.  

C. Bullet Points For Responses

You can provide them with key points from the services and quick responses. This way, the representatives can handle controlled situations without missing out on information.  

D. Live Chat Customer Service Training 

This particular training method will allow you to learn tonality, grammar, and typic speed. Through this training, customer representatives always learn to make prompts. 

You can also teach your agents to multitask, handle complex situations, and provide information effortlessly.  

E. OJT Training 

You can provide online experiential learning to your employees as a part of employee training. A properly designed OJT training can help the employees to learn through their live tasks.  

During the training, you can provide them cheat sheets about their work as well as assess their daily activities. This can help them to learn from their mistakes and understand the areas where they need to make improvements.   

F. Gamification

You can incorporate the concept of gamification in your customer service training. In this process you can introduce game-like components such as points, leaderboards and badges to make the training session more fun and engaging.  

The milestones can also encourage the employees to perform well while providing better customer service.   

How Would You Document The Customer Service Training

To ensure smooth training operations and seamless onboarding of customer service representatives, there are a few documentation methods that you can use to help your employee training achieve the desired goals. 

1. New Hire Guide 

Firstly, you need to decide on a new training guide that will include the vision and mission of the company, the role description, and other policies related to the training.  

Post customer service training, the new hires can review the manuals whenever possible to ensure that they are abiding by the same rules. The new hire guide can also include role-specific details to help them understand the services.   

2. Training Timeline

During the training process, you can provide timelines with details such as schedules, performance milestones-related deadlines, and dates/times for every training session.  

3. Tech And Software Setup 

You can use Real-Time Collaboration, WY SIWYG editor, and similar software to manage the training content, reading materials, and resources through software.  

4. People To Meet 

You can help the representatives connect with the team and other stakeholders to improve the scope of the collaboration.  

5. 100-Day Goals

During the documentation, you can help them with a set of clear objectives. These objectives will help them evaluate their performance in the first few months.  

6. Feedback And Reviews 

Regular evaluation of performance and assessment of progress can be useful in pinpointing areas for improvement.  

7. Interaction With The Customers

It is important for the customer service provider to maintain a positive relationship with customers while handling inquiries and complaints.  

Customer service training helps the representatives listen to or read customer complaints. Take a moment to process the criticism you just faced and look for a solution to address the situation successfully.  

Say thank you for the feedback or apologize to them while listening to their issues. This makes the customers feel more valued. 

Tonality is another important factor in proper customer service. Training the representative to keep a professional and empathetic tone can enhance the situation on a positive note. 

Lastly, the representatives should be trained in escalation management. It will work more like a secret weapon to your customer service. The escalation framework will allow the representatives to handle the tricky customers and look for a more experienced service provider with a better solution.      

8. Product Knowledge

While providing training about handling the customers, the representatives also need to have product knowledge training.  

This crucial training allows everyone from the organization to learn about the products. Furthermore, it enhances competency and communication with the clients.  

If the employees have the a to z knowledge about what products or services they are providing, building a good positive relationship becomes easier. 

9. Training Courses For Better Customer Services

Customer service training courses play a pivotal role in providing better information about delivering better service to customers.  

Everyone associated with customer service should participate in customer service training. Even though they may not need a detailed orientation of what customer service is, the training can also familiarize them with the customer service philosophy. 

However, as a trainer, I must also help the employees properly access the information so that they can refer back to it when necessary.  

The online courses provide employees with flexibility and mobility. Moreover, they make progress and support evaluation more convenient for the trainees.   

These further create opportunities to enhance the trainees’ communication, supply productivity, and empathy resources.    

In Summary

For any successful business, good customer service works as a backbone to the entire function. Thus, business leaders look for opportunities to serve customer service that can help them to meet customer expectations.  

Remember, customer service is the face of the company. So, you have to ensure that your customer service training helps the representatives to master the product knowledge, enhance their communication skills, and stay calm in any situation.   

If you successfully train your employees to provide good customer service, knowledgeable employees can handle customers with prompt solutions. As a result, your business delivers tailored services for exceptional customer service.

And, you can turn any interaction into a positive customer experience. 

Read Also:

• How Small Businesses Leverage Social Media For Customer Service
• Importance Of Corporate Training For Employees And Organization
• Take Your Customer Service To The Next Level With A Ticketing System