Customers expect a fast, high quality customer service experience, and if you let them down, even once, they’ll take their vast spending power elsewhere.
More than half of dissatisfied customers will give you the heave-ho for a competitor – and many of those will feel emboldened to let you, and the whole world, know it on social media.
The secret to keep your existing customers and attract new ones is to provide them with great customer experiences. Providing your staff with good customer service training also ensures that your team will perform better, your customers will be happier and be retained.
Customer service training software can help businesses to train support staff in the abilities they should have to improve customer satisfaction, says BonfireTraining.com. It covers how to coach and inform your agents about your product or service and your customer service style.
In this article we will look at the principles of good customer service training and the 5 modules that will take your customer service to the next level.
Product/Service knowledge
Because customer service agents need to be able to give the right answers fast, they need to have a thorough understanding of the product themselves. And a deep understanding of the product inspires the kind of faith in you that generates repeat business.
Product knowledge should literally be at their fingertips. Invest in customer support software and other tools to help agents find customer information in seconds, fix problems faster, and more easily collaborate with peers.
Agents must also know and understand internal processes to help customers better. Without knowledge of processes, agents often divert between different teams trying to find an answer.
Describe your customer support processes internally in your organization’s knowledge base. Your agents will be able to use those answers to understand how things work the first time, and then go back and read the documents again on their own later if needed. Of course, be sure to keep your documents up to date so that they reflect changes in your organization’s processes as the company grows.
Confidence
Once customer service agents develop a familiarity with a company and product knowledge, they still may lack confidence when speaking to someone on the telephone.
Some agents always feel just a bit insecure, which tends to result in a bad customer service experience.
Other than changing the way someone says something to a customer, such as “I’m not able to fix your problem,” to “I can connect you with one of our engineers so they can help you”, building the confidence of a customer service agent is paramount to their success.
Empathy
Acknowledging and validating a customer’s emotions encourages them to feel that they’ve been heard and that you stand by them to help in whatever way you can.
Insulting customers, being belligerent, condescending or screaming at them will inflame the situation and make an upset customer angry. It will also make the issue more difficult to resolve.
Communication
Communication skills are one of the most crucial to have as a customer service agent (source). Clear communication can drastically improve a customer experience.
When a customer has an issue or a question, they expect the customer service agent to be confident, easy to understand and professional.
Customer service agents need to have seamless conversations and communication with customers, resulting in better customer retention and loyalty.
Self Control
One key and valuable skill for anyone working in customer services is to maintain self-control. It helps you in not overreacting and responding impulsively when you’re interacting with an angry customer.
This skill will enable you to continue to focus on what the customer has to say and get the problem resolved properly. Having some self-control is important when learning persuasive communicating because you are in control of your emotions, you don’t lash out, you are master of your domain, especially against difficult customers, you can control how you feel, what you say, and how you influence the other person to provide better customer service.
Self-control helps customer service agents take ownership, helping the customer to feel heard and recognized, increasing customer satisfaction. Listening empathetically and connecting with the customer’s internal states to experience their feelings helps to solve their problems in the short term, and maintain the customer’s business in the long term.
Summary
You want your customer service team to be successful – satisfied customers mean satisfied business. Trained agents grow into confident, informed and happy employees – a win-win situation for business and customers alike.
To continue to provide your team with the resources they need to build better, more positive experiences, look for a customer service training software that provides you with conversational experiences, personalized customer service and full support.
Last Updated: April 16, 2024
