Customer Service Training Software

Even though there are many elements that play a role in the success of a business, one of the most important is customer service. A company has numerous touchpoints with customers and all of these can impact the bottom line of business. This is why customer service training is so important. Customer service training software can help businesses deliver efficient training in a timely manner. This translates into both time and money.

What is customer service training software?

Customer service training software enables agents and other customer-facing employees to provide exceptional customer support. With online training software, support teams create customer service training modules that agents access right from their desks. These online lessons can focus on product and service training, new changes, and essential customer service skills that agents need to know in order to do their jobs well. By delivering customer service training online, it’s easier for teams to deliver both onboarding and ongoing training to agents in a timely manner that doesn’t disrupt a rep’s main priority—delivering great service to customers. Customer service training software also gives agents the opportunity to revisit training content when they need the information most. This effective and efficient training method frees up business resources that can be used to grow the customer base and expand operations.

Types of Customer Service Training

There are numerous types of customer service training that businesses should consider. And when it comes to delivering customer service training, it’s important for employees to have both initial onboarding training as well as ongoing training opportunities. Some popular types of customer service training include:

Product and service knowledge

In these customer training courses, employees learn about the various products and services provided by your company. In order for employees to correctly address customer issues, they need to be knowledgeable about the various products and services that the company provides. The onboarding process for these customer service courses may take a little longer for new employees to comprehend. But, if employees can answer the questions of customers more completely, they will be better positioned to help customers in need, which is well worth it.

It’s also important to remember that employees need additional training courses in this area as the company rolls out new products and services. This will help employees stay on top of the company’s latest additions so they can deliver correct and consistent customer support.

Customer service tools

Ongoing training is going to be important in this field because the company’s interface system might change from time to time. This can impact the tools that are available to customer service agents and what they need to know how to use in their tech stack.

Customer service policies and procedures

Part of how to deliver customer service training involves teaching policies and procedures to ensure agents are delivering consistent levels of support across the business. How should employees handle certain issues? How do employees calm down angry customers? When should a problem be escalated to a manager? These are all questions that must be answered in a customer service course. If these policies change, then ongoing customer service training should also address these changes.

Customer service certifications

Customer service certifications are great for teams that have tiered customer support agents who require varied skill sets or areas of expertise depending on their role. This gives agents the chance to complete ongoing training courses and earn a customer service certification online. These certifications can also be tracked by managers and trainers to ensure agents complete required learning paths or levels of training for their current or maybe even future role.

The Importance of Customer Service Training

Why is customer service training important? Well, every customer experience leader is asking how to improve customer service quality. We find that one of the most effective ways to improve customer service is to make sure your team focused on customer satisfaction is trained efficiently and effectively, whether they are in the call center, help desk, or any other type of customer experience team. Obviously, customer service improvement is made up of a lot of different factors, but sometimes, improving customer service is just that easy. If that still doesn’t convince you then consider these stats:

Companies that invest in customer service training have more engaged employees and see 24% higher profits than those that don’t.
Over 46% of customers say they’d go to a competitor due to an agent’s lack of knowledge during an interaction.
Nearly half of call center agents say they don’t feel like they have access to the information or tools they need to best serve their customers.

Customer Service Training Ideas

We get so excited when customer service teams share information using Lessonly because we know we are helping provide a necessary function that helps customers have a better experience, making people happy! Here are some customer service training ideas you can use in your training activities from what we’ve seen our current customers teach and what we share internally that help improve client satisfaction.

What is customer service?

Often, a great place to start with your customer service training is to ask the stakeholders of your company “what is your definition of customer service?” By understanding the customer service definition your company expects, you can begin understanding what your goals are and how to disseminate them to your team. Then, each of your team members will be able to understand the customer experience definition of the company and make sure they are providing the experience they are expected to produce.

Customer service techniques

Another great topic for customer service training is customer service techniques. Everyone has a different style in providing great customer service but using customer service training techniques, you can make sure that your help desk or call center team is using a similar strategy for each call. This type of training will help increase the frequency and speed of successful calls.

Customer service skills

Something we discuss a lot internally is the fact that good customer service skills don’t typically come naturally to people. Although you can improve your team’s odds at having a natural tendency toward key skills for customer service through hiring and firing right, it’s important to continually improve your team’s skills.

When training your team, it is often a good practice to put together a customer service skills list to structure the skills portion of your training. Within your skills list, we recommend including at least communication skills training, presentation skills training, telephone skills training, and storytelling skills training.

We also find that in order to train your team for excellent customer service skills, it is critical to provide customer service skills examples from people on the team that you identify as successful. These people typically have the very best customer-facing skills or help desk skills, so they make for great helpers when you’re putting together your customer service skills training materials.

Finally, we encourage you to train your team to ask themselves “how to improve customer service skills,” so that they continually seek out resources they can learn from and share with the rest of the team.

How to Deliver Customer Service Training Online with Customer Service Training Software

There are numerous ways that a computer customer service course can be used to deliver adequate training. First, this type of online training software is engaging. It leverages the power of actual customer interactions to hold the attention of the employee. Then, this software will track the progress of the employee through various tests and training modules. Finally, customer service training software also has a reliable support system that ensures any issues with the software are addressed quickly.

How can customer service training software improve your customer service training program?

The best customer service training programs today take advantage of a number of important benefits of advanced computer programming.

First, this software minimizes disruptions. By using advanced computer programs, managers can select which customer service training modules are relevant to each employee, ensuring that time is used wisely.
Next, the best customer service training software cuts costs. Travel, venue, and instructor costs can all be put in the past. Furthermore, the same training course can be used for many sessions, further reducing overhead expenses.
In addition, these programs streamline the training process, allowing each agent to learn at his or her own pace, which leads to increased comprehension and engagement.
Finally, training software simply improves customer service. If agents need a refresher on a certain topic, they can revisit the training program with ease.

Clearly, there are numerous benefits and applications that come with advanced customer service training software. This represents the future of customer service training. So, let’s see how your team can go from delivering good service to excellent service.

The Path to Excellent Customer Service

A critical part of customer service training has to be understanding the difference between poor, good, great, and excellent customer service. We discuss this internally as a continuum with four parts:

Poor Customer Service: According to us, poor customer service is defined as not providing even the minimum effort and/or result the customer requires in order to be satisfied. This is a failure to complete the job.

Good Customer Service: Our definition of good customer service is to reach the very minimum required for a customer to be neutrally satisfied. This looks like getting the job done, but not much more.

Great Customer Service: To us, the definition of great customer service is creating an experience where the customer is happy, but not delighted. The customer leaves with a smile, but forgets the experience and doesn’t share.

Excellent Customer Service: The way we define excellent customer service is going above and beyond, going the extra mile to make a customer beyond so happy they can’t wait to return. Excellent service produces more service opportunities because the customer can’t help but speak positively to others about their time with you.

Customer Service Tips for Training

A really great way to make your customer service training more digestible is to simply package them as customer service tips. Good customer service tips include how to communicate with angry customers, call center sales tips, and even the subtleties involved with face-to-face customer service to be used in applications such as customer service tips for receptionists. If your service is currently lacking, you may want to take the tone of tips to improve customer service, which may lead to some interesting conversations.

Customer service phone tips are usually great additions to a “call center tips” section, to make sure that the help desk representatives know how to properly use the phone system and understand how to connect with the right stakeholders internally. Call center customer service tips are some of the most common because of the lack of visual accountability when you are behind a phone, rather than in person, like in a retail store or providing hospitality.

Because we’ve seen our clients onboard and train call center employees, we put together these call center training tips to make help you be more successful when it’s your turn to train:

Tip #1: Plan your training.

Tip #2: Build your materials with multiple forms of media, including at least text and images.

Tip #3: Distribute your material in a trackable, modern way.

Tip #4: Track who has done what with your training and who understands it.

Tip #5: Send reminders to those who haven’t engaged and re-distribute to those who don’t understand it.

Customer Service Training Manual

One of the best ideas for ensuring a positive training experience is to have a customer service training manual. You may require an additional call center training manual, help desk training manual, or even a hospitality training manual, but either way, it is crucial to make sure you have a standard manual to keep everyone on the same page. Although most training manuals have been historically created in untrackable Word documents and Powerpoint presentations, Lessonly is a great place to create such a manual and track who has viewed it and even add quiz questions about it.

Customer Service Activities for Great Training

Remember, customer service training doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, we don’t believe any training has to be boring. A great way to spice up your training is to add an interactive activity. Fun and free customer service training activities include:

Role-playing as an unhappy customer
Journal de-stress training
Brainstorming excuses and rebuttals
Playing “Telephone”
Other team building exercises of your choice

Don’t Forget your Customer Service Strategy

If you are managing a customer service team, it’s just as important to have a plan for your overall customer experience strategy. This can be done in many ways and takes a lot of different forms, shapes, and sizes, but it’s crucial to have a customer service map that leads the way. When designing such a map, keep it simple and to the point, but also comprehensive enough to encompass all of your customer service strategies. Finally, sharing this plan with your team will increase buy-in and make sure everyone is moving in the same direction.

Measuring Customer Experience

Customer service training software plays a critical role in improving and measuring the overall customer experience. And while customer experience analytics and customer satisfaction metrics are sometimes difficult to track, they are essential to help everyone understand how the level of customer service is changing over time. We find that even though speaking directly to customers and measuring them directly is the most reliable way to measure customer experience, it is also a good idea to continue measuring the knowledge and techniques of your team members. You can accomplish this by creating a regularly taken customer service survey or quiz and tracking the results over time for each individual team member to estimate the level of service output from each member and how it changes.

Create the Best Online Customer Service Training with Lessonly by Seismic

If you’re ready to take your training efforts to the next level with online customer service training courses, then say hello to Lessonly by Seismic. Lessonly’s training software enables frontline teams to easily create, deliver, and track customer service training online so global and remote agents know how to deliver consistent service that amazes customers. With Lessonly, customer service teams can quickly ramp up new agents with simple and effective learning. Lessonly is also great for delivering ongoing training to seasoned agents who may need to practice and hone essential skills or stay up-to-date on new policies, services, or products. Ready to learn more? Jump into a free lesson to see what your customer service training courses could look like with Lessonly.