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.

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 ideas you can use in your training activities from what we’ve seen our current clients 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 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.

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

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

Customer service training does not 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 activity. Free customer service training activities can include:

• Role-playing as an unhappy customer

• Journal destress training

• Brainstorming excuses and rebuttals

• Play “Telephone”

• Call your own company

• Team building exercises of your choice

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 Strategy

If you are managing a customer service team, just as important as having a plan for training is having a plan for your overall customer experience strategy. This can be done in many ways and take a lot of different forms, shapes, and sizes, but it’s crucial to have a customer service map to lead your 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 experience analytics and customer satisfaction metrics are sometimes difficult to track. However, 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.

Customer Service Quotes

Everybody loves a good customer service quote, here are some of our favorites:

Funny Customer Service Quotes

“Although your customers won’t love you if you give bad service, your competitors will.”
– Kate Zabriskie tweet

“Customers are like teeth. Ignore them and they’ll go away.”
– Jerry “G” Flanagan tweet

“A brand not responding on Twitter is like hanging up the phone on customers. With millions watching.”
– Dave Kerpen tweet

Excellent Customer Service Quotes

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.”
– Sam Walton tweet

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echos are truly endless.”
– Mother Teresa tweet

“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change.”
– Tom Peters tweet

Customer Service Sayings

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
– Charles Darwin tweet

“Well done is better than well said.”
– Benjamin Franklin tweet

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
– Damon Richards tweet

Customer Loyalty Quotes

“Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless.”
– Jeffrey Gitomer tweet

“Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.”
– Chip Bell tweet

“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”
– Walt Disney tweet

Great Customer Service Quotes

“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.”
– Henry Ford tweet

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”
– Peter Drucker tweet

“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”
– Jeff Bezos tweet

Customer Satisfaction Sayings

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
– Bill Gates tweet

“Unless you have 100% customer satisfaction, you must improve.”
– Horst Schulz tweet

“Rule 1: The customer is always right. Rule 2: If the customer is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1.”
– Stew Leonard tweet

Customer Service Interview Questions

Are you hiring new customer service staff? Take a look at our list of customer service interview questions. They include examples of good and bad responses so you know what to look for!