Customer Service Games

Customer Service Games & Team Building Activities

As the famous English Poet, John Donne, once noted, “No man is an island, entire unto himself,” and that notion is behind the popularity of team-building activities for groups of all ages. Team building games assist in building communication skills and helps develop problem-solving strategies that work great for kids and adults alike. That is why team-building activities, exercises, and programs are all the rage at corporate retreats and children’s summer camps. Knowing that the benefits of team-building activities transcend age groups, there is a myriad of team-building games for kids, team-building games for teens, and team-building games for adults.

Each program varied its exercises according to the abilities of the age group obviously, but all of them build on skill sets that individuals need to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world. For those operating in a corporate environment, team-building games help create a rapport among your staff that is carried back to the office. This new rapport fuels improved performance with clients and a seamless operation that is bound to result in increased customer satisfaction and lifelong loyalty to your company.

Team Building Activities for Work

The collective groan can be heard throughout the office when staff training is mentioned around the water cooler, but that does not have to be the case because team-building is fun and makes work fun. Participating in team-building activities for work translates into having an engaged staff that looks forward to these exercises as a way of honing their skills in a congenial training environment. Long gone are the days when employees watched training videos in the human resource department before filling out the obligatory informational packets and surveys that indicate you perused the material.

When it comes to team-building activities for adults, corporate team-building games are an excellent vehicle for inculcating valuable lessons in a fun-filled environment. Corporate team-building activities build on the fact that your employees work most efficiently as a team in the pursuit of your company goals, and these types of fun activities remind them “all work” does not have to equate to “no play.” Working by yourself is a boring proposition, so why not spice things up with team-building activities for work.

Virtual Team Building Games

Now that we’ve spent the last year adjusting to a work-from-home environment, it may seem harder than ever to perform team-building exercises. But never fear! Virtual team-building games can help your customer service department share experiences across the department and grow closer together. Without in-person interaction, it can be hard to feel connected to your team. Virtual team games can change that by providing a fun activity that brings everyone closer while honing customer service skills at the same time.

Since customer service is all about rapport and communication, team-building exercises are perfect for boosting these skills. As your team becomes comfortable with each other, they’re also learning how to connect with their customers more effectively. Using methods like virtual icebreakers, virtual team-building bingo, and two truths, one lie can help your colleagues get to know each other. These exercises make people feel more integrated into your company family and stay connected, even if they haven’t physically seen each other in months.

Online Games for Virtual Teams

Nobody likes sitting through boring training meetings, and even less so when they’re working from home and would rather spend that time doing something else. To make your virtual team-building less tedious, consider using games for all of your team-building activities. You can award prizes (or simply bragging rights) to the winners, incentivizing everyone to log on and join the fun.

Using online games for employee engagement makes team-building fun and fosters a sense of community among your employees. Icebreaker games that ask each person questions about themselves and their interests provide a way for team members to get familiar with each other. These questions can include favorite foods, what they had for breakfast, whether they prefer cats or dogs (or fish), and other questions that reveal people’s individuality.

To create team-building games online, you can use various free templates, instruction manuals, and integrations available online. The important thing is to make it fun and relevant to your employees. Employees who feel a sense of connection with their colleagues are happier, more satisfied in their work, and are less likely to resign. Taking your team outside the grind and making office work enjoyable is the perfect way to boost employee engagement and performance.

Fun Customer Service Training Games

Customer service jobs can be grueling, and interacting with the public brings with it a wide array of customer exchanges that must be successfully navigated to ensure superior customer service and lasting loyalty. Unfortunately, as is often the case in life, people are usually more willing to complain than praise in an environment where they are spending their hard-earned money. That makes customer service difficult, so it is great when your entire team can get together to problem-solve around this persistent customer service issue. Customer service activities for the workplace are the ideal platform for engendering this type of team cohesion. After all, why not learn from the shared experience of the entire team? Customer service games allow that to happen in a fun and supportive environment.

Sales and customer service are two sides to the same coin. The former is aimed at making a sale while the latter is responsible for that customer coming back for more services later. Likewise, it just makes sense for both teams to work together in activities that combine both customer service training activities and sales training games. These customer service activities lend themselves to a better appreciation for the role each side plays in an ongoing, successful business relationship with your customers.

What makes customer service training games so much more effective than typical team-building exercises? In short, they are fun activities that inspire as many smiles as they do mental breakthroughs. In the same way that comedy clubs have taken over the teaching of DMV driving classes when you get a ticket, a fun-filled experience is always remembered more clearly than a boring one.

Customer Service Game Ideas

Combine team-building and customer service training into one engaging game session and watch employee participation and retention soar as a result. While your team members learn to relate to each other, they’re also learning how to connect with customers, solve problems, and find creative solutions to customer requests.

1. Empathy workshop

Consider setting up or using an empathy workshop to teach your sales and customer service reps how to empathize with both colleagues and customers. Empathy means sharing a feeling with another, and doing that means understanding what they’re feeling. Helping your team members recognize what others are feeling and how to appropriately respond will reap benefits not only in the workplace but also in job performance.

2. Empathy exercises for customer service

To help your team members build relationships with each other and sharpen their customer service skills, use empathy exercises. These games can help your reps identify a customer’s problem, display the proper amount of sympathy, and resolve the problem while caring for the client’s needs. As a foundational skill in customer service, empathy helps us connect to and understand others. Using empathy exercises can help your employees not only perform their jobs better but feel more connected to their coworkers and customers.

3. Jeopardy game

A great way to identify knowledge gaps in your team is by organizing a game of Jeopardy. By creating categories and questions related to your business, you can discover which employees know the most about the different areas of your business. Better yet, the mere act of hearing the right answer in a fun game setting makes them more likely to retain the knowledge after the fact. Positive emotions like joy and laughter are shown to make information retention easier, as well as solidify a sense of community. The goofier the questions and the more hilarious the responses, the more effective your team-building Jeopardy game will be.

4. Conflict resolution scenarios for adults

Conflict occurs when people want seemingly incompatible things, or think that they do. A customer service rep may misunderstand a problem and apply the wrong solution, or mistakenly tell the customer there’s nothing they can do. By correctly understanding what another person thinks or feels, your employees can better address the issue and resolve conflict without escalation. Role-playing scenarios are perfect to hone these skills.

Examples of role-play scenarios that you can use include having one employee pose as an angry customer. They’re demanding to return an item that falls outside of the return policy, and the customer service rep has to tell them it’s ineligible for return. How can the employee diffuse the situation? If there are other options to appease the customer, what are they and how should they be applied?

Restaurant customer service role-play scenarios are another great way to train any kind of customer-facing employee. Wait staff have to deal with all kinds of customers and situations, many of them unpleasant. By acting out possible scenarios and helping your employees resolve them, you help them feel more capable in the face of conflict. Confidence will prevent your reps from freezing up, saying the wrong thing, or accidentally making the situation worse.

Customer Service Week Activities

Celebrated the first full week in October, Customer Service Week celebrates and honors the hard work done by the nation’s service representatives. If you have a team of dedicated customer service workers who toil daily to ensure your brand name with their public interactions, rewarding them with customer service week games and activities is a great way to show that you appreciate their contribution to the success of your organization.

Not only can you promote customer service week games for your hardworking staff, but such activities serve as great customer service icebreakers between departments. Customer service week games and puzzles allow your employees to continue their ongoing training, under the guise of fun-filled frivolity, and four out of five dentists have long agreed that fun-filled frivolity is the way to go when you are learning new things.

Various Team Building Exercises

When plotting out quick team-building activities always harkens back to the joys that you remember from elementary school. Specifically speaking, remember the joys of recess. The psychology of your basic nine-year-old fourth-grader and average 39-year old accountant is much the same when it comes to being cooped up in the classroom or office. Rather than fight that fact, integrate that factor into your ice breaker games and quick team building activities by moving the action outside with outdoor team building games. As opposed to indoor team building activities, outdoor team building activities awake the senses and excite the brain’s neurons from the stimulation provided by a new environment.

To keep your staff fresh and alert for changing conditions, mix up your indoor team building games with outdoor team building activities to help awaken their senses. Whether it is a group walk around the building or a sack race that pairs coworkers in a tripod-like configuration of cooperation, moving the action outside increases the rate of retention both in and out of the building. No one said that learning had to be boring, so take that philosophy to the streets, and see the supercharged results you get by simply exposing your staff to the warm rays of the sun on an otherwise busy workday.

If you’re ready to reinvigorate your support team with some new and fun customer service training games, then take a look at our free resource! If you’re looking for a way to deliver customer service training in a more engaging format that employees love, then consider taking a look at this quick preview of Lessonly—we’d love to help!