Guest Post: Cultivate a Customer Service Online Training

This week, we feature an article by Christopher Jan Benitez, a freelance writer who specializes in digital marketing. He shares the importance of developing online training resources for your customer service team and how to implement one for the success of your business.

Your customer service team must be an asset to your organization. They should help provide quick service, sustain positive customer relationships, and help address concerns prospects have from becoming one. 

The best customer service doesn’t have to work together in the same room. Your team can be composed of different people across the globe and can provide excellent support to your clients. 

However, this is only possible if they are trained the right way. 

Why Your Customer Service Needs Online Training 

Online training for your customer service is essential for various reasons: 

• Helps them become better brand advocates – Customer service is your frontline when talking to leads and customers about your business. Their knowledge about your business and their disposition influences people also to have a positive attitude toward your brand. 
• Increases customer loyalty – After turning people into customers, the real work begins by keeping them as one. Customer service helps by ensuring all their needs are met and questions answered. In doing so, there’s no reason for them to leave! 
• Gain a competitive advantage – Having a great product and service for sale is good. But having customer service that treats customers like real people and humanizes your brand is even better. 

How to Build an Effective Customer Service Online Training 

Below are ways to help your organization develop solid online training in place for your customer service team: 

Determine Customer Training Type 

There are various ways you can train your online customer support staff. New hires undergo an onboarding process that includes training. Aside from getting to know the team, the training introduces your products and services and sets expectations based on their responsibilities to avoid confusion among the team. 

Over time, you may want a quarterly or annual team review to ensure everybody’s in sync and clicking on all cylinders. You can determine this by referring to the North Star metrics when reviewing each. This also serves as a re-training—revisit some of your training that your team isn’t proficient in or supply additional training to ramp up their performance. 

Finally, you want to call emergency training for new or updated products you’re offering. This enables your customer support to answer queries about them correctly. 

Use the Best Materials for Training 

Aside from product and service information and company background, your training materials should teach you how to become a better customer support agent. In addition, it should instill skills like interpersonal communication, crisis management, and conflict resolution to help them solve leads and customers’ issues with your organization. 

And since customer support never ends, so should your efforts in helping them continuously provide better services to customers. To do this, you must extract information from people who talked to your customer support regarding their experience. Then, after every interaction with your team, ask people to take assessments containing questions about their experience. 

Use their feedback to focus on areas of improvement to be integrated into your training. 

Simulate Calls 

Let’s face it: as efficient as automated customer service is, nothing beats the personal touch of an actual human on the other line. 

So, to help put their training into practice, you want your team to take up mock calls simulating new or difficult scenarios regarding your business.  

For example, simulate a call with branching scenarios to see how your customer responds to each. Recreating these situations helps them get used to the pressure from leads or customers. This way, they can provide them with the appropriate response without getting rattled. Since there can be unlimited scenarios that could happen in a call, your team may not be able to respond correctly to each instance. In this case, you can diagram the most common scenarios into an easy-to-follow flowchart that your team can use as a guide during calls. 

The call simulation and data from actual calls should help identify which scenarios you must diagram in the flowchart. At best, you want your team to be able to manage customer expectations from these calls. Even if they could not hit the goals, encourage your team to at least make an effort to help customers. 

Conclusion 

Most businesses neglect customer support for various reasons. Because they prioritize getting new clients, taking care of existing ones goes by the wayside. On the contrary, investing in online customer support allows your organization to cultivate relationships with current customers, turning them into loyal brand advocates. 

At the same time, you can use customer support to introduce prospects to the business, which could convince them to become clients. Again, this can only be possible if you have a robust online training program, which we have detailed above. 

Christopher Jan Benitez is a freelance writer specializing in digital marketing. His work has been published on SEO and affiliate marketing-specific platforms.