Your customer service is what people associate with your brand. Professional call center agents are essential to represent your company’s products and values. This can be achieved by training your customer service agents. There are however some issues you might face, such as low trainee engagement, inability to track their progress, and low effectiveness.
This article will provide five tips that will help you overcome these problems and make customer service training more effective, informative, and engaging.
1. Train online
Online training is a great way to provide customer service training that is convenient and efficient. Training in person takes a lot of effort. You have to get call center agents together (some come late), set up equipment for a presentation or video (almost always some equipment doesn’t work), and then explain the topic to them while they are distracted by their work tasks. You will also have to repeat the training program for each new hire because of the high turnover rate in call centers.
This training approach can also be expensive if you invite trainers to other countries or send your specialists to train agents from other departments. What do you get in return for your investment? These training sessions can’t be tracked. It is impossible to know the strengths and weaknesses of your call center agents and can therefore not provide training programs that address them.
Online customer service training can be more informative, convenient, and efficient. All you have to do is upload the training materials to your learning management software and assign trainees. They can access the programs anywhere they are: while waiting for customer calls or on their way home from work, etc. You can also track their progress in real-time. An LMS like Learn provides detailed reports that allow you to track the progress of a specific agent, team, or entire department. This allows you to see individual and collective accomplishments and points for growth.
2. Customer feedback can be used to train customer service personnel
It’s not hard to see, but customer feedback is the main foundation of customer support employee training. This gives you a clear picture of your communication problems with clients. It is important to analyze the data and create training programs.
If customers complain that agents take too much time talking to them, then you need to find out why. It could be that agents are having trouble using the software. Poor communication can lead to delays in resolving certain issues. Call center agents may not be given clear instructions on how long a call should take. Corporate training can resolve any problems related to employees’ knowledge and skills. Simply identify the training requirements based on customer feedback, and then create the training programs you need.
You can also build cases using customer responses and create role-plays that you can then play out during training sessions. We now move on to the next tip.
3. Call Center Games
You are so lucky to have games. You won’t find anything better. They are one of the most effective ways to increase trainee engagement. Only when trainees are engaged, can we speak about the effectiveness of training. Customer service training has a wealth of games that you can use to motivate employees.
Let’s look at role-play, a game that is similar to this one. Practice mock-ups in a safe environment to improve communication skills. It is possible to take real customer service cases and make role-plays for new hires. This will allow you to improve your brand without negatively impacting your brand.
Two ways to do a role-play are available:
Traditional role play
Role-playing is traditionally done face-to-face. Agents will need to be assigned roles based on the scenario you have in mind, then explain the rules and let them practice them. You can then discuss with the agent the pros and cons of their approach and suggest other options, if necessary.
Interactive role-play
Interactive role-plays work in the same way, but you don’t have to gather your team or distract them from their work. All of it happens online and one person is involved. This is how it works: A trainee can see the character of a customer, who calls to resolve their problem. There are many options for the trainee to choose from, and the training program moves according to their preference. This is how a to role-play might look:
If the issue is not resolved, it will return a negative result. However, if an agent can resolve the issue, it will return a positive result. Other results are possible. An agent may be able to solve the problem in a way that does not negatively affect the brand. Agents will learn from your feedback and be able to correct their mistakes.
While most authoring tools that allow you to create role-play require coding skills to use them, there are many easy-to-use tools such as iSpring Suite that anyone can use. iSpring Learn is included with the iSpring suite, so you have an all-in-one tool for creating interactive online training content and delivering it to your trainees.
4. Training agents to use Customer Service Software
The duties of call center agents go beyond just dealing with customers. There’s more to it than just dealing with customers. They must also be able to access and update customer information, handle customers, handle calls, manage priority callbacks, and more. They must be able to complete multiple tasks using contact center software tools. To do this, they must first learn how to use them. To help agents use the software, you may want to include software-related modules in your training.
You can either create video or text-based training materials depending on the needs of your audience and the complexity level of the software. To help trainees learn how to use simple software, create articles using images in your LMS. You might consider recording a screencast that includes system sounds and highlighted buttons for more complicated cases.
5. Learn from the best in training and apply it to real life
Employees are often not interested in learning new skills because they don’t see the relevance of them to their everyday tasks. This is similar to when kids don’t like math because they don’t see how integrals and equations can be useful in their daily lives.
Trainees should be able to clearly explain to them what they will get from the course and how it will improve their performance. Let’s say you are giving a lecture about human behavior to call center agents. You might explain to agents that their new knowledge will allow them to better understand their customers, what drives them mad and what they like, and how to handle their emotions. This knowledge will allow agents to solve more problems and move up in their careers.
To wrap up
If they can understand the benefits and have fun with their training, call center agents will enjoy customer service training. This can be achieved by moving your training online using the right online tools, such as an LMS or an authoring tool.
