Is Customer Service Training Effective?

In a world of commerce and daily customer interactions, nothing is more important to a business’s long-term survival than its customers. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, and without them, it would spell almost certain doom for any commercial endeavour. That’s why it’s so important to deliver great customer service. For some, this comes naturally, but even still, there’s always room for improvement.

Investing in the right customer service training ensures that your staff deliver the best possible experience for your customers. Most customers determine whether they’ll continue to buy products or services from a business based on the service they receive. Poor service could see sales slump, especially in the age of social media and the Internet, where negative reviews can be engaged by hundreds or thousands of other potential customers.

While bad service can slow your business’s growth, great service can help bolster it, motivating customers to spend more. And at the heart of all this is your employees. Your employees could make the most significant impact on your customer acquisition and retention. Your business will be judged on how they interact with customers and their behaviours.

The right customer service training teaches employees how to behave and interact with customers correctly. It instructs them how to react in various situations and how to conduct themselves ensuring the customers’ needs are met. Above all else, it instils in them the right values, both in terms of common sense and in line with the company’s ethos.

With the right customer service training, you can be confident that your team is delivering the experience needed to help grow the business.

Why Is Customer Service Training Important

A common misconception is that customer service skills are something a person either has or doesn’t have. The truth is that with the right training, any employee can be taught to deliver great customer service. It’s all about knowing what to say and how to behave during any customer interaction. And with the right training, you can even intuit your customers’ needs, allowing you to anticipate and react better during subsequent interactions.

Customer service training is important as it equips employees with essential knowledge concerning:

• The Business
• Products
• Formal Procedures
• Services

A baseline of knowledge is essential – only with the right knowledge can employees answer customer queries confidently and accurately. And the right training teaches the skills needed to communicate this information effectively. These skills include:

• Approachability
• Patience
• Empathy
• Politeness
• Assertiveness
• Initiative

The right customer training helps build employee confidence, which is especially useful when dealing with upset or hostile customers. It improves customer service at every level, leaving more customers impressed. It ensures that brand-consistent experiences are delivered through effective communication of the business’s values.

It helps establish a culture of service excellence by ensuring employees can resolve inquiries faster and more accurately. It helps improve employee engagement through personal development and job proficiency. It helps identify and improve on weaknesses. And above all else, it helps build customer loyalty.

What is Customer Service Training

You might be unfamiliar with what customer service training is. After all, isn’t customer service simply having good manners and helping customers with their inquiries? That’s certainly a part of it, but it’s not the whole story, and even the best customer service training courses can’t provide the sort of preparation that we do at Steps.

When first approaching client and customer service, businesses tend to start with their brand and how they wish for customers to perceive the brand. Specifically, they focus on the ‘brand experience’. Where our approach to customer service training differs is that we focus on individuals and their behaviours.

We look at how these behaviours affect the service being provided and look at how they can be shaped to provide the best possible client and customer experience. We delve into your world to understand the service challenges that you, your customers and your employees face. Then, we work closely with you and your staff to create a culture that prioritises customer and client needs.

Customer service training provided by Steps makes use of drama (live or virtual) to demonstrate credible client or customer interactions. And we provide the tools and confidence your team members need to tackle even the most demanding or challenging situations.

The right customer service training balances the development of practical skills and theoretical knowledge. It helps develop questioning techniques, personality profiling, and transactional analysis to enhance learner understanding.

Above all else, customer service training offers a flexible and creative approach that accounts for shift patterns and varying schedules. All options are scalable to businesses of all sizes and instigate changes that transcend the entire organisation.

We do it all, from large-scale rollouts to the design and delivery of engaging videos and digital learning resources that can be accessed remotely. Through customer service training, the infrastructure will be put in place to support your team so that they can deal with each customer professionally, confidently, and efficiently.

What Does Customer Service Training Involve?

So, what exactly does customer service training involve? Steps’ course on customer training places emphasis on the behaviour that employees exhibit towards customers. Behaviour has a big impact on customer interactions, as does having the right problem-solving skills needed to deal with tough or difficult situations.

We work on these behaviours, develop the right skills and zero in on the general brand experience that the customer is receiving, ensuring this is worked on to improve it. We focus on providing training that’ll equip individuals to become as knowledgeable of your business, products, services, and formal procedures as possible.

Our customer service training courses put clients and customers front and centre. Through drama-based training, we put forward scenarios that can be observed and re-enacted live or virtually. This helps by putting individual behaviours into context, demonstrating their impact in each scenario.

With the right knowledge and skills developed through our training, employees will know how to behave and be able to provide the best service possible in any given situation.

We recognise that not all businesses have the same requirements, which is why our training is scalable. Whether your business comprises ten employees or 100+, we’ll design a course that’s tailored to your needs. We’ll work with you to ensure that your employees are fully supported from start to end and to ensure the training is rolled out throughout the organisation.

Through our customer service training programme, these new behaviours and skills will become a part of the fabric of your business. And with improved customer service across the board, you can look forward to positive growth throughout your business.

How Much Does Customer Service Training Cost?

One question that often crops up is, ‘How Much Does Customer Service Training Cost?’. This isn’t a straightforward question to answer, as every case will be different. As our training programmes are fully scalable and bespoke, the cost will vary from one customer to the next.

Obviously, a small company (ten or so employees) won’t pay as much as a larger organisation. In addition to the size of your organisation, other factors will also be considered. Another such factor will be the makeup of the programme. We’ll work with you to tailor the programme to your needs, and we’ll inform you of any additional costs.

Plus, you’ll be notified in advance of the total cost of the programme, so you know precisely what you’re paying before you commit.

How Long Does Customer Service Training Take?

Another question we often get asked is, ‘How Long Does Customer Service Training Take to Complete?’ The reality is that the time it takes for your employees to complete the training will often depend on the size of your organisation. 

For instance, if you have only ten employees, the training can be realistically carried out in days. In contrast, a larger organisation (100+) might take a few weeks for every member of the organisation to complete the programme. 

Rest assured that we never rush the process and will take as long as is needed to ensure each member of your team receives the training they need. 

Check out our Steps to Change Programme

So, if you would like to learn more about how great customer service can transform your business, might we recommend our excellent Steps to Change programme? Great customer service is more than just a series of taught processes; it’s learned behaviour that surpasses even the greatest customer service training programme.

Through the Steps to Change programme, employees are encouraged to change their behaviour by navigating four steps, the first of which is to ‘See It’.

This involves seeing their behaviour through fresh eyes. We use actor facilitators or bespoke videos to show these behaviours, holding a mirror up to the individual so they can recognise the culture as an observer might. In our experience, this has the best impact of any other approach.

Next, candidates are encouraged to own their behaviour and see the value or necessity to change. We offer ample opportunity to explore and address perceived barriers, giving people the time that they need to transition.

Once a person has taken ownership of their behaviour, the next step is to change it. We help people develop new skills and behaviours through bespoke roleplay, coaching, high-impact learning activities, video & digital media, well-crafted inputs, and simulations.

Lastly, each candidate is taught how to live this new behaviour. We go beyond having a ‘great conversation’, instead helping candidates begin a journey instigating changes that transcend the entire business. If you would like to learn more about how we do this, click the link above, call us on +44 (0) 20 7403 9000, fill out our online contact form, or drop us an email at mail@stepsdrama.com.