5 effective customer service training tips

Customer service training is used to train your employees on how to handle customers. Before you begin to train employees, seeing as how this can be quite costly, you want to make sure that you hire the right type of person for the job. Not everybody can deal with customers. Interacting with people takes a certain kind of person; this person needs to have great communication skills, effective problem solving skills, an even temperament, and needs to be able to work under stress.

Customers are the life blood of every company. Without customers you would not be in business, customers determine if you are going to stay in business or not. If the customers are not happy with the service they are getting from your company they will not hesitate to take their business elsewhere. So once you find the right type of people to hire, you need to train them to provide excellent customer service.

Here are some tips to follow when training your customer service employees:

Tip one:
Keep the customer happy. This is probably the most important tip you can give your employees while training them. If the customer is not happy your employees need to be doing everything in their power to make the customer happy, even if it involves suggesting they talk to a supervisor. When training your employees offer them tips and ideas on how they can keep customers happy. This tip should be the focus of your training.

Tip two:
Provide continuous training. Many companies only train their employees when they first get hired. What these companies are not thinking about is that as times change and as customers needs change employees need more training. By requiring your employees to attend seminars given by your company or by people you hire you are giving your employees more tools to do their job.

Tip three:
Use real life situations. Most companies record their customer service calls to use in training their customer service employees. During their initial training play some of the common and not so common scenarios. This will give them some ideas of what to expect and how to deal with this. Also use these kinds of calls in their continuous training.

Tip four:
Have them practice. Before turning these people lose have them practice with other employees. This would work best if you have your experienced employees pretend to be the customer and your trainees are the customer service representative. By acting out different scenarios you can be more confident that they will be able to handle the phones or email. While you are doing this walk around the room and offer suggestions, but keep an eye out for any trainees that are not able to handle this. Chances are if they can not perform during training they will not be able to provide great customer service.

Tip five:
After they have completed the basic training provide a mentor for them. Have the trainees work side by side with a senior level employee. At first they should just be listening in on the calls so that they can get an idea of what they might be handling. After a few hours of this have them switch places with the senior employee, where they answer the calls and help the customer rather than just listening. If they get stuck on how to handle a problem or a customer they have somebody right there to offer advice and tips. For this to be effective you want to continue this type of training for a few days or until the senior employee thinks the trainee can handle it by themselves. How long this can go on depends on how well you did when hiring people to provide customer service.

When it comes to dealing with customers nothing is set in stone, but if you are able to effectively train your customer service people then there is no situation that they shouldn't be able to handle.