Practice makes perfect in pretty much everything that you do, and when you implement this same idea into your customer service strategy, you can improve your offering to your customers. You wouldn’t run a marathon without training first, so why would you put anyone on the front line of customer service without customer service training?
Regardless of the industry in which you work, you need to practice. Excellent customer service doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s something that takes time to be able to do, with reps needing to train their communication skills, hone their ability to listen, and be able to anticipate and pre-empt any number of customer interactions actively. Your customer service team must undergo customer service training before being allowed to interact with new customers (or old ones, come to think of it). Customer service training should never be rushed as it can make the difference between customer retention or customers leaving. The ability to keep customers is precious, and when you implement customer service training as part of your business, you can help your team members to grow and flourish with these new abilities. Even customer service reps who have many years of experience always stand to gain from regular customer service training.
The good news is that companies who are looking to improve their customer service offerings can find a ton of useful information and training resources online. The internet has swathes of courses, resources, videos, blogs, vlogs, and more to help them to give their customers the best possible experience. If you are interested in maximizing your customer retention rate and keen to foster loyalty within your customer base, then finding these resources is in your best interest. The customer service training that you see online can be as simple as you like, with little of your time invested, or you can lay on proper courses that serve your customers and your employees well. You can’t lose when you choose customer service training; not only will you be able to provide a better service to customers, you’ll be able to improve the skills of your employees.
With this in mind, we’ve put together five of the best resources for customer service training so that you get a headstart with your customers and their future with your business.
Best Customer Service and Support Training Programs
One of the best things about customer service training is that there is variety. If you like classroom learning, you can do that. If you prefer online courses, those are available, too. You can be as in-depth as you like, which allows you the chance to choose the way your customer service team learns. Let’s take a look at those five resources for the best customer service training programs you could use:
Support Professional Training – Service Strategies
Service Strategies offers a support training package that helps technical support reps to learn how to offer customer service of the highest possible quality. This package is a two-day course that focuses primarily on the best communication techniques when giving technical support and solutions to customers. Technical support is not always easy as you’re supporting from a distance based on the explanation that customers provide for you. Giving the correct answer is, therefore, not easy in the slightest. This customer service tool help your technical support staff to give the best answers using the customer’s language.
Anyone who interacts with customers on a regular basis can benefit from this customer service training. The best part about this one is that Service Strategies offer you the choice of where you attend training, be it in public, online or on-site. If you prefer to keep your customer service training on-site, they’ll send you an instructor to administer the course to the right people. Public customer service training can be anywhere that suits groups of 15+ and the online customer service training can be available for 60 days after you register for it. This gives your reps time to learn at their own pace.
The price depends on how many people are training and where you’d like them to complete it.
Culture of Services: New Perspective on Customer Relations – edX
If you have employees that prefer to learn via watching videos, then you’re in good company with this customer service training option. This program uses videos of real-life customer service interactions to be able to impart on their attendants the best customer service skills. The businesses involved are in the retail, hospitality and food service industries, so if your business falls into one of these categories it’s going to do well. As a visual aide, these videos can teach viewers to analyze customer interactions properly while being able to assess the services in their own business.
The bonus for this course is that it’s a free eight-week course. It requires you to ensure that your staff have 2-3 hours of free time to complete this course, so if you plan to offer this type of customer service training, give your employees the time over the eight weeks to complete it. It gives you the option of buying completion certificates, too, which can be a nice motivational tool for your staff.
Various Courses – HubSpot Academy
At HubSpot Academy, you can choose between a wide range of courses that will give your staff some useful lessons in customer service that will make sense for your business. Some of their courses include:
- Inbound Certification Course. This covers the recent updates to Inbound Methodology.
- Conversational Strategy. It’s important to be able to learn in-depth about messaging strategies, and you can do that with this course that tells your staff how to message effectively.
- Lead Management. Customer service training isn’t just for your staff. Your customer service management can benefit from courses, too.
Head over to the “Service Hub” and find training that works specifically for HubSpot users. There is plenty you can learn here about using Service Hub tools, and the best bit?
The courses are free.
Customer Service Training – Alison
Employees in any stage of their customer service career can benefit from Alison’s customer service training program. There is so much involved in this course, and it can take between one and two hours to complete. Your staff will be able to go through the basic concepts of customer service with the goal of learning how to handle difficult customer encounters. It’s also going to help them learn why these difficult interactions happen in the first place.
Your staff will be able to learn how to create an approach to customer service that is focused solely on the customer. You’ll learn how to handle inquiries as well as complaints, and you can help your employees to learn how to offer the best outcome to stressful situations. The courses are free, so it’s just a case of finding the time to add them to your employee’s day!
Call Center Customer Service – Universal Class
When you are looking for accredited customer service courses, you may stumble across Universal Class and their offerings on their website. They have a range of customer service courses on their website but the one that stands out is their Call Center Customer Service course.
With this course, your staff can learn the responsibilities and requirements of the job. They can also learn what skills they need to be successful in a call center position. This includes the etiquette expected in a call center, the issues they may face and how to overcome them, too.
This online course comes with a final exam after six months on the course.
These customer service courses are by no means the only ones out there, but they are the ones that we think are the top five!