Any business, regardless of size, industry, age or type, has to deal with its clients. Whether the touch point is at the point of sales, or customer care and after-sales service. It’s thus imperative that the individual holding the designation is trained sufficiently to represent your brand and its values in a way that is polite, conducive to business success and pleases the customer.
Although customer service denotes that there are certain expected ‘rules’ that a client-facing staff member needs to follow in any business, individual businesses can see a need for tailoring the training for their brand. This type of training includes instruction on how to address customers in various forms of communication, how to greet customers, and how to handle certain situations according to internal procedures.
This article explores what steps to take and areas to focus on when you are providing customer service training for your staff, emphasising the needs of your business.
Defining Good Customer Service
Good customer service starts by actively listening to understand the customer’s need, whether it be a complaint or a query. This is where staff can draw on good communication skills: listening to understand the goal, asking clarifying questions and doing so while being helpful and friendly.
By defining the customer’s goal, the representative can start solving the problem, whether it is finding information, directing them to another person, or answering a simple question.
During this process, it is vital to understand what professional communication means. This can relate to a person’s tone of voice, specific terminology that is used as well as keeping the client informed of what is being done to help them. For example, “Ma’am, please give me a few minutes to call our maintenance department to help with your room”, or “Sir, I need to connect you with the finance department to follow up on your account status. Please stay on the line for them.”
Set Clear Expectations and Steps Forward
When onboarding an employee, or a customer service agent, you need to already communicate to your staff member what you expect when you speak about “good customer service”. It is also a good idea to have a list or guide of expected behaviours. Some businesses might call it a policy, but guides take a more instructive approach, guiding the reader through the process with active tips. Whereas a policy is rigid and feels like a set of rules for specific interactions, and this can feel like it is constricting the abilities and problem-solving abilities of the staff member.
Where it is important to your brand, you also need to communicate important information that is vital to your brand. Simple elements such as all staff needing to greet visitors, using specific language like always speaking in English or always addressing a person by their title can help build a brand’s reputation with customers. But the importance of this needs to be communicated upfront; the employee can’t guess what is expected. This can be anything from etiquette to brand requirements.
Offer Customer Service Training Courses
As a business owner, you need to offer training to your employees. This is a good idea not just to upskill them, but to improve your overall business. After all, better employees equal a better business.
The training you offer customer-facing staff can be anything from in-house training to job shadowing or formal training such as certification in customer service through reputable institutions, such as the Institute of Corporate Learning, or at the Red & Yellow Creative School for Business.
Refresher Training
Sometimes it can be useful to organise refresher training. This can be because of new procedures that are implemented in the business, or new products and services that are added to the offering.
What refresher training does is align all your staff and ensure that they always have the right information at hand to best serve customers. It is also a good way to ensure that anyone who might be lacking some skills is guided into acquiring the necessary skills without being called out individually.
Now that you have a clear understanding of the types of customer service training your business might need, you are ready to ensure that you deliver on top-notch customer service.
