Customer Experience Training: Empower Your Team
To deliver a great customer experience, customer experience training is essential. Competition among businesses is growing at a steady pace, and each industry is becoming more competitivee. However, one of the things that set these businesses apart is their customer experience.
Customer experience is the interaction that customers have with a specific organization or brand. Due to fast technological advances, customers are now more connected than ever before. This allows them the opportunity to share experiences and their company reviews – both negative and positive. However, through the delivery of excellent customer experience, organizations gain a competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, positive reviews, and referrals. To ensure success in the delivery of a great customer experience, organizations must offer exceptional customer experience training to wow their customers.
Customer Experience Training Options
Customer experience encompasses the whole journey of a customer from the initial brand awareness to post-purchase customer care. Every customer inquiry plays a role in building a strong brand reputation and must be treated with care and professionalism. Customer experience training often includes onboarding, on-the-job training, quarterly training, refresher training, and crisis management training. They equip employees with the tools, skills, and competencies needed for customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.
Let’s take a closer look at the different components of a customer experience training program:
- Onboarding
Onboarding involves a comprehensive orientation of new employees. New hirees should be introduced to the company’s products and services, organizational structure, vision, mission, and customer service philosophy.
- Refresher Training
Often conducted quarterly or annually, refresher training can be used to help employees review essential customer service strategies and introduce them to new concepts. Refresher training is also great for team building.
- Job Shadowing
Job shadowing is another excellent option for customer experience training. New or current employees intending to join the customer service team are paired with experienced team members. New team members receive mentorship and guidance by observing more experienced colleagues on the job.
- Crisis Management Training
One critical feature of customer experience training is crisis management. Customer service teams must be taught how to prevent and manage urgent situations. In the customer services department, emergencies are inevitable, and preparation is key.
- Role Modelling
Role Modelling refers to teaching by example or live demonstrations. Through role modeling, inexperienced hires observe examples and practise imitating the behavior of more experienced colleagues.
- Role-playing
In role-playing, customer service employees explore realistic situations using mock conversations between the customer service department and customers. Through this customer experience training, they get to practise how to behave or respond in actual customer service situations.
Tips for Successful Customer Experience Training
The success of a customer service training program is reflected through learner satisfaction, knowledge retention and implementation, business impact, and the return on investment. To achieve these measurable indicators of successful customer service training, follow the following tips:
- Set clear and measurable training goals
The objectives or goals of the training program must be realistic, clear, measurable, and time-bound. Ambiguous training objectives are difficult to assess and should be avoided.
- Product knowledge training
Products and services change over time; therefore, in addition to the people skills taught in customer service training, product knowledge should be covered.
- Collect regular feedback from learners
During the customer experience training period, allow the learners to give feedback regularly, so you can assess their progress and knowledge retention.
- Document the Whole Training Process
The feedback received from the trainees must be recorded and used to update the training manual for future use. Through documenting the whole training process, trainers evaluate the material that works or does not work in any given training.
- Track Learner Progress
Customer experience training programs must include milestones the learners can use to track their progress. A long training program that seems to never to end can demotivate the trainees. Assessments such as quizzes or assignments during a training program give trainees a sense of accomplishment.
Successful online customer service training should be challenging and engaging. Trainees must be able to participate rather than just listening. To ensure success, the training material should combine text or audio with visuals to improve knowledge retention. In addition to participation, customer service training must also include some form of assessment for the trainees to keep them engaged.
Providing great customer experiences is key to customer loyalty and organizational success. Customer perception is now part of the business reality. Customer experience training should be conducted frequently to develop a customer-centric culture within your organization. The customer must become the center of all business operations, and getting your staff professionally trained will help you achieve those goals!
Other Resources:
CustomersFirst Academy offers comprehensive customer service training designed to help you grow your skills and advance your career.
To keep learning and developing your knowledge of customer service, we highly recommend the additional resources below:
10 Best Customer Experience Management Software Solutions
The Importance of Obtaining a Customer Service Certification
20+ Examples of Probing Questions In Customer Service
How to Create an Inspiring Customer Service Philosophy
