Customer Service Training Program: What to Teach (and How to Measure It)
Staff development is an important initiative for any growing small business, and for owners, refining your customer service training program becomes essential as you expand operations. We share how to implement an easy and intuitive training approach that works and doesn’t need a giant handbook – read on!
If you are in need of a customer service training program for your business, you are living the dream and have reached an important milestone! Your company is expanding, and it is now time to turn your operations over to a trusted team member to serve as an administrator.
This may not be your first customer-service rodeo either. You may already have a fully established admin team and customer service systems established, but your metrics indicate room for improvement. Like if you are an owner who turned their customer service over to another person after doing everything yourself as a solo-operator, you may have seen a drop in areas like retention, refunds, and even sales metrics when you scaled your team.
Naturally, seeing drops in your KPIs can cause alarm and various levels of reaction. Owners who realize this discrepancy in their effectiveness with clients versus their team’s may be tempted to step back in and retain their operation’s customer-service responsibilities. Or if you are totally new to training staff in your operations, you may try to avoid delegating the responsibility entirely, because it feels easier to just keep doing admin yourself.
Cast those doubts aside! For ANY service company or venture to grow, there must be a successful way to utilize the support of an internal team to help your customers and extend your singular capacity. Even in our AI-booming times with virtual assistants at our fingertips, the use of teams and customer-service training is still very essential, and chances are, you will need a process that works and achieves measurable results within your own business.
Delegating your business’s customer service without losing quality service
The risk as an owner with entrusting customer service to a member of your staff is that your employees do not have the same commitment and loyalty to your product as you – nor should they. When you are speaking to a customer, you have all the context of starting your enterprise and the emotion connected to the vision behind your answer. A caring owner’s help is going to feel meaningful and hard to replicate due to that emotion. We cannot strive for our staff to be us.
In a healthy environment, your business will never mean as much to your employees as it does to you, but that does not exclude them from feeling a strong connection to your business and the mission you achieve. Your business can be important to them and take on a unique, but still connected meaning.
The first step as a leader is recognizing this difference in perspective so you can effectively reach your team, as well as create meaningful experiences for them in their work. They need a benefit that is different than yours, but still important and inspiring.
Your Company’s Environment – 50% of a customer service training program
The art of being a business owner is creating an encouraging and purposeful environment, and this is a significant responsibility. Teaching customer service to your administrative staff is already 50% complete through they values and practices they witness in your work culture – even virtual environments for remote organizations.
Whether you like it or not, this 50% of training-effectiveness is entirely a by-product of your company-vibe and the indirect reflection of an owner’s leadership. A great culture means training is that much easier. But inversely, a poor culture means training is that much harder.
In most cases, teams will emulate their leaders and what they see from the company’s micro-influencers all around them. This ripple effect makes its way into the team’s interactions with leaders, each other, and most importantly, the client.
The net effect and challenge – your company’s internal environment and culture can hurt your customer-service training and output.
If you are taking shortcuts with your work, your team will likely feel entitled to those same work-arounds, because you are showing them, “this is the way…this is acceptable and how we do things,” through your actions.
Likewise, with company culture, an internal push to lift one another up and give support radiates to clients and through your organization. Employees are nurtured, essentially. They are able to give out support, because they have care and positivity coming in. But an internal spirit of competitiveness and under-cutting within your team will have a ripple effect to company communications in a negative way. Your staff will feel less inclined to help, because they are not receiving this same support from their leaders.
Never discount the importance of environment in your training process, and strive for the best internal work values within your team. As a leader, always demonstrate integrity, especially in how you interact with your managers, admins, and staff. Remember, your example is powerful. By setting the stage for the remaining 50% of customer service training – which actually includes the soft skills we develop with our teams – the entire system and approach will connect in a meaningful way.
Engagement – the applied half of customer service training
The other 50% of customer-service training for your team includes practical exercises and applied skill development. There is no getting around this part. Though environment can go way further than most leaders realize, an element of teaching your team will be needed too – and not every leader is a natural teacher.
Whether you feel that staff training is your strong-suit, or a skill you need a lot of guidance on as an owner, the end need is the same: it is critical that you have a strong and effective team managing customer service requests and that your client base has reliable support.
To reach this objective, there are many best practices around staff-development and team training available in the ether to consult, but they may feel too overwhelming to implement, or too systemized to understand.
In my own work with training and teaching customer service, I have found the most effective systems are also the most simple and intuitive. The crucial element of effective training is our intent as leaders and teaching universal concepts that serve our admin staff, as well as our customer’s need. This intent makes all the difference and starts with how your training is set up.
Here are the customer service training program principles that matter most when developing your team:
DIVIDE TRAINING INTO ‘BUCKETS’: As a first step, it is very important that YOU – the owner, or leader training others – start with an organized approach. Organizing the order of training, in itself, can create a lot of success.
I call categories of operation processes ‘buckets’, because a bucket is a catch-all for what you throw in it, and training categories are very much like this. You won’t be able to tie all types of customer complaints into hyper-specific sub-types, for example. But if all situations related to a complaint go into a “bucket”, we can at least sort out that major type of response and apply global best practices to that area. Then, we get more specific within that bucket.
To create customer-service training categories (or ‘buckets’) in this way, think of the major requests you receive in a day, week, or month for your business, starting with the most common. Look at the full range of inquiries you receive over a set amount of time, and group them into common themes. Like a refund request, service quality complaint, scheduling question, billing question, etc.
Having around 5-10 buckets is the typical division for a small business office that covers all major hubs. These communication areas include categories like refunds, complaints, general questions, adding services, account management, etc.
As you work with your trainee, introduce one ‘bucket’ category to them at a time along with the resources, templates, and training needed to fully immerse in that customer service area. It may be just handling customer scheduling questions at first, but as your trainee develops their skill in this area, you can then introduce another. What we avoid is introducing everything at the same time, because that leads to overwhelm.
This systematic approach to training is very effective, because both you and the trainee can pace learning according to concept retention and being ready for the next bucket. The trainee can remain focused on a single area at a time.
TEACH ENGAGEMENT AS A SKILL: LISTENING + VALIDATION. The most important skill I can impart to new customer service staff for any industry is to learn to listen and validate constantly. Take opportunities to engage with the client when you are helping them and make that moment of interaction count! Be present and invite interaction.
As an owner, or leader, you will need to teach this skill of engagement to your customer service staff, as it is not natural pursuit for everyone. There are many people who have a natural talent for helping others, but every business has its own style of interaction and mission too. Take time to set up an engagement plan and teach your team how to talk to your customers.
Engagement is the number one action that leads to customer service success and ensures the client’s need is being fully resolved. Why? Because engagement leads to communication, and communication is where we will get the information needed to fully assist.
The best example from my own experience is when parents would call to unenroll their child from music lessons with my school. Not many families would lead with why they were stopping, and it was all too easy for administrators to close out the lessons upon request without a conversation.
I worked with our team on engaging on these requests, especially. We made it a habit to alway ask families why they were stopping lessons and if there is any way we could improve their experience. This led to students who rescheduled, rather than quit, as well as families who called us back after a few months of a break, because they enjoyed the level of service they received from us. In many cases, families stopping just needed some time away from lessons. A simple question built into our exit process led to increased success with our retention rates.
It’s not just person to person processes like unenrolling that require a solid customer-service approach and engagement, though. Many times, it’s the simple questions along the way that clients have for us that provide an opportunity.
So often, customers receive help responses that are generic and not tailored to the specificity of their issue. The client can tell they are getting a scripted response, or an FAQ link they have already read, but still take issue with for a deeper reason.
By teaching your staff to engage with customers they are helping, as well as convey that they understand the problem, and help is on the way, any negative experience a customer is having can be turned into a positive one.
What systems help with engagement and teaching ‘connection’ to your staff?
- Teach your customer-service team to answer inquiries with complete sentences. This communicates we are listening. Each question from a customer within a single inquiry should be addressed in the company response too. Example: Customer says “I ordered a cake with blue icing, not orange!”, the staff member responding would say, “We understand the color of the icing on your cake was blue, instead of the orange you ordered, and we apologize for this error…”
- Always start responses to customers with a polite sentiment. “Thank you for your question..”, “we appreciate you asking about that…”. Even if the customer is not warm and fuzzy, your company’s voice should be warm and polite – not matching an aggressive, or irritated tone.
- Teach your staff how to delay answers they need more time to answer accurately and how to escalate difficult issues that need your attention.
Too often with small businesses, a customer-service representative is wearing many hats and is managing a dense communication load. They feel responsible for moving work along, rather than completing it from a company-mission perspective.
Or, you have a very dedicated administrator who wants to see everything through personally and does not want to disrupt you as an owner. That is a wonderful quality and a sign of natural leadership from your employee, and yet, there are still items that should be moved up for help, so that they do not overwhelm his workload, or the level of response that can be provided.
To enable both examples of staff members to escalate, or delay an answer, they must have training on this process and how to approach NOT solving an issue on the spot.
Training your team with the verbiage and strategies needed to escalate, or delay an answer will give them the confidence to access this tool when it is really needed. This is a skill and script to rehearse, as the need to delay or escalate usually comes up when we are stumped. The more familiar a communication routine, the easier it is to implement in a real customer-service situation.
- Challenge your team to ask questions and be curious – remind them there is a real person on the other side of every question! By helping and making sure their request is fully resolved, we create less work for ourselves too.
How do you measure the success of a customer service training program?
The system of categorizing training initiatives for your customer service team, then instructing on engagement, creates a unique training program for teams that is focused more on environment and approach, rather than an endless administrator-handbook with micro-systems broken down for every specific task your business does.
The challenge introduced with a strategic communication and engagement-based approach is within the KPIs. Without a strong metric, or set of data to demonstrate success, it is difficult to assess what is going well and what is not with engagement strategies.
The clearest KPIs and measures of success I have found for assessing customer service training are –
- Number of conversations and engagements started by our team after a customer reaches out. More conversations happening is a success!
- Number of internal questions received by an owner, or manager, from the customer service team for assistance. Questions are a good sign! This metric should be used only by owners / managers.
- Number of disengagements from your service (i.e. – number of “quits” in a time-period, like a week, or month). A successful customer service strategy should help with reducing the number of disengagements from your service initially, though insights from customer service and areas to address within other operations areas may be the conclusion. Retention takes a long time to to play-out, but quit and churn stats are fast.
A Simple Customer Service Training Program for Service Businesses – In Conclusion
For growing service businesses, especially those with a recurring revenue model, adding an administrative team to help with operations and customer service is a sign you are pointed in the right direction! However, training on customer service is more challenging than most leaders realize, because helping customers requires a deep understanding of a company’s mission and culture.
As leaders, literally HALF of your training for customer service happens in the environment you create. What you and the whole team promote as your culture will trickle down into operations and the brand your clients perceive.
For that other 50% and soft skills your team needs to handle all client requests, customer service training programs can be quite simple! An organized approach where a trainee is led through categories of customer inquiries one by one helps tremendously with pacing and a plan. In addition to the set-up of training topics, a focus on listening, validating, and engaging with customers will lead to lasting success.
How will you know if you are succeeding? You will feel the difference in the number of quits and number of conversations happening. On an even greater level, you will feel a synergy and connection with your team. When you are feeling positive and that the conversations in progress are providing benefit, all good things will follow for your operation.
If you are seeking a customer service training program for your business that creates connection and engagement in your community, we would love to help you create a path for success! We help with both project engagements and executive coaching programs for leaders. Connect with us to discuss how we can help!
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