A study done by UK market research firm BI Intelligence revealed that it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for the poor impression left behind from one unresolved bad experience. This finding highlights the importance of addressing three fundamental concerns that often arise during customer service training for employees — lack of a company-wide customer service mindset, training being restricted to frontline staff, and backend issues not being addressed.
Tackling these three challenges is the beginning of setting a gold standard for customer experience within your organisation. In this article, we will be discussing how each of these challenges impacts customer service training for employees and providing solutions that will help your customer service training program be effective.
Challenge #1: Traditional Mindset
Traditionally, customer service isn’t viewed as the responsibility of all staff members. Departments that work behind the scenes, such as finance and IT, prefer to focus on training that relates to their core job functions. But the reality is that customer service training is everyone’s business, and it’s important for you to help everyone on your team understand this fact.
Solution: Present your case at the executive level so that you can get the support you need to develop a customer-first organisation. Use data from within your organisation to highlight the impact each department has on the customer experience. As you build your case, outline a step-by-step process exec leaders can take to link customer service to performance reviews and make customer service a natural part of business processes.
Challenge #2: Training is Limited to Frontline Staff
This challenge is closely linked to the traditional mindset that often plagues organisations — customer service is the sole responsibility of staff members who have direct customer contact. Since customer service is everyone’s business, customer service training shouldn’t be limited to frontline staff. Instead, customer service training should be done consistently across all departments.
Solution: Develop an internal customer service training plan and execute it. Key areas to focus on during internal customer service training include: internal communication, how to go above and beyond, and building positive workplace relationships.
Challenge #3: Backend Issues Often Aren’t Addressed
An organisation with good internal customer service has employees and processes in place that result in swift resolutions to backend issues. Traditional customer service training often focuses on the soft skills customer service agents need to create a great customer experience instead of focusing on the issues that cause problems for customers in the first place. This leads to customers developing a poor impression of your brand — an impression that can have a lasting negative impact on your brand’s reputation.
Solution: Create systems and processes that support swift issue resolutions. Make it easy for customers to leave feedback and provide feature suggestions, while also decreasing the time it takes to resolve escalated issues. This may mean having at least one team member in key departments, such as IT, whose core job function is to manage issue escalations and feature requests.
Make Excellent Customer Service the Ethos of Your Brand
The solution to the three customer service training issues mentioned in this article boils down to creating a company culture where the customer is top priority. There should be clarity on how each department fits into the customer experience, as well as how all team members can work together to resolve issues. Customer experience should be built into performance appraisals and form a core part of the organisation’s values.
Work with your team to implement the systems and processes necessary to create the best customer experience company-wide while developing customer service training content that’s relevant to your organisation. Let One on One provide the online courses, content creation services, and learning management system necessary for the effective customer service training your organisation needs. Book a demo to learn more about how we can help you.
Interested in learning more about effective customer service training for employees? Listen to our podcast episode with Gina Tomlinson-Williams by clicking the link below.
