If you want your business to have exceptional customer service and strong customer relationships, you’ll want to make sure that your contact center training program is top-notch. But, it can take between two weeks to three months to train a high-quality member of your customer service team with strong communication skills. For fast-growing companies, maintaining customer satisfaction is pivotal, and you might not have time to waste when training new team members.
Here are seven best practices to speed up the customer service training program and take your team to the next level.
1. Project-based hiring
An ideal customer service team will be able to quickly learn new skills to support your loyal customers. When interviewing potential team members, you can use project-based hiring, an effective method of measuring problem solving and customer service skills.
Here’s how it works:
- An ideal project would be a role-play scenario or take-home assignment that requires the same technical skills and conflict resolution skills they would need on the job.
- For example, you could provide three customer complaints or questions to see how they respond.
- Then, advise your potential customer service representative to look at your company’s social media feeds to determine how you’d want them to respond to these questions.
2. Shadowing
Once you’ve hired a promising new team member, you can pair them with established, high-quality customer service representatives who can help train them. By working with a partner and encountering real, on-the-job scenarios, customer service agents will learn specific soft skills that they can apply to your company. You can empower your experienced call center agents to share actionable insights, and they can expand your knowledge base and share tips for ensuring great customer service and customer satisfaction (CSAT). Also, this will provide your new hire a more personalized customer service training program than a more generalized webinar, online course, or training session.
Even when working remotely, rather than in a call center, it’s important to maintain good relationships and teamwork on your support team. That way, if they encounter difficult customers or tricky situations, they can consult one another about the best ways to ensure customer satisfaction before asking questions up the chain.
3. Spreadsheet practice
Another training method for new customer service agents is spreadsheet practice. In a spreadsheet, provide your new team member with sample questions that test their product knowledge, customer support, and problem-solving skills.
Together, review the agent’s performance to make sure that they’re prepared to address customer complaints and provide effective customer service.
4. Use internal notes and private comments
If you’re using a CRM like Zendesk, ask individual agents to leave internal notes with the message they want to send out. Then, as part of your customer service training, you can review the message and give feedback to make sure they’re prepared to provide customer care and conflict resolution.
These techniques improve call center quality assurance
5. Build a cheat sheet with response templates
While a trainee customer service representative is onboarding, encourage them to develop their own cheat sheet with templates or macros that they can use to speed up their customer interactions. Many customer questions will be similar, asking about shipping times, pricing, or returns. Your team can quickly meet customer needs and provide good customer service by having pre-written messages to address these common questions swiftly and ensure customer loyalty.
6. Use a Quality Assurance Scorecard Tool
Customer service quality assurance scorecards provide feedback to customer support representatives that help improve communication skills, meet customer expectations, and ensure high service quality. Here are some options for programs that help call center agents provide a great customer experience:
- StellaConnect
- Maestro QA
- Playvox
- Klaus
By measuring metrics, benchmarks, and key performance indicators (KPIs), these tools help quality assurance specialists optimize the quality of service.
7. No time to worry about hiring or training? Try Chatdesk Teams!
Chatdesk Teams handles hiring and customer service training for you – that way, you can focus on growing your business, rather than developing your own customer service training course or scouting potential hires on Linkedin.
- With Chatdesk Teams, you can build a customer service team from Superfans of your brand who are already familiar with your products.
- Through machine learning, the Chatdesk system’s methodology ensures that your support agents perfectly match your brand voice to influence customer retention from day one.
- Chatdesk provides personalized training materials for your business, allowing agents to practice responding to past messages.
- Then, they get continuously scored on the customer service experience they provide, allowing you to select high-quality performers for your team who hit their benchmarks and exceed metrics.
- Even as team members provide customer care and address customer needs, the Chatdesk “Center for Excellence” (QA specialists) continue to provide customer service training through feedback and coaching.
