Continuous Customer Care Training for Improved Service
Customer care is the culmination of efforts by every employee, right from a customer care representative to a CEO, to ensure a smooth and rich customer experience. It is not a checklist but a philosophy that requires a top-down approach, in order to be effective.
Customer interactions can be direct or indirect, and sometimes both. Communicating your organization’s customer service standards down to the last person can maximise the potential of the entire lifetime of your product or solution.
Training begins at the door
By commencing training the minute new recruits walk in, you can instil the purpose of the brand within them. Induction training is of prime importance, and can make or break the reputation of your brand, since your customer care reps are the face of your organization.
Orientation traditionally includes elementary training in soft skills and behaviour such as tone of voice and empathy, respectively. Accent training and cross-cultural awareness are also essential for representatives servicing international markets. Following process training, trainees can be tasked with on the job shadowing that give them a taste of the real world of customer care.
Continuous, individual training
Customer satisfaction is a great indicator of your service standards, but it’s not the only measure that matters.
Every process needs to be benchmarked for quality excellence, and these parameters should be deep-rooted in the trainees’ psyche. Internal teams, ranging from compliance to quality assurance, must regularly audit interactions to gauge performance, with different sets of metrics quintessential to each team. Parameters can include accent, delivery, empathy, adherence to script, etiquette and much more. Training can reach its maximum effect only when representatives receive their quality metrics, and are given adequate feedback by the various teams for improvements.
When a representative’s quality scores are below the benchmark, a retraining process ought to be automatically initiated, where the concerned agent is taught the necessary skills to pull up his performance. This can include classroom or one-on-one mentorship, followed by mock calls and further review. This ensures that all customer care reps are always on par with client expectations.
What and when should you teach your care representatives?
Sometimes, covering the basics during initial training is not enough. As a client grows and introduces new features, you must keep your customer care team updated for seamless service.
Another simple yet useful feature that can have a marked impact on service is creating and maintaining an updated list of FAQs. This will allow your reps to quickly resolve customer issues thereby reducing average call handling (another excellent indicator of customer satisfaction).
Lastly, holding regular seminars or workshops on changing service trends can make a huge difference to customers. These small differences in approach can improve the satisfaction matrix and likely even boost the bottom line.
The final word
Customer interactions may not only be in store or over a service call, but service quality must always be maintained across the organization.
Additionally, with technologies such as internal chatbots to instantly connect with other teams or supervisors, and gamification to introduce an element of competition, your organization can be on its way to providing unparalleled customer care.
