When I look to see what training there is for Customer Service there are two things that stands out. The first is there isn’t very much training to choose from. It’s as if Customer Service were something that isn’t mission critical so it doesn’t much matter if the good people doing it are trained or not. They’ll pick it up on the job, their supervisors will train them, they’ll figure it out.
The other thing is, when you find the training, its all very much centred around dealing with customer complaints. Yes, maybe that’s mostly the reason why your customers contact customer services, when it’s all gone wrong and they’re feeling aggrieved.
Let’s look at both those things. If you leave it to your team to train themselves, what is the best you can hope for? That they are all going to be as good, or not quite as good, as the person training them. However, the person you’ve got training them, do they know how to train and do they know about customer psychology, communication theory, and how to find more business?
If you could design the perfect training for them, my guess would be something like this:
- Effective communication on the telephone and email
- Keeping a positive attitude and maintaining equal business stature
- Understanding your customers (tactics and psychology)
- Questioning techniques
- Up-selling and Cross-Selling
- Dealing with difficult people
Customer service is much more than just dealing with complaints. They are perfectly placed to identify and develop new opportunities. If they aren’t empowered or trained to do so, you could be losing out on a lot of business. I recently trained a customer service team, and simply by learning how to ask a few questions they are now becoming a profit centre in their own right.
Your customer service team is the front line, your live “shop window”. Whether your client stays with you or looks around for alternative suppliers has a lot to do with how they are treated by customer services. Your (ex) client will tell you it’s all about budgets and costs, but in actual fact it’s more likely they don’t feel appreciated and valued. That feeling of neglect will come straight out of their dealing with your customer service staff. If you are working very hard to bring in more business but you are losing clients at the same time, you are in trouble.
In other words, you can’t afford to neglect your customer service team. You should seriously consider making sure they have the best training. Not just about dealing with customer complaints.
If you’d like to know more about how we can help your customer service teams and your HQ is in Surrey, Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex or Kent, click here. You’ll not only get a idea of what our training includes, you also can download a chapter of our book “Customer Service the Sandler Way”.
Paul Glynn
Sandler trainer
