The 5 Steps to Effective Customer Service Training

For many of your customers, the customer service center is their primary touch point with your company. It’s vital that your customer service outsourcing partner has an effective training program that supports your company’s brand promises across all channels.

The basis for an effective customer-service training program is a successful transfer of knowledge. Each customer service agent must have a solid foundation of information and brand personality that drives their daily engagements with customers. Each new hire must receive the right information, and ongoing employees should receive refresher training on a regular basis.

The right training can help create a passion for your brand and deliver meaningful customer engagement that builds loyalty. In fact, recent research shows that customers care more about high-quality customer service than any brand attributes.

Over the past 30 years, TSD Global has developed a deep understanding of training for customer service outsourcing relationships that deliver results.

While it’s hard to share all of our experience, here’s a look at five steps we know to be critical in developing successful, sustainable training programs.

1. Create Objectives and Outcomes: Develop and share the objectives and outcomes that will define success for the program. Start with what you want people to know and the behaviors they should demonstrate. Engage subject matter experts in determining appropriate outcomes. Work with internal stakeholders to define metrics and expectations for your customer experience team.

2. Develop Targeted Content: Invest in creating your own content strategy with training manuals, service bulletins, a knowledge base and other resources in digital or physical forms, or both. This strategy is the key to launching a sustainable, repeatable process that transmits and reinforces critical institutional knowledge that supports your customer service outsourcing partners. Ensure that agents have easy access to the documents so they can meet customer needs. To ensure quality, invest in professional training manual development.

3. Use Creative Content Delivery: Effective training shouldn’t be boring. Use varied techniques that take into account different learning styles and are relevant to the content. Agents will be more attentive if they are fully engaged. Use visual and auditory learning techniques such as gamification, side-jacking and role-playing exercises.

4. Track Training Effectiveness: Conduct formal and informal evaluations throughout the training cycle. The feedback can help develop plans for future sessions and identify leaders and those who may need additional help. Shortly after they start working on the account, interview trainees about how the training prepared them for the task.

5. Continuous Training: Regularly assess and coach the customer service agents to help them develop and identify content for additional and refresher training. Develop constant monitoring and feedback loops as part of the quality assurance process to aid in training development.

TSD Global’s innovative training program is one of the best in the customer service outsourcing space because it is based on a full range of training strategies. The program uses role-playing, tests, product knowledge training, vocal training, as a several week nesting period of training with our top agents. The varied teaching approaches ensure trainees are fully engaged and attentive and lead to a high level of retention.

Our infrastructure of more than 1,800 agents worldwide reflects the excellent performance that our training program produces. TSD Global can streamline your call center outsourcing functions in a cost-effective and efficient way. To ensure your customer service outsourcing partner will support your brand promises and build customer loyalty, talk to TSD Global today.