10 Customer Service Training Best Practices

Your customer service training program must deliver clearly defined benefits through clearly defined training objectives. In other words, what do you hope to accomplish with customer service training?

Identify Each Team Member’s Purpose

In study after study about employee motivation, it’s clear that your team members need to feel a sense of purpose in their work. Well-designed customer service training will clearly identify each team member’s purpose in the organization’s overall mission.

Identify the Personal Benefits of Customer Service Training for Each Team Member

In every IT customer service course I teach, we start with a poll and discussion about the personal benefits of customer service training. Students frequently identify qualities such as the personal fulfillment that comes from helping others, satisfaction in a job well done, improved job security, and better working relations with team members.

Identify the Benefits to the Organization of Customer Service Training

Similarly to personal benefits, your customer service training must deliver benefits to the organization, whether you’re a small MSP or a Fortune 500 company with global reach. Some of the benefits to the organization include faster ticket resolution, improved communication channels between end-users and the IT department, and improved trust between end-users and the IT department.

Clearly Describe What Good IT Customer Service Looks Like

It’s one thing to say you want to improve customer service. It’s a whole other thing to clearly describe what such improvement looks like. What are the specific goals of the customer service training? How will measure its effectiveness? Are there intermediate benchmarks to measure progress toward the goal?

Identify the Role of the Customer

We often think about the role of the employee in IT customer service, but what about the role of the customer or end-user? Is their role simply that of a paying customer or is it something more? Do you want them to be repeat customers? Do you want to get video endorsements from them? What about referrals? Once you identify the role of the customer, you can tailor your CS training in that direction.

Teaching the 5 Principles of IT Customer Service

Compassionate Geek customer service is based on the 5 principles of competence, compassion, empathy, listening, and respect. Here are techniques you can use to teach each of the principles to your staff.

How to Maintain Competence

People often talk about whether IT people, especially on the help desk, need more tech skills or people skills. Explain how in IT customer service, you obviously must have sufficient technical skills to complete the tasks of your job. Another way to describe this is to say you must have sufficient technical competence to meet the requirements of your job description. Then, discuss the importance of technical certifications, not so much for career advancement, but just to fill in gaps in technical knowledge. Talk about attending vendor demonstrations to learn about cutting-edge products. Mention the importance of test labs and test environments using virtualization tools such as VMWare, VirtualBox, or GNS3. You can also use older equipment for many test labs.

How to Show Compassion

To teach someone how to be more compassionate, talk about how each person has a story, yet most other people don’t know what it is. Explain that the person who is angry on the phone may be dealing with difficult personal challenges. They may be under tremendous work pressure when a problem occurs requiring a call to technical support. They may be intimidated by technology and worried about looking stupid. Explain that our role in IT is to help our fellow humans do their jobs more effectively, productively, and creatively.

How to Show Empathy

Empathy is about putting yourself in the other person’s position. It’s about trying to imagine what you would want if you were them. Explain to your group that no one is an expert on everything. Ask them to recall a time when they needed someone else’s help, such as when they went to a doctor, for example. Ask them to recall when a doctor took time with them and explained things clearly in a way they could understand.

How to Be a Better Listener

To teach someone how to be a better listener, use Stephen Covey’s lesson from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in which he explains that most of us don’t listen to understand, we listen to respond. While the other person is speaking, we’re concentrating not on understanding them, but on preparing our response. Explain active listening, where you’re engaged with the speaker and ask relevant questions to gain a deeper understanding of what they’re saying.

How to Act in a Respectful and Dignified Manner

Explain that there are two aspects of respect. One aspect is how you feel about another person. It’s based on the other person saying and doing things you admire. You feel respect for them. The other aspect is about your behavior toward other people, especially people for whom you may not feel respect. Explain that it’s not necessary to feel respect for another person to treat them with dignity and respect. The first aspect of respect is about how you feel. The second aspect of respect is about how you act. Explain that you can choose to act in a dignified and respectful manner, regardless of how the people around you are acting.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment.

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