As you prepare to welcome new employees to your team, don’t forget to set aside some time to evaluate, and possibly revamp, your employee training program. Customer service is a vital piece of your success, and yet many employers neglect to include customer service topics in their new employee training program. If you want your employees, and your business, to succeed, you’ll have to design your employee training program to achieve maximum results.

Here’s how:

Give All Employees (At Least Some) Customer Service Training

Even if certain employees don’t regularly interact with customers, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if they’re still trained on what’s expected of them should they be called on to work directly with a customer? You’re making a mistake if you think that employees with less client exposure don’t need customer service training. If you’re office is like most office around the world, things change all the time. So just because someone wasn’t initially hired to work directly with customers, that doesn’t mean that the occasion will never occur, or that they may not switch positions or fill in for someone else down the road. Plus, when every employee has knowledge of other departments’ responsibilities, you build a stronger team and everyone has a better understanding of what their co-workers deal with on a daily basis.

Provide In-Depth Training to Customer Service Employees

Employees on the front line, the ones who have the privilege of working with your customers day in and day out, need to be thoroughly prepared for every possible situation and personality type. They also need to know the rules – how much authority do they have? How far can they go to please a customer? At what point should they escalate an issue to a manager?

When you review your training content, look for opportunities to remove information that’s no longer relevant, and add new information that will be valuable to your company’s future. Eliminating unnecessary information will keep the training process brief and on point – both of which have been shown to improve how quickly new employees absorb information. The last thing you want to do is overwhelm new hires with non-essential information and risk them zoning out on the important points because they’re bored.

Practice Role Playing

Role playing with your customer service staff is another way to prepare them to serve your customers. By acting out real-life scenarios and engaging your employees in a very real way, you’ll help them learn to control their emotions and solve problems under pressure.

To get started, put together a list of common scenarios they are likely to experience, along with other situations you can reasonably expect them to have. The goal here is to learn and grow, so be careful not to set anyone up for embarrassment. Don’t put anyone down if they make a mistake – instead, use this as a learning opportunity and show them what they could have done differently.

As for Feedback

No employee training program is complete without gathering feedback. It’s impossible to accurately assess how effective your training content is without asking those that are experiencing it. To ensure the most honest feedback, you can keep the feedback anonymous. Just make sure you review the feedback and implement the suggestions that make sense.

Remember, the goal of your training program is to make the workplace better for everyone, employees and customers alike. When you continue to reinforce the learning, you help your employees succeed. Doing so will help your whole company succeed.

Make Sure Your Employee Training Ensures Good Customer Service in The Future

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