Seven Pocket-Sized Tools to reinforce Key Service Principles

In this article, Micah Solomon, CX thought leader, provides seven strategies for CX leaders for effective customer service training, including leadership involvement, tangible support materials, certification, early onboarding emphasis, celebrating successes, regular brush-ups, and leading by example. It highlights the role of technology, such as CCaaS and AI, in supporting well-trained employees by routing queries, summarizing calls, and improving real-time performance. 
 
The power of an extraordinary customer experience can't be overstated. It can turn a one-time purchaser into a lifelong customer and transform an unhappy customer into a brand evangelist. To ensure employees consistently deliver exceptional customer service, robust and effective training is crucial. Here are seven secrets to making your customer service training more powerful and long-lasting in its impact.   

1. Involve Company and/or Departmental Leaders

Demonstrating that customer service is a priority starts at the top. If your CEO or department head participates in the training or even introduces the session, it sends a clear message about the importance of customer service within the organization. This involvement from leadership emphasizes the value placed on customer service and fosters a culture where everyone is accountable for delivering excellent service. 

2. Offer Support Materials to Take Away from the Training

Providing tangible resources can help reinforce training material. For instance, Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company equips each employee with a pocket-sized card outlining fundamental customer service principles. This quick-reference tool helps keep everyone aligned and serves as a constant reminder of the company's service expectations. 

3. Certify Participation and Completion

Recognizing employees who complete the training with a personalized certificate can boost morale and be a tangible reminder of their accomplishments. While the certificates don't have to be overly extravagant, they should be worthy of display.   

4. Emphasize the Importance of Customer Service Right Away during Employee Onboarding 

The orientation process is an ideal time to instill the importance of customer service. While legal and loss prevention information is vital, it shouldn't overshadow the emphasis on customer service. Stressing how central the pro-customer mission is to the company's operations can set new employees on the right path from day one. 

5. Celebrate Customer Service Wins  

Take time to acknowledge great customer service moments when they occur or soon after. This will motivate staff and reinforce the importance of delivering exceptional service. This can involve sharing customer compliments or "wow stories" from the organization. In this way, you’re likely to inspire additional employees to create memorable experiences for their customers and create their own customer experience "wow moments". 

 6. Implement Regular Service Brush-Ups 

Implementing a daily or weekly "customer service minute" – a brief refresher session on a particular service principle – can help reinforce training lessons and encourage ongoing improvement.  

Continuous learning is vital to keeping customer service skills sharp. 
 
Rotating the leadership of these sessions among non-managerial staff can further engage employees and promote a culture of learning and teaching.  

7. Lead by Example  

Actions speak louder than words, especially when it comes from senior management. When leaders are seen assisting or warmly greeting customers, it reinforces the importance of delivering excellent service. This visible commitment to service from the top down helps engrain a customer-centric culture.  

Beyond Training: Using high technology, including AI, to support and extend the reach of even your best-trained employees

 
While we often think of exceptional customer service as being delivered by an empathetic, focused employee with the resources and empowerment to do so, many technological supports can also come into play.   

For starters: Wouldn’t your agents do their best if they were getting the right calls, therefore always starting on the right foot (do phone calls have feet?) with their caller?  A proper CCaaS (cloud-based Contact Center as a Service) such as Sprinklr Service can accomplish this. It can route the query to the right agent based on who has the relevant skill set.   

In addition, it can apply filters like case type, case priority and past interactions to resolve the queries that do come in using AI.    

Using AI to summarize a call so the Agent can move on to the Next One

After a call between an agent and a customer ends, wouldn’t it be great to have an easy, automatic way to generate a summary of the conversation for posterity so the agent can hop on the next call, knowing that nothing got lost?  An AI solution like Sprinklr AI+  can take care of this, no fuss, no muss!    

Using Technology in Real Time to improve results and reduce Resolution Time

Technology tools can also be involved in real-time to assist an employee with thorny questions that may come up, thus turning a generalist agent into a specialist, at least for the length of the call. Technology can also enable agents (and their managers) to monitor and track their daily performance, inevitably leading to improvement.