Johnny Walker

Effective customer service training requires more than hiring great people who naturally enjoy helping others

The relationship between sales and customer service is critical, but these two divisions are typically trained separately, with different emphases and objectives. While most companies stress the importance in sales training of having a customer-centric focus, they often overlook many of those concepts in customer service training.

That lack of a consistent approach and mindset for interacting with customers can cost companies revenue, customer loyalty and even great salespeople who get fed up when the relationships they’ve spent months developing are destroyed in an instant by a fumbled customer service issue.

Hiring Great People Isn’t Enough

Building a great customer service team requires more than hiring great people who naturally enjoy helping others. As Johnny Walker explains in this podcast, we also need to equip those great people with the soft skills like emotional intelligence so they can interact effectively with the customer. The customer has to feel that the person on the other end of the call is laser focused on understanding their needs and solving their problems. They must truly believe that they are the most important person the contact center rep has talked to all day. They need to feel empathy, passion and commitment on the other end of that call.

And that’s why one of the most common customer service tools around is also one of the worst things we can do in customer service training: hand people a script. We all know when someone’s reading a script, especially when you’ve talked to several customer service reps from the same organization and they’re all saying the exact same thing.

Try focusing customer service training efforts less on what to say and more on how to interact. We can do that by giving people a process that allows them to be authentic and build genuine relationships rather than a script that takes their personality out of the equation.

Listen to our podcast to hear more from Johnny Walker as he discusses:

  • The connection between sales and customer service
  • Pitfalls of typical customer service training approaches
  • A values-based, concrete process that helps customer service reps relate and empathize with customers, even when they’re having a bad day
About the Author
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Bruce Wedderburn

Chief Sales Officer

Since 2016 Bruce has led the Sales organization with a passion for creating impactful results for clients through the successful...
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