When it comes to customer satisfaction, the user experience can be your biggest strength or your Achilles' heel. A ZenDesk survey found that 67% of customers who reported a good customer service experience recommended products and services to others. Conversely, 52% of those who had a negative experience shared their customer service woes with others.
When customers have a good experience with your product or service, they're anxious to tell others. Customer experience training effectively onboards your internal team and gives them the power to convert their first, second and 30th impressions into real advocacy for your organization. Turn your customers into brand ambassadors by empowering your customer success representatives to offer a stellar experience from start to finish every time.
Creating connections
Though it's true that consumers like to have self-serve options, connecting to real people matters. In fact, PwC reported that 74% of consumers want to connect to a knowledgeable professional, so a great user experience starts with great customer experience training. It's important that your employees have the answers, but it's also vital that they connect with consumers how they want and when they want.
Soft skills training can supplement employees' product knowledge to enhance their customer interactions. Empower employees to understand customer experience through role-play so they can identify potential frustrations and offer emotional solutions as well as technical ones. When they put themselves in the customers' shoes, employees become better at anticipating needs and empathizing with consumers for a more personal customer experience.
Anticipating needs
Customers become advocates when they feel like their needs are consistently met. Your employees don't need to be mind readers to foster a spirit of consumer advocacy. Getting to know your customers is the first step in learning to anticipate needs and switch customer service from reactive to proactive. Who uses your product? Why? When? Asking these questions can help you identify potential issues before they become real sticking points.
Use the data you have to give your customer success team a better picture of the end user. Whether through marketing materials, customer satisfaction surveys or product development data, knowledge is power when training a more effective customer support team. With reliable data, customer support often knows exactly what users need long before they reach out. Armed with data-driven solutions, they're better poised to anticipate the user's needs, resulting in a more positive interaction that customers can't wait to tell others about.
You can get even more out of this data by corroborating it with your learning management system analytics. Compare the successes and failures highlighted by customer feedback with course completion rates and other indicators of training progress and performance. This will enable you to translate any gaps in your customer satisfaction into opportunities for new content or improvements on existing content.
Offering sales training
You might not immediately think of customer service reps as salespeople. In fact, your customer service support team might eschew the idea of sales and feel more comfortable forwarding those inquiries to a dedicated sales team. Offering your customer support team sales training, however, allows you to capitalize on the personal relationships customer support creates with the end users. Who better to cross-sell than the employees who are interacting with and offering solutions to users every day?
One vital way to elevate your training effectiveness is to add sales training to your customer success program. With the right training, they can upsell or cross-sell to address customers' needs directly. As the members of your organization with the most direct knowledge of customer pain points, they are best equipped to identify broader solutions in your products and services. In return, the customer enjoys a full-service experience without feeling like they're constantly being sold to.
Consumer advocates are more than those who simply like your product or service. True advocates want to share their positive experiences and influence others' behavior. When your team turns individuals into experienced, connected customers, they'll go beyond just referring your business or leaving a review—they'll become your new sales force. Enable your customer service reps to learn, grow and connect through training, and every experience can become a five-star interaction.
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