Customer Service Skills Training Templates

How is your company’s customer service?

Would you say that your customers are 100% satisfied? Are they over the moon excited about your company and thrilled with every interaction that they have with you? Or is there some room to improve?

Maybe your customer service is average to good, but there are always going to be some unhappy customers, right?

It’s true that you can’t please everyone. However, the reason that someone leaves your company and your sales funnel shouldn’t be due to a customer service issue. It should be because you’ve solved all their problems and they’ve grown. They’ve purchased everything you must offer, they’ve recommended you to their friends and family, and now they are moving on.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what customer service is and what it isn’t. Customer service is a series of processes and systems designed to:

• Keep your customers happy
• Prevent problems from occurring
• Solve any unexpected problems that do come up in a quick and efficient manner
• And to keep your customers buying your products so that they become lifetime customers.

And contrary to what you might think, customer service doesn’t start when someone makes a purchase. It should really begin when someone visits your website. DO they have a positive experience? Let’s stop and look at something we just said, “Customer service is a series of processes and systems.”

If you look at that portion of the definition, you may quickly realize that your own customer service has room for improvement. Much of your customer service can and should be automated. It should be something that proactively solves a problem or prevents a problem from happening.

For example, autoresponders that thank customers for their purchase are a customer service system. They’re automated and they help guide your customer to find the answers, products, and steps they need to take. Other customer service systems include:

FAQ Pages – These pages are easy to create and can be quite effective. Write down the common questions that you get from prospects and customers. Look at your product and website from their perspective and anticipate the questions they might have. Then go about answering those questions. Make sure that your FAQ page is easy to find. And remember to add to your FAQ page as new questions come up.

Contact Forms – What if someone has a question and the answer isn’t on your FAQ page? The contact form is an easy solution. You can make it part of your “Contact” page, add it to the end of your FAQ page, or place it in your sidebar or footer. Like your FAQs, make sure that visitors and customers can easily find your contact form. And then create systems so that you can answer their question within one business day. There are plugins for WordPress based sites and external software and services available as well so that you can automate the contact form process.

Ticket Systems – For your existing customers, it can be quite helpful to have a ticket based customer service system. They issue a ticket, and you or someone else, respond to their issue. This type of system helps streamline communication so messages don’t get lost. It also automates much of the process. Customers know that you received their message and they are notified when you respond.

Search Function – Finally, it should be mentioned that a good old-fashioned “search” function on your website can be infinitely useful. Your visitors or customers can type in keywords or the product in the search box and they will be taken directly to a results page with a list of items containing their search term. Don’t overlook this simple solution.

Of course, not all your customer service can be automated. In this report, we provided an abundance of templates that you can use to automate and streamline your customer service. However, sometimes a customer or lead needs to talk to a real live person. That’s where scripts and training materials can help create consistency, continuity, and control. So, what are the benefits of good customer service?

Certified Customer Service Skills Training

Most people think about customer service in terms of how they’re treated when things go wrong or when they need help. While this is a very limited view and there is much more to customer service, it does give business owners and customer-service providers an idea of what is important to customers. When setting up and administering your policies, systems, and strategies, the key to customer retention is to equate customer service with “customer experience.”

Customer retention is a simple enough concept, right? You keep your customers. You’ve probably read that it costs more to get a new customer than to keep the ones that you have. Statistics vary on how much more a new customer costs and the research ranges from 5 times more to 30 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain a customer.

This is addressing the fact that marketing is more expensive than customer service. Even at the low end of that range, it’s easy to see that it makes sense to focus on customer retention. And happy customers buy from you and they buy from you often.

Customer retention builds relationships. It strengthens word of mouth marketing because happy customers talk to their friends. Customer retention also helps to increase sales. Happy customers spend more money. Why It’s Important to Proactive and Ahead of Customer Service Problems?

If your customer service focuses on solving problems, then it’s reactive. You’re already fighting a losing battle. Think about it like this, you want to prevent your customer from ever having a problem. You want to be proactive and ensure they never need to speak to “Customer service.” That is what creates an exceptional customer experience.

If your customer service systems focus on handling problems and is reactive, then you’ll find that customers are coming to you already unhappy. If they have a problem, they’re unhappy. Unhappy customers leave, even if you’re able to solve their problem they often leave. Prevention is the name of the game.

One of the reasons why customer service systems and processes fall behind is because many entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have the time to dedicate to creating a comprehensive customer service strategy nor do they have the time to implement it. The templates, checklists, and systems in this report will help you create your strategy. What should you do regarding the implementation? Well, there’s a simple solution.

Outsource Your Customer Service

Customer-service email responses, ticket management, and phone conversations can take time. That’s time away from your business, time away from money generating activities. It’s also something that can come up unexpectedly. You may be just working through your day, making headway on a big project and bam, the project is interrupted by a customer service need.

Outsourcing takes care of this problem.

Handling customer service yourself can also be difficult. Completely invested business owners, frequently find that their emotional attachment to the business is too strong to take on the role of customer representative. Customers can push buttons and stir up emotions. This is one of the reasons it’s great to outsource your customer service. Then you don’t have to worry about taking a complaint personally or not handling the situation appropriately.

One of the biggest reasons why entrepreneurs don’t outsource is that they are afraid that the person or people handing customer service won’t accurately reflect their brand, mission, and vision. It makes sense, you want to protect your business and take good care of your customers. However, templates, scripts, and thorough training virtually eliminate this concern. You can use the materials in this report to facilitate this process and ensure your customer service team is top- notch and takes care of your customers the way you want them to.

This information along with this month’s tools will help you create an outstanding customer service and retention program for your business.

Customer Service Best Practices

Use this template to train your customer service team on your best practices. You can choose which of the best practices apply to your business and your customer service preferences.

Additional Video Material