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Trainings help companies improve their employees’ soft skills, increase profitability and remain competitive within the industry. Customer service trainings are particularly targeted towards improvement of customer-company interactions. Why do some customer service trainings fail?

Complexity of Training

The purpose of any training is to inculcate certain skills in people. No matter how difficult the idea is, the training should actually be simple. When creating a training program for customer service, the trainer must keep the level of perception of the audience in perspective. The learning outcome should be to help them understand nature of customer service and the actual changes that they need to bring into themselves to become better at it.

Wrong Training Direction

Each training delivered to staff is unlike the other. Every training must have clear objectives right from the start and should be focused keeping in mind the target audience. For example, a company usually provides different types of training to managers and junior staff. The goal of the training must be clear in order to give it a proper direction. The trainer must write down the learning outcomes to be achieved and inform the audience about it. When the audience knows the purpose of training from the start, they will be able to better apply themselves to climb up the ropes of learning to become better at client servicing.

Repetition

Each training session should have something new to offer. Companies need to accept that if a certain training is not working they must opt for something else. You cannot expect a different result by doing the same thing over and over again. One way to get around repetition is to read the content of the training carefully and suggest something new or different. Similarly, changing the learning objectives may also result in shifting the approach towards the training by applying new methods.

Lack of Interactivity or Liveliness

Trainings need to be more attractive and a fun thing to do. Employees are used to trainings and their attitude towards learning can only be positive when they are doing something interesting. Some ideas that can be included in training are brainstorming sessions, discussing case studies, comparing notes, carefully evaluating customer feedback, and creating metaphors. Similarly, adding graphs, pie charts, and other pictorial content will help summarize facts in a visually appealing format. Another idea can be to invite the company’s best performing customer service employees to speak to attendees, share insights and customer interaction experiences. Sessions can also be made more exciting by dividing the training group into two. One group could represent the customers and the other represent the company. Both groups should then be given situations to perform and an audience can decide how well the customer service KPIs were actually achieved.

Incorrect Size of Training Group

The quality of customer service training delivered is inversely proportional to the number of participants. There are different numbers floated by researchers. A more agreed number of participants hovers between 8 and 12. Lower number of participants in a training session makes it easy for trainers to set a personal rapport with each individual. As the number of participants rises, the attention span given to each individual reduces. Positive and continuous reinforcements are required on more frequent basis to help staff members develop required people skills to excel at delivering exceptional customer service. Some companies need to train larger number of people. In that case, they can either hire more trainers or divide the participants into batches.

The Wrong Training Environment

Training environment plays an important role in its effectiveness. There are certain things that you need to be careful about. The room should be of the right size in order to properly place all visual aids and accommodate the participants while still sparing room for the trainer. Make sure the training is conducted at an easily accessible location. The lighting in the room should be adequate and the seating arrangement should ensure that all participants are able to see the trainer. The furniture should be comfortable yet space savvy. Lastly, the room temperature must also be right. The trainer should have access to the thermostat control to maintain a moderate and comfortable temperature.