An effective training manual will leave customer service and support employees feeling confident and well-equipped to handle any situation that might arise, increasing overall productivity and satisfaction. ‘ Follow these ten best practices when putting together your customer service training manual to ensure the best possible outcomes for your customer support staff, as well as your customers:
Make increasing positive customer interactions as the main objective while writing your handbook, and encourage employees to do the same in their day-to-day work. In your customer service manual, you should be able to incorporate this objective and explain why customer service policies and practices are designed the way they are. This will promote understanding and more consistent service outcomes.
In a similar vein, drive home the importance of empathy when interacting with customers and dealing with service-related conflicts. Finding appropriate and helpful ways to remind your team members to understand how their customers feel can minimize frustration and facilitate resolutions. One simple way to do this is to emphasize active listening and including exercises that help employees practice those skills along with other soft skills like adjusting their body language or politely probing customers to gather the information necessary to resolve the issue.
Don’t skip the basics. Include the full details of your customer service policies in your training manual as a reference for your team members to point to when they have to put their training to use. Many customer service teams even create dedicated policy and procedure manuals for their teams that outline their support ticket priority levels, escalation policy, and so forth. These policies should be the foundation of all of your customer service representatives’ training, so it is vital to spell them out in simple language, and design examples and training activities to bring them to life. Utilize standard operating procedures (SOPs) and process documentation to highlight step-by-step instructions on how to tackle different issues.
A comprehensive customer service training manual should include instructions for interacting with customers with the aim of finding an efficient path to resolution, but in the event that a conflict is more complicated, team members should be well-versed in escalation procedures. Of course, not all conflicts will require the same treatment or escalation. Be sure to make clear which issues should, and should not, be escalated. Also highlight who should be brought in for specific issues, how best to reach out to the appropriate party, and what exactly to tell the unhappy customers while they wait for next steps.
Develop a set of scenarios for trainees to act out in role-playing activities. These can be pulled from your FAQs and should provide examples of right and wrong ways to handle situations. Providing creative and realistic role-playing scenarios will give your customer service employees the practice they need to ensure that they can carry out best practices confidently when interacting with a real customer on the job.