Customer Service Training – Is It Effective?

The ‘Global Shared Services Center’ of a Fortune 500 organization approached MMM Training Solutions to help them with a customer services training intervention that would not only improve basic customer handling skill sets but also help facilitate a change in the mindset of their employees toward becoming more customer service oriented as individuals and as an organization.

By working in coordination with the HR, Operations and Quality teams of the client organization, MMM Training Solutions demonstrated clearly the benefits of customer service training. We also facilitated a 20% improvement in the customer service skill sets of various teams.

For the purposes of this case study, our focus will be on the customer service training intervention we undertook for the IT services and Helpdesk Support team.

Challenges Faced:

The client outlined to us that the major challenge that they faced was that most of their IT Services and Helpdesk employees were not customer service oriented. Although, they possessed good technical skills they just had not been able to see the importance of customer service as they were dealing with ‘internal customers’ i.e. employees of the parent company, who had no one else to turn to for their IT support needs.

They wanted us to help instill a professional approach to customer service, problem solving and call handling as part of the IT Helpdesk operations. This included:

• Change in mindset toward a ‘culture of customer service’
• Politeness and courtesy when speaking to customers
• Using the right telephone etiquette
• Using the right e-mail etiquette
• Taking ownership
• Dealing with different types of customers

Pre-training Preparation:

Prior to the delivery of our customer service training program, an in-depth study of the situation was carried out by the MMM Training Solutions Team. Our pre-training preparation focused on areas that helped gain an insight into the real nature of the problem.

The Training Program:

The training programs were initially conducted for five batches of participants from the voice based support operations.

Duration:

Each batch went through a training program that was for 16 hours split into 4 sessions of 4 hours each.

Training topics:

• Developing a customer service mindset
• Understanding the elements of great customer service
• Understanding and managing customer expectations
• Call handling skills and E-mail etiquette
• Dealing with different kinds of customers
• Polite and friendly phrases to use that sound professional

Methodology: 

• Numerous role-play simulations of customer facing situations with feedback from the facilitator and peers
• Group games, movie clips and case studies along with Instructor Led Training (ILT)
• Audio recordings of sample calls that were categorized as ‘good’ calls and ‘bad’ calls

Post-training Intervention:

A post-training assessment was conducted one week after the completion of training for each batch and the appropriate feedback was given to the participants.

Results:

The result was that the participants showed an average overall improvement of 10-15% in terms of quality of performance, specifically focusing on customer service.

Refresher Training:

We conducted a 4 hour refresher session for each batch one month after their initial training program. This session focused on key areas in which the participants were not showing significant improvement.

As a result, participants showed a further 5-10% improvement in their customer service skill sets. This meant that at the end of a month participants had shown an average overall improvement of about 20%.

Conclusion:

The client organization was so delighted with the results that they wanted us back to conduct a ‘Level 2 - Customer Service’ training intervention to take their teams to the next level of bringing about ‘Customer Delight’.

We continue to work with the organization to this day. Today, we are looked at as a strategic learning partner who is helping them focus on the core of their business – developing people.

This business case clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of our customer service training material and programs. Kindly visit our website to download free customer service training material.