To maximize the impact of your customer service department, there are a number of training programs available which focus on a variety of different areas. There’s emotional intelligence training, team-building, and conflict management training, just to name a few. There are also multiple options available for the delivery of these programs: online, lecture, workshop, full day, half day, etc.

There’s no question that customer service training is a worthwhile investment for your organization, but how do you know if you have chosen the right kind of customer service training? Here are a few tips to help you make your decision.

1. Define your goal. It’s difficult to choose the right type of training if you’re unclear on what you want your training to achieve. Asking yourself what challenge you hope to address by providing the training can really help you get clear on the goal you are working towards. Do you want to orient new staff? Help staff deal with difficult calls? Or reduce the length of your call center calls?
2. Evaluate the route to achieving your goal. Sometimes training isn’t always the answer depending on what your goal is. If you feel like staff have all the information they need to do their jobs well, then look to your business processes. Maybe there is something happening in the back office that needs fine-tuning.
3. List your training objectives. Once you know your goal and have decided that training is the way to achieve it, you need to determine what objectives the training will meet. What outcomes will you see as a result of the training?
4. Research training programs. Now that you have your goal and objectives set out, you can start researching training programs to see which ones will accomplish what you’re trying to do. You may even find that designing your own in-house training is the best solution if nothing out there matches your needs.
5. Determine how you will measure whether your goal was achieved. Here is where you need to start thinking about some quantitative data. Hopefully you are already using metrics to improve your contact center performance and you can use those numbers as a starting point. It’s important to determine what improvements you want to see as well as how you will measure those.
6. Post-training check-in. After your employees have gone through the training, you need to review the results. Check the key metrics you identified in step 5 and notice what they looked like before and after the training.

Regardless of the type and format of customer service training you want to provide, you can use these six steps to ensure you’re investing in the right kind of training to meet your goals. KOVA  provides Enterprise Feedback Management software to help you keep track of all the important customer service metrics in your business. With Enterprise Feedback Management software you can share and customize data, analyze customer responses, evaluate employee performance, and protect customer data. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you start tracking the key metrics you need to improve customer service in your business.