How to Quickly Train Customer Service Skills for Free
Updated: July 26, 2021
Every week, I hear from customer service leaders whose employees are struggling with customer service. They recognize their employees need training, but there's always some obstacle in the way:
We're too busy!
There's no budget!
My employees work remotely!
These obstacles aren't impossible to overcome. Here are some solutions that customer-focused organizations are using right now.
We're too busy!
I don't know of a single customer service team that isn't pressed for time.
Gathering everyone together for a half-day seminar just doesn't work in today's busy environment. Our employees need training, and they need it fast.
One solution is the team huddle.
The UPS contact center in Las Vegas, Nevada uses daily huddles for each of its teams. The meetings are highly choreographed and take just nine minutes. Team leaders gather their employees around a whiteboard where they discuss key metrics, review challenges, and share success stories.
(There's no one way to huddle. Read about other variations here.)
Each huddle is a mini-training session! By the end of the huddle, employees know:
What's going on in the business.
How to solve a challenging problem.
What people are doing well.
Best of all, those huddles add up to 45 minutes of training by the end of the week, and three hours of training by the end of the month. Ta-da! Half-day seminar.
Many organizations have a LinkedIn Learning subscription. If you have access, your employees can take the same approach with customer service training videos.
Let's take my Customer Service Foundations course as an example. It will take 1 hour and 23 minutes to watch the course all the way through. That’s just too much content to dump in your brain all at once.
A better approach would be to have your team watch just one video from the course per day. The videos average about three minutes long, with no video lasting more than five minutes.
Try it! Have your team watch this 2:22 minute video on identifying your customers' emotional needs, hold a brief discussion about it with the team, and then ask everyone to go back to work and apply what they learned. You've just given everyone a useful skill they can apply immediately!
There's no budget!
Two primary factors drive up the cost of customer service training:
The cost of the training itself.
Paying people to attend training.
Major League Soccer's Chicago Fire addresses both of these issues with simple, highly-targeted sessions called "spark training."
Guest feedback is the starting point. For example, there might be a few complaints about a particular concession stand during a match. The Fire's fan services team will investigate the issue and identify a solution. The solution will be shared with employees at that concession stand via a 15-minute training session immediately before the next match.
This helps eliminate chronic problems, keeps employee sharp, and takes virtually no budget to implement.
You don't need complaints to create simple, low-cost training. The free Customer Service Tip of the Week email is an easy way keep everyone focused on the fundamentals.
Start by subscribing here. (You can have your employees subscribe, too!)
I'll automatically send you a book with over 52 of my favorite tips.
Each week, you'll receive one customer service tip to share with your team.
Customer service leaders have found many creative ways to use these tips for ongoing employee training.
My employees work remotely!
A lot of customer service teams are spread out geographically. You might have multiple offices, work-at-home employees, or a field service business where employees are working onsite at a customer's home.
There are still plenty of ways to train your remote employees.
Use this guide: All You Need to Know About Training Remote Employees
John Peek, owner of Peek Brothers Painting in San Diego, creates short video clips to share weekly reminders with his work crews. Each one is simple, direct, and immediately useful.
These short videos are easily viewable on a smartphone. Here's a great example.
Side note: I've hired Peek Brothers many times over the years. When the company painted my house last year, the crew received multiple compliments from my neighbors for their professionalism and workmanship!
Take Action
Time and budget usually aren't insurmountable barriers to training.
You'll often find there's a way to get things done if you think beyond the traditional seminar and focus on training that's short, convenient, and practical.
This type of training is sometimes called “microlearning.” Here’s more information on how to create it.