Ultimate Guide To Create Customer Service Training Manual

What Is a Customer Service Training Manual?

A customer service training manual acts like a handbook that customer service reps can use to build an unparalleled experience for customers. This training manual provides a detailed understanding of company policies, plausible action plans a rep must take to resolve a customer’s challenge, and more.

In a nutshell, the customer service handbook trains both existing and new customer service team members on how to deal with customers during a support call.

Why Create a Customer Service Training Manual?

Training both new and existing customer service team members is one of the ideal reasons why your business must create the manual. But there are other crucial reasons why you must create a customer service training manual. Here’s a list of top reasons why you shouldn’t skip creating one for your business.

• Boosts customer satisfaction

When support reps know how to deal with various challenges that customers bring in, it becomes easier to tackle them efficiently. And, the faster they resolve the challenges, the easier it gets to boost customer satisfaction. The training manual will help them learn how to conduct themselves in certain situations and how to resolve them to boost customer satisfaction.

• Makes customer onboarding hassle-free

The customer service training manual also cites various steps the reps must take to onboard a new customer successfully. These steps help them provide the right guidance to customers and avoid making mistakes. This results in happier customers and improved satisfaction.

• Clarifies the job role for support reps

This internal documentation also helps support reps to learn what their job role includes. This is especially useful for new team members who may be unaware of their roles and responsibilities. They can always return to this information to see if they are fulfilling the requested duties.

• Assists reps to build soft skills

A lot of do’s and don’ts are also a part of the customer service knowledge base. Information about how a customer service rep must talk, behave, answer, tackle questions, and more is covered in the manual. These instructions, therefore, help customer service reps build soft skills that can become useful in the long run.

• Improves performance that results in retention

The customer service training manuals also consist of frequently asked questions (FAQs) that help reps answer questions faster. Since they answer them faster, they are able to tackle more questions in less time. They get to answer more questions with quality which results in increased productivity. And, productive reps end up retaining more customers for the brand.

8 Crucial Factors to Include in Your Customer Service Training Manual

With the above-mentioned benefits, you have more reasons to create a customer service training manual for your organization. While you get started on the process, here’s a list of eight crucial factors you shouldn’t miss when building the manual from scratch.

1. Best practices

List all the best practices the customer service reps must adhere to when attending to customer queries in real time. This will help them stay true to the brand voice and close to the values of the business. What’s more, these best practices will help them polish their soft skills during the conversation, therefore assisting them to build a delightful experience for customers.

2. Customer service policies

Do not forget to create a separate section for customer service policies. These will help the reps understand to what extent they can offer their services and set realistic expectations for the customers during the support conversation. They can even help the customers understand what the support process will entail and what would be the expected duration within which they can reply back to customers.

3. Information about products and services

Create a separate section about the products and services your organization offers in the customer service knowledge base. This will help reps clarify their doubts about the product and offer an answer to the customer more confidently.

4. Approaches to resolving conflict

Make sure you include scenario-based solutions or share possible ways to deal with a difficult customer without compromising the conversation quality. This will help customer service reps improvise the conversation and ensure that the customer never leaves disappointed.

5. Frequently asked questions

Since this is internal documentation, make sure you capture all the frequently asked questions by the reps in one section of the manual. Try to capture common questions by reps every quarter and add them to this FAQ section. This should help them understand who should be their point of contact if they come across complicated product queries or accounts-related questions.

6. Escalation protocols

Many can confuse this to be a part of the customer service policy section or a part of the FAQ section. However, this needs to be a separate section in the customer service training manual. It will prove to be beneficial for the new team members in the customer support team. They’ll learn which issues should be escalated and to whom. They will also learn the possible scenarios where they should not escalate and try to resolve certain queries at their end.

7. Resources

Another list you can’t miss is the resources section. Help your support reps find all the marketing and sales collateral that was used to bring a customer on board. They’ll be able to find the possible areas from where the customer queries originated and tackle them accordingly. The same collaterals can help them answer other questions that the customer may have about the product and its use.

8. Feedback survey

Know what’s on your support rep’s mind with feedback surveys. Make sure you add this component at the end of all the articles in the knowledge base to understand whether the resources you’ve added have been helpful for the reps or not. This way you can further improve your training manual and ensure that the reps offer the best customer service experience every time.

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8 Unavoidable Steps to Create a Customer Service Training Manual

You’re equipped with a list of factors that shouldn’t be missed in your training manual. Now, it’s time to build one. To help you get a kickstart on the process, here’s an eight-step checklist that’ll help you create a complete customer service training manual hassle-free.

1. Think of your customers, always

The whole point of building a training manual is to ensure that your customer service reps provide the best experience to customers every time they approach your business. And, this is only possible if you have a detailed understanding of how your customers are.

To know your customers, here’s what you need to understand:

• • Why did they choose your brand over others?
  • What’s their perspective on your existing services?
  • What are the possible common questions they ask?
  • What are the possible reasons that disappoint customers and prompt them to leave your business?
  • What are their expectations from customer service and the products in general?

These questions will help you understand customers and create a customer service training manual that is customer-oriented. That means each step that reps must take in various customer service scenarios will be thought from the customer’s perspective. This approach will help you build a holistic guide for customer service reps and ensure they deliver a great experience each time.

2. Keep empathy as the base of this manual

Customers seek empathy whenever they reach out to your brand for service, period.

They want to be heard, they want to be taken seriously, and they want the same consideration across all support calls. No doubt, customers can sound a little unreasonable at times but that doesn’t mean you give up on being empathetic toward them.

When they approach you, understand that they are stressed because of the challenges they are facing with your brand and have nowhere else to vent. A part of your service has caused them inconvenience, and to correct that you need to ensure that you hear customers with empathy.

So, when you are building this training manual, make sure you give emphasis on being empathetic with the customers throughout their journey with the brand. Here’s how you can introduce empathy when creating the manual:

Introduce the art of listening: Encourage your reps to hear the customers before diving into a solution.

Emphasize on patience: With a few customers, your reps may run out of patience. However, it would be wrong to raise your voice or add a hint of irritation during the call. Customers are sensitive to such behavior.

Therefore, add conversation examples of such customers in the training manual to help reps understand how they can learn from the mistakes of fellow team members and what they can do to help such customers find solutions to their problems.

Reiterate the problem: It is important to let the customer know that you’ve understood the base problem. To give that assurance, you can ask reps to repeat the challenge that the customer has expressed during the call. Once you repeat, ask the customer if you’ve summarized the problem correctly. If they give positive confirmation, only then proceed towards giving a solution to them.

Besides this, you can also introduce:

• • Phrases to use when initiating a conversation
  • Possible ways to apologize and how to take the conversation ahead
  • How to introduce a solution when dealing with difficult customers

Also listen to: User empathy while creating customer support documentation with Domi Sinclair

3. Understand why you need the training manual in place

There are multiple reasons why an organization needs a customer service training manual in place. Some of the common reasons for building yours could include the following considerations:

• • You might want to train the new support team members and help them get a headstart on your services and what your business stands for.
  • You might want to train both existing and new team members at the same level to avoid knowledge gaps. This helps you ensure that the support process is the same and that customers receive the best support experience with your brand.
  • You might want to build a resource that customer support team members can go back to in case they’ve missed something. This documentation can also prove beneficial for reps who would like to revisit the basics and understand the basic support experience expectations the brand wishes to set for customers.

Your reason could be any of these. But it would be great to narrow down your reason to build this training manual. It will help you streamline all the resources you wish to add and create a knowledge base that customer service reps can always go back to.

4. Add a list of things your reps must do

You certainly want your customer support reps to perform well and improve customer satisfaction rates by ten folds. But to do that, you’ve got to list the best practices that’ll help them achieve this feat.

Here’s a quick list that you can enhance with a few in-house examples:

• Get a thorough understanding of how the product works to offer a detailed solution during the support calls.
• Be positive during calls. Not only will this engage customers during the conversation but will also assure them that they are being heard.
• Be witty, and be quick to resolve frequently asked questions. Don’t maintain the know-it tone when answering commonly asked questions. Instead, find witty ways that don’t make the customers feel that it was wrong on their end to ask the question. See how an Amazon customer service rep tackles a support question in the wittiest way possible.

Source

Other than these, you can also list best practices like:

• • Finding the best ways to personalize a conversation experience
  • Help customers identify their needs during the support call
  • Be customer-oriented while offering a solution
  • Be a keen listener and ensure the customer feels the same way

Also Read: Internal Customer Service Best Practices

5. Set the right customer expectations with company policies

Your training manual must also cover all the policies of your services to help customer service reps set the right expectations from get set go.

You can create a separate section on all the policies and divide them into categories. For example, you can create a category that talks about subscription policies. Another section can describe policies around contract violation. Like this, you can create a separate section on policies that will help customer service reps set the right expectations and make sure that the support service is offered as per the policies given in the manual.

6. Keep all the useful resources and support tool guides in one place

From marketing collaterals to sales decks, keep all of them in one place. You ask the “why” question here.

Understand both these resources were used by different teams to convert prospects into SQLs and the same SQLs were converted into customers. Both these resources played a crucial role in bringing these customers on board. Neglecting these while providing support would be wrong. You can identify the actual features and services that were pitched to the client and understand the source of their challenge.

On top of these, you can also list all the support tool guides for the customer service reps along with these resources. In case they face any challenge with any of the support tools that they are using while having a conversation with the customer, they’ll be able to find an answer regarding the support tool right away. This will help make sure that there are no glitches during the conversion experience and that the customers stay satisfied with your services.

7. Ensure keep your training manual up-to-date

Another crucial aspect of creating training manuals is to ensure that they are updated regularly. Here’s a list of things that get updated every now and then, and you must add them right away:

• • Product updates
  • UI updates
  • Company policy updates
  • Latest customer service examples
  • New frequently asked questions

And the list goes on. However, you need to make sure that all these are updated in the training manual as they are discovered to ensure the customer service team is on the same page as other teams in the organization.

8. Take regular feedback to upgrade the manual accordingly

The last step in the creation process is to know if your efforts on the documentation have turned out fruitful for the customer service team or not. Ask them questions like:

• • Did you find the necessary information helpful or not?
  • Were you able to help our customers using this knowledge repository?
  • What aspects would you like us to improve?
  • What all-new sections would you like to see?

Feedback questions like these will help you:

• • Identify the right areas in the training manual that need to be updated on a priority
  • Understand what new sections should be added to simplify the training process for customer service reps

Also Read: Ultimate Guide to write instruction for User Manual