Having a hard working, strong customer service department is extremely valuable to any business. Businesses with the best customer service are the best at retaining customers and building long lasting relationships. But training a team of employees is often more valuable than just making sure you have the right people. Here are some tips to follow when determining what training skills your customer service agents need.

Technology use

A good customer service agent will be working with technology in many capacities, whether that be through phone calls, texting, emails, chat, or even social media conversations. Of course, a lot of this can be handled automatically with an artificial intelligence company, but the employees still need to know how to work with the technology to produce the best results. Don’t just put the best technology in place; give your employees the proper training on how to use it efficiently.

Writing skills

If one of your agents isn’t great with writing but can strike up a great conversation, that’s great! Put them on the phones. For everyone else, learning the proper writing skills is extremely important to helping customers. Your employees need to be able to have a conversation through text that feels just as warm and friendly as speaking on the phone. Teach them different keywords to use through the conversation that are positive. Teach them to take a minute to gather themselves before typing a response if they are upset.

Another important writing skill is instructional writing. Customer service agents need to be able to clearly send a set of instructions to customers in order to fix a problem. One of the main jobs of customer service is to fix problems, so they need to be able to find a solution and, if the agent can’t fix it themselves, send instructions to the customer on what to do.

Take time to think

A normal part of any conversation is to make assumptions. And while many people say you should never assume, the truth is that you must make assumptions in order to properly address customer concerns. Try to consider not only what you are thinking and assuming about them but also what they may be assuming about you. They might assume you will be unhelpful as a customer service agent or maybe they assume you’ll be great because they’ve had positive interactions in the past.

The same goes for your employee’s assumption of them. Are they automatically assuming it will go well or that it will go poorly? This will significantly affect the outcome of the conversation. The further into the conversation they go, the easier it will be to determine exactly what they are thinking and how to best respond to that.

Overall, training customers on how to use the right technology to work with customers and how to interact with them properly will make a huge difference to whether or not customers leave happy. The right training will go a long way.