How To Make Your Customer Experience Training More Fun And Effective

Your customer experience strategy is worthless without ensuring it is retained and executed by every existing and new team member. My recent blog talked about 6 Steps in Launching a Successful Customer Service Initiative that Lasts. The one I want to focus on today is #3 Certify it. 

Once you have created an outstanding customer experience initiative, for example, the Customer Service Action Statement, your never & always, your non-negotiable standards in each part of your customer journey, the Five E’s, FORD, or your Zero Risk service recovery process, now it is time to certify their retention of the training you just gave them.

Just because your employees were in attendance for your customer service training, or watched the presentation online, doesn’t mean they retained everything that was launched. There must be a certification component. It is important to test each employee to make sure they learned and retained the information that was taught/launched. There are many ways you can do this. One of my favorites is gamifying it, making it a competition between teams, departments, or locations. This makes it fun and an incredible team-building activity. Best of all, employees retain the information.

The Best Customer Service Certification Programs

For example, some companies will hold the Customer Experience Training Olympics, which can result in having teams/departments go head-to-head to see who scores the most, gets the most answers correct, or finishes first with getting the correct answers. The more hype you have leading up to the competitions, the more exciting it is. This also gets employees to prepare better and study more, because they do not want to be the ones that let their teams down.

Advance Financial, with over 100 locations throughout Tennessee, has one of the best customer service certification programs of anyone we have ever worked with. Upon completion of their customer service orientation training, each employee must play games like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Word Search, Crossword Puzzle, and Memory Match. 

Whether you are launching a new customer experience strategy or need to revisit and reinvigorate some existing customer service training, it is vital to add a customer service certification component. You do this by applying typical elements of game playing that will not only have a dramatic increase in retention of customer service training content but also a great, fun, team-building exercise for your team that will help your organization exceed customer expectations and increase customer loyalty.