The training of your employees must be continuous. To achieve this, you can rely on a customer service manual to ensure everyone is informed about the standards to follow and avoid providing poor service. Let’s discuss the customer service training manual.
Without a unified training plan, managers and coworkers may teach each staff member to use different techniques. This can lead to conflicts or dissatisfaction when each employee interacts with customers differently.
Using a customer service manual can be the solution. Today, I’ll give you some tips on creating your own manual and ensuring your entire staff learns the same basic concepts, practices, and policies of your organization.
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What is a customer service manual?
A customer service manual is a document that contains all the information your employees need to create phenomenal experiences with customers. When combined with a great attitude and a customer-centric mindset, it’s easier to lay the foundations for business success.
The manual serves as a tool to provide employees with consistent customer service training, identify the most important customer service training topics for your team, train employees more efficiently with effective customer service training exercises, and ensure that customers receive fair treatment.
Know the benefits of having a customer service process.
Tips for creating a customer service manual
Writing a manual is not easy, especially when starting from scratch.
That’s why today I’m going to share some tips on how to write an effective customer service manual that will help you train exceptional representatives.
Start with the customer
Most business training focuses on the employee or collaborator. Their skills and experience are analyzed, goals are set for the skills they should have at the end, and a training program is created to cover areas of improvement.
That’s how retail sales training works, and training in most other areas is similar.
But customer service training needs to start with the customer. The success of your business relies on your customers having positive interactions with your customer service representatives, getting their problems resolved, and being satisfied at the end of the interaction.
One of the challenging aspects of customer service is that each customer has different needs. They come with different problems, and each one will require a unique approach to solving them.
That’s why empathy stands out above all else.
Check out these tips to improve customer service.
Be empathetic
Empathy in customer service is the ability to understand the feelings and desires of another person, and the best customer service agents have a strong sense of it.
Arguably, the most important aspect of empathy in customer service is learning to understand what success and happiness mean for your customer.
So, how do you develop customer empathy? By learning to listen. The ability to listen is the foundation of customer service skills.
In your customer service manual, emphasize the importance of empathy and provide resources to help your employees.
Remember throughout the training process that the customer should be the focus, not the employee.
Define the scope of customer service
Your customer service manual will cover a range of topics relevant to your service, and it should apply to everyone. Executives need to be on board, and employees need to see it.
Commitment to customer service should encompass all departments and all levels, from top executives to frontline representatives.
The scope of your document needs to align with what you consider “customer service” in your company, and you’ll want to define it early on in your training manual.
Modern customer service has begun to go beyond mere complaint resolution to include customer satisfaction during the sales, implementation, and customer lifecycle phases.
This idea is related to empathy: all members of the company must focus on helping customers achieve their goals. This is something that should be addressed from the beginning and given emphasis in your customer service manual.
A comprehensive customer service training manual can contain a wealth of information not only about specific customer service policies but also about how people in all positions can foster a customer service mindset. Make your manual interesting and useful for everyone.
I’ll share the customer service elements that will make your business thrive.
Specify customer service policies
This section of your customer service manual should contain everything you want your representatives to know (and anyone else reading the manual).
Since every company has different needs, the points we suggest below may not fit perfectly, or you may need to add more details to specific points.
Use these points as a guide and think about how you’ll need to adapt, add, or remove them to fit your company better.
- Customer interactions
How do you want your employees to interact with customers? Do you want to encourage a specific greeting or a particular way of handling customer service issues? Is there something you’d like your employees to say when they’re wrapping up an interaction?
All these things should be covered here. In some companies, you need to be very specific and may even provide a script or some examples of how to handle customer service complaints.
This section should contain all the tips and instructions you have to offer about how your employees interact with customers. If you have a retail business, that might mean face-to-face interactions, including sales. You could also include phone assistance. If you have employees who send emails to customers to resolve customer service issues, that should be addressed here.
Specific advice can also be given on non-verbal aspects. Maintaining a friendly tone of voice, constant eye contact, an open facial expression, and positive body language—all contribute to good customer interaction.
Your customer service manual is a living document, so you can update it with non-verbal details, but make sure to do so at some point, preferably sooner rather than later.
You can also discuss things like acceptable wait times, words or phrases to avoid, and challenges that have arisen in the past. The entire customer service training manual needs to be updated periodically, but this section is probably the one that gets updated most frequently.
As your employees encounter new situations, add them to this section. Maybe someone receives a question they’ve never had before, or you introduce a new product or service that needs specific treatment. Make the document easy to access and modify so that everyone can stay up to date.
It’s also a good idea to specifically address what your customer service agents should do when dealing with unhappy customers. It’s always a challenging situation, and stress can make people forget what they’re supposed to do.
This section should contain everything your service agents need to know about interacting with customers. That’s going to be a lot, and it will be specific to your company. It will take time to develop this section, but it will be a valuable resource.
- The decision-making authority of your agents
What decision-making authority do your customer service agents have? Can they issue refunds? Offer special discounts? Honor warranties?
Often, these are the things that make or break customer relationships, so it’s important to think about them and have the answers in your customer service manual.
While some companies allow their customer service representatives to make many decisions, others prefer that managers make the decisions. Whichever route you choose, make it crystal clear.
If your customer service representative makes a promise, and the manager says the company can’t fulfill it, the customer will have a very negative experience.
If you prefer your customer service representatives to escalate specific problems to their superiors, there are several details to include:
- Exactly which problems should be escalated
- The chain of command for escalation
- How customer service agents should contact their superiors
- What service representatives should say to customers during this process
Having all this information documented ensures the process is efficient, the customer knows what’s happening, and the right people are making decisions.
Return and refund policies
Since returns and refunds are common issues, it’s worth documenting them specifically in your customer service manual. Companies selling products should have a clear refund policy that customer service agents can assess and execute easily.
If you offer exchanges, company credits, or any other method of return or refund, note it in your customer service manual. If there are specific conditions, make sure they are clear. This is an area where customers can easily become frustrated, and having solid documentation can resolve the issue before it becomes a problem.
Tools and resources
In general, you want your employees to be as self-sufficient as possible. And that usually means giving them the tools and resources they need to obtain information, make decisions, and interact with customers in the most satisfying and independent way possible.
This section should contain a list of all the tools and resources you can think of. It could include links to product specifications or information published by manufacturers.
We also recommend providing employees with access to continuous training, and this could be a reference point.
A customer service manual is a good place to reiterate the chain of command for various issues and provide contact information for people who can make high-level decisions.
Pay attention to the format of your manual
You may consider delivering the content of your customer service manual through videos, slide presentations, webinars, audio files, or even games to train your customer service agents.
Create a living document
Like most documents you regularly use in your business, your customer service manual should receive updates. You’ll encounter new situations, add new products and services, decide on different procedures, and so on. All of this needs to be documented.
Another good practice is to keep the manual in a centralized location where everyone can easily access it. Current manuals should allow employees to comment, share, make suggestions, view multimedia presentations, and interact with each other. Documenting your service is an essential component of your customer service strategy.
Conclusion
In summary, a customer service manual is a tool that helps your employees deliver top-quality service to your customers. A comprehensive manual addresses common customer concerns and internal policies that dictate how you want your employees to handle product returns, complaints management, and service-related issues.
Are you ready to start developing your own customer service manual?
