Customer service training: The complete guide

Customers expect fast, convenient, high-quality customer service—if they don’t get it, they won’t hesitate to go elsewhere. The key to attracting and retaining customers is to deliver a fantastic customer experience (CX). However, to do so, you must ensure every support agent has the proper skills and proficiencies to assist customers.

Businesses use customer service training to improve the customer service skills of their support agents. The right plan can enhance team performance, improve customer satisfaction, and boost retention and loyalty without straining a business’s bottom line.

Use our guide and customizable template to build a robust, engaging customer service training plan or program that takes your CX to the next level

More in this guide:

• Why is customer service training important?
• What’s the difference between training and hiring customer service candidates?
• 5 types of customer service training
• Which customer service training skills should you cover?
• Tips for effective customer service training
• Customer service training materials
• Frequently asked questions
• Empower your agents with the right CX partner

Why is customer service training important?

Customer service training gives agents the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to operate efficiently every day—otherwise known as customer success enablement. Here are some of the most impactful benefits of customer service training.

Creates agent development opportunities

Customer service training gives agents the skills required to excel in their roles. With ongoing training, newer employees learn the basics of your operations, and tenured workers can use employee development plans to stay up to date on (or improve) internal processes, technologies, and customer trends. This creates a continuously improving workforce.

Builds customer loyalty and retention

Good customer service sets exceptional service teams apart from fine ones. Adequately training customer service teams will give you an edge over competitors and, as a result, help build customer loyalty and improve customer retention. When agents provide personalized, prompt, knowledgeable, and empathetic support, they can “wow” customers, making them more likely to stick around.

Increases job satisfaction

According to the University of Phoenix’s 2024 Career Optimism Index® study, 55 percent of American workers agree they would feel more able to advance in their current role if their employer offered skill development opportunities. Skill development of this sort also improves employee performance, allowing employees to find more value in their roles, feel satisfied at work, and display higher levels of engagement.

Helps improve productivity

Properly trained employees deliver faster support. When businesses commit to ongoing development, they create teams capable of prioritizing tasks efficiently, resolving issues promptly, leveraging resources effectively, and more. This, in turn, can improve agent productivity and customer service key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer satisfaction (CSAT), first reply time (FRT), and other metrics.

What’s the difference between training and hiring customer service candidates?

Some businesses may prioritize hiring experienced customer support agents and de-prioritize the training process. They may think they can cut corners or reduce expenses by assembling experienced staff. This is a common oversight.

While hiring the best candidates is important, businesses still need to train them no matter their skill level. Training customer service candidates can make a difference in critical areas like:

• Communicating your vision: While a skilled rep may know how to provide good customer service, they don’t know how to provide good customer service for your business. Training can educate new hires on your customer service goals.
• Introducing your target customer: Just as with your specific customer service preferences, new hires are unfamiliar with your customer profile. Training allows you to tell them about who they will be serving.
• Explaining your tools: If you use customer service tools or other in-house applications, training can show new hires how best to use them.

So, while hiring experienced candidates is a great way to build a solid support team, businesses still need training programs to help them reach their full potential.

5 types of customer service training

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to training customer service teams. Choose the model that suits your team’s budget, timeline, and needs.

1. New hire customer service training

New hire training and employee onboarding typically cover company culture, software, and product knowledge. Ideally, the program should be between four and six weeks in length.

During the process, analyze your training program by asking:

• Do they understand all the training material?

• Do they have questions you can answer?

• How can you improve the process to make learning easier?

Regularly checking in ensures recent hires are on track, and getting feedback helps you better understand how to enhance the training for the next cohort.

2. In-house employee training

Support managers or highly skilled reps usually lead in-house customer service training for employees using company training materials. By consulting data and designing a custom curriculum that addresses your team’s weak spots, you can optimize training and tackle common challenges, such as slow response times or lengthy interactions.

Since each business is unique, creating a program that aligns with your specific processes and culture is more effective than simply adopting another company’s approach. Tailoring your training program in this way ensures that it meets your team’s needs and strengthens overall performance.

3. Consultant workshops

Typically led by external customer service experts over several days, consultant workshops usually include multiple intensive training sessions. There are benefits and challenges to these types of customer service training:

• Pros: Agents learn from an expert in the field through highly engaging, inspiring, and interactive sessions.
• Cons: Lessons are short-lived, usually costly, and may not help agents adopt long-term ideas.

To get more value out of consultant workshops, consider recording them and storing the videos in an internal knowledge base. That way, employees can reference the sessions whenever they need information from the workshop or some extra motivation.

4. Customer service refresher training

Ongoing training should be essential to the job, even for experienced reps. Customer service skills can get rusty with time, so it’s a good idea to have a routine performance check. If reps are lacking, they need to take a refresher course.

Recruit tenured staff to help with training to reduce your budget and help seasoned employees reinforce all they’ve learned. Just make sure they have the bandwidth to teach team members on top of their primary job responsibilities.

5. Special circumstance customer service training

Special circumstance training is typically a one-off occurrence based on a unique event or issue, such as a new product release. These sessions are timely, and you shouldn’t postpone them. You can also accelerate learning if agents can independently complete the training and have a clear deadline.

Which customer service training skills should you cover?

Excellent customer service is more than answering customer questions—it requires skills to “read” customer sentiment, manage an influx of support tickets, adequately resolve issues, and keep cool when things get heated. Alongside a company’s philosophies and communication styles, training programs should cover these hard and soft skills to support agent success.

Tips for effective customer service training

As we’ve mentioned, customer service training is essential for improving agent productivity, building customer loyalty, and more. However, creating a program can be easier said than done. Here are our top tips for effective customer service training:

• Be customer first: Being customer first means putting the customer at the forefront of your decision-making. When you plan your training with the customer in mind, you’ll naturally create a better program.
• Set clear customer service objectives: Identify the key skills and knowledge areas that your team needs to know and structure your training around those aspects.
• Engage in active training: Don’t just give training presentations—encourage participation. Incorporate simulation exercises and role-playing activities to help reinforce information.
• Monitor performance: Ensure you monitor your agent performance to assess your training effectiveness and identify improvement opportunities. Doing so can help you evaluate your program and scale your customer support team.

Use a combination of these tips to drive a better training experience for your team and a more positive experience for your customers.

Customer service training materials

Using customer service training materials like templates, courses, games, and videos can further shape your CX strategy and train your employees.

Customer service training templates

Creating a customer service training template is an easy way to take your process to the next level. You can use it to deliver training content as effectively as possible and ensure everyone, from new hires to tenured employees, is on the same page.

Use our customizable customer service training template below to communicate your customer service philosophy to your agents, enhance CX, and streamline skills training.

Customer service training courses

Customer service training courses typically offer structured training on various aspects of customer service, communication, and problem-solving. For example, Zendesk Training allows businesses to create optimal learning experiences for agents, enabling them to learn key soft and hard skills, including technical proficiency. Plus, Zendesk Training offers free courses and learning paths to help all team members deliver high-quality customer experiences.

Customer service training games

Customer service training games add a bit of fun to the training process and can include role-playing exercises, team-based competitions, and quizzes. You can start with some examples like:

• Jeopardy!: Split your agents into teams and conduct your own game of customer service Jeopardy! Include questions around themes and topics that will challenge your agents.
• Charades: Again, split your team into groups and have one team act out interactions or scenarios and the other guess what’s going on or how best to resolve it.
• Bingo: Your team must match your clue to the correct term or process and then find it on their board.

Adding creative training opportunities in the form of games can improve employee engagement along with agent skills.

Customer service training videos

Customer service training videos can teach your team new processes and reinforce important concepts. These videos don’t need to be dull instructionals that remind you of high school science class—there’s plenty of engaging content to choose from. Consider using customer service-focused TEDx Talks or other similar videos to start your virtual learning experience.

Frequently asked questions

Empower your agents with the right CX partner

Empower your employees to deliver the best CX possible with customer service training—but don’t do it alone. Choose a powerful customer experience partner like Zendesk to enhance your internal and external training plan. Plus, download our customer service training template to get started today.

Get the guidance you need and access free courses to help your agents, admins, sales teams, and more with Zendesk Training.