Exceptional Customer Service Training

Course Overview

This Exceptional Customer Service Essentials training increases the confidence of your team members so that they can consistently deliver an exceptional customer service experience. Customer Service Essentials reflects the best when it comes to proven, reproducible communication techniques that empower your team members to make every interaction a productive and successful one. With these proven communication skills and customer service skills, your team will learn to transform customers into loyal and enthusiastic advocates for your company.

Using customized, real-life examples that go beyond theory, your team will learn how to apply these techniques to any situation. By integrating them quickly and easily into their daily routine, they’ll see immediate results your customers will notice and appreciate.

With Customer Service Essentials, your team will know how to transform every interaction into a positive customer service experience. They will learn to talk to customers in a relatable, authentic, and professional way. The end result is a consistent, top-tier service model that creates a spark throughout your company’s culture.

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Exceptional Customer Service Builds Great Companies and Teams

Every time you communicate with someone, you form an impression of yourself: a positive, negative, or neutral one. Ideally, you want your customers to form a positive impression of your organization whenever they connect with you. Your goal is to create memorable experiences that leave your customers and team members feeling great while resolving interactions positively through excellent customer service.

Your team members are on your front lines creating memorable experiences. Whenever a customer thinks of your company, they think of your customer service professionals: their faces and their voices. It’s your peoples' abilities and confidence in providing high-quality service that lead to more satisfied customers.

If you’re seeking to improve your customer satisfaction, and, by extension, customer loyalty — it starts by equipping your frontline staff with the skills, techniques, and support to turn them into confident and capable professionals using essential customer service training. Through essential customer service training, staff members learn about transactional and interactional skills and how they apply those in a positive manner with every customer to create great experiences. Many positive impressions combine into a stellar reputation with your customers that keep them coming back!

Learning Outcomes

Customer Service Essentials covers the most important skills and techniques your customer service professionals need to succeed in their roles. After participating in our exceptional customer service training, your people will know how to:

Convey positive voice tone and word choices
Consistently create positive first impressions
Guide and control every conversation
Understand when and how to use empathy
Build and maintain rapport
Transform negative messages to aid in customer cooperation
Skillfully handle difficult customer interactions
Apply standards for internal and external communication

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“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around."
Steve Jobs

Business Outcomes

Customers should walk away from every interaction satisfied with your service. That’s the key to building customer loyalty.

After they participate in the Customer Service Essentials course, your team members will understand how their actions build customer loyalty and feel empowered to represent your company effectively. Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty set your organization apart from the competition and transform one-time customers into repeat advocates.

Within your company, your focus on providing exceptional customer service will help you establish and reinforce high customer service standards. Those standards travel enterprise-wide, and they relate to everybody in the organization, regardless of their position. Overall, this commitment to excellence enhances your company culture and creates a place where people are excited to work.

Through our Customer Service Essentials course, you can realize these crucial business gains, as well as:

Improved team morale
Fewer customer complaints
More self-reliant and empowered employees
Breaking down of internal silos
Consistency of exceptional customer service

Program Format

We offer the Customer Service Essentials course as a one-day, onsite, instructor-led session that can be split into shorter sessions to accommodate schedules. We present our course in a multimedia, fun, interactive manner with group exercises to engage participants. You also receive materials and job aids to support additional learning reinforcement of essential customer service.

Part I: Customer Service Fundamentals

The first part of the Customer Service Essentials course focuses on fundamental knowledge for customer service professionals, such as:

Greeting a customer
Managing your voice tone
Concluding a phone call
Properly transferring a customer to another team member

We also cover the expectations that team members set every time they speak with a customer. The goal is to discover the importance of building a positive reputation that precedes every customer call through essential customer service.

Part II: Leading Productive Conversations with Customers

The second part of the Customer Service Essentials course addresses how your people can lead productive conversations with customers. That includes working with dissatisfied customers, who don’t always present as your team members may expect! Many people expect dissatisfied customers to vocalize their issues, but studies show that only 4% of customers will voice their concerns that way. The rest don’t often show outward frustration until they leave your organization for a competitor.

Dissatisfaction shows itself in many ways, and our training helps your people identify when that customer sentiment arises. Your team members then know how to demonstrate empathy, de-escalate frustrated customers, and keep customers cooperative, which all contribute to effective and positive outcomes through essential customer service.

From the Customer Service Essentials course, your team members will gain skills like:

How to foster active listening skills to really understand your customers
How your team members can communicate most effectively with customers
Methods for your people to de-escalate upset customers
Maintaining a positive attitude focused on the resolution of a customer’s challenges

The session also covers how your people can lead these conversations in multiple media, from email to phone calls to online chat. These skills are relevant no matter what form an interaction takes, and we tailor our program to meet these many different channels.

By the full session’s end, your customer service professionals will cultivate a strong and capable mindset and know how to bring that mindset and skill set to work every day. From the initial greeting through issue resolution, your people will provide thoughtful and positive interactions that leave a lasting positive impression on your customers!

Who Should Attend?

Any department or team looking to improve communication skills with internal and external customers should attend. This session is valuable not only for supporting your team members’ communication with customers but also for encouraging interdepartmental cooperation. Learning together creates many opportunities to connect within your organization and build camaraderie.

Bottom line: If you talk to people anywhere for any reason, we can help you!

info@bonfiretraining.com | 800-888-4893

Remote and Online Training Available

Do you have a distributed workforce? Are there people who you’d love to take this course, but they work in a different office location?

We offer Live Remote Training so all of your team members can receive exceptional customer service training. Contact us today for more information.

Are you struggling to figure out how you can commit a full day to this session? Or do you simply want to start improving your customer satisfaction immediately?

We offer the Customer Service Essentials course as an online module as well. Our online, on-demand session is designed to give you high-quality and concise training you can watch in one sitting. Learn more by viewing a preview of the course.

Sustain the Training and Its Benefits

Once you’ve finished the Customer Service Essentials course, you and your team will see immediate improvements in your customer interactions and team members’ abilities. But maintaining those benefits over time requires an organized environment committed to consistent exceptional customer service training.

The excitement around new training and lessons learned lasts for only so long. In fact, research shows that people can forget 75% of what they’ve learned within 24 hours of learning it! Without proper reinforcement and encouragement, your people may not recall the important lessons they’ve just learned and slip back into old habits. And that could affect the gains you’ve made in customer satisfaction and loyalty!

For sustained customer satisfaction growth and company culture enhancement, it’s best for training to be done as a sustainable activity. That’s how leadership can best encourage their people to learn more and continue growing and developing their customer service skills.

Our Customer Service Essentials course lays the foundational knowledge and skills for customer service professionals. When you’re ready to build upon that foundation, our Sustain the Training: Customer Service Essentials course gives your leaders the tools they need to create sustainability and consistency of standards. This holistic approach to training continually refreshes your team members’ skills and enthusiasm. You’ll continue to realize improvements to your customer satisfaction and maintain an excited and knowledgeable workforce.

Do you have in-house trainers? We offer a Train-the-Trainer & Licensing program to equip your trainers with tools and solutions to deliver great training to your people. Through them, you can extend the value and benefits of training!

Customer Service Essentials FAQs

Check out some FAQs, and keep in mind that we'll help you design the best and most effective program to meet your training goals and desired learning and business outcomes. Just give us a call or email, we're here to help! 800-888-4893 / info@bonfiretraining.com

The standard Customer Service Essentials course content is typically seven hours in length and can be delivered in a full day to one group, or scheduled in half-day increments over two days. This way, one group will see part 1 in the morning, and another group will see Part 1 in the afternoon. This sequence is repeated for part 2 on a second day. This can help if you'd like to have some staff available to serve customers each day while the others are in training.

We recommend Customer Service Essentials for all departments or teams looking to improve communication skills with internal and external customers. This includes frontline customer service representatives, team leaders, managers, and supervisors. The more team members that attend, the more the culture of customer service excellence will be integrated into your entire company. This can be an enterprise-wide training initiative.

This is a very common concern. Many of our clients decide that the long-term gain of interactive, hands-on classroom training is worth the short-term pain of being short staffed for customer interactions for a day or two. Rest assured; we have several options when staffing is a concern. We can divide your staff into multiple groups and run them through the training at different intervals, ensuring that no one is away for more than a few hours. Also, we can deliver the training after hours or on a weekend. Or you can bring in small groups from each department in your company, so no single department has everyone in training at the same time. We have worked around staffing issues many times.

It's important to reinforce the training within 30 days of the training program to ensure the techniques stick and become part of your culture. With that in mind, we have several recommendations.

We strongly recommend Bonfire’s Sustain the Training workshop, which teaches supervisors, team leaders and management to coach the newly trained staff on the new techniques and skills learned in the Customer Service Essentials workshop. It reinforces the new skills and helps the staff to practice them until they become habit. The coaches’ training provides real content that is coupled with a methodical approach to set your coaches and staff up for success. It’s the best return on investment insurance for your training.
We also offer customized refresher training. This can take place anywhere from 6-12 months after the initial training and will help the staff brush up on key techniques so that all of their skills are fully implemented.
Our Online/OnDemand Customer Service eLearning series is perfect for reinforcement and refresher training. With Bonfire’s comprehensive lineup of customer service eLearning modules, you get the quality training your team needs whenever you want it, anytime and anywhere!
Spark Video Series, Team Huddles, Customer Service Essentials Reinforcement Guides, BOOST Huddles, IGNITE Videos, and Leader Companion Guides are also great tools that reinforce the learnings from the Customer Service Essentials workshop.
Your Bonfire trainer is also available for advice and guidance after the training is completed. They’re just a phone call or email away!

Our onsite training is our best and most effective training solution for Customer Service Essentials since it is customized, interactive and fun. Our charismatic trainers are able to get the entire class involved and participating during the training. This makes the learning process highly enjoyable, and we have found that participants tend to learn and retain more with this format.

Live remote training for our standard Customer Service Essentials course is also customized and is typically delivered over three total hours, usually in two 90-minute segments. That said, Bonfire is flexible and will adjust timing to meet your needs.

Our Online/OnDemand Customer Service Essentials eLearning series is an excellent fit for clients who have a remote workforce or find it difficult to coordinate onsite training sessions due to scheduling, geography or other challenges. Many of our clients use both formats successfully with their training programs. We offer bulk pricing or licensing options for companies that have a large number of people to train or have many locations. The seminars can either be accessed through our website or loaded on your Learning Management System (LMS) or intranet.

Be Your Best, On Purpose, Every Time.

Transform every exceptional customer service training interaction into a positive, successful one.

Create a Spark