Why is Customer Experience Training a must for everyone?

Table of Contents

As they say, ‘Customer is king.’ Organizations often harp on about how a customer can make or break their business and how providing a great customer facing experience is a big deal. But why do many organizations still fail miserably? The short answer is failed customer experience training.

If a customer experienced disappointment or dissatisfaction a decade ago, a customer would call the company or write a complaint letter. Nowadays with email, chats, chatbots, & social media for customers to reach out to companies, there’s various touchpoints that customers can use to engage with the company. To ensure that the customer facing experience is consistent across these touchpoints, there is a need for comprehensive customer experience training programs for employees.

Customer Experience Means Profitable Business

The majority of companies agree that it’s cheaper to retain loyal customers than to acquire a new one. The only way to do so is to provide a better customer facing experience. Hence the profitability of a business in today’s day and age is directly proportional to a great Customer Experience (CX). Let’s find out how?

It’s no mystery that people make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from friends and family. Positive online reviews by a loyal customer is the most easily gained publicity any brand can get.

Businesses can dramatically impact their growth by putting out positive experiences for buyers and customers. With better customer service and customer experience management training businesses can engage customers and build strong relationships. It also helps in retaining customers and encouraging repeat business. These loyal customers can also endorse the brand positively on social media or through word of mouth, these reviews are worth their weight in gold in today’s world of instant social media visibility.

Dell Hell: What Happens When Customer Experience Goes Wrong?

Reputations are built over time but can easily be destroyed in seconds. “Dell Hell” is a classic story of how bad customer facing experience and lack of customer experience training can negatively affect a brand.

In 2005, the time when blogs were just beginning to boom, Jeff Jarvis, a citizen journalist wrote a negative blog about his experience with one of the top tech companies of the time, Dell. The blog became so viral that it got noticed by the New York Times. The New York times picked up the blog and ran a scathing review of Dell on it’s magazine, this caused immense reputation loss and loss of business to Dell to the tune of millions.

Dell had to break through the online barriers to convince it’s customers that it cared about them. Dell chose to take the criticism and negative feedback as a learning opportunity. They joined online conversations to turn their reputations around. They blogged, reached out to bloggers, and listened to their customers and ended up seeing the value of a better customer experience (CX) the hard way.

Brands of today should learn from the numerous PR disasters and should proactively adopt customer experience strategy training for all their employees to avoid such a scenario.

Should Non-Customer-Facing Teams Worry About Customer Experience?

Often what businesses understand about customer experience is the summation of the interactions of a customer service executive and an employee. But it is imperative to understand that anybody associated with an organization is the face of the company. It’s the interaction, the end-to-end experience of a customer, the goodwill of a brand, that matters rather than just customer service employees alone. Thus training a few employees for better customer support with client experience training and keeping others ignorant is a huge mistake.

Before expecting the employees to deliver a better customer experience, the brand should focus on the leaders and managers and later each and every one of the employees, from the product managers to the sales people.

Every single employee must have clear visibility and understanding of the firm’s business plan, goals, objectives and the kind of experience the brand is trying to deliver. The Learning & Development (L&D) team plays a major role in the learning growth of the company and should focus on customer experience-based training programs rather than task-based.

Why is Customer Experience training for everyone important?

Everybody likes to tell a story. Even your customer. Throughout his dealings with your company, every single employee he dealt with represents the brand. Any kind of dissatisfaction is what he is going to remember and will tell the story to others. Hence training all your teams is an important step in making your company customer-centric.

  • Employees feel valued

    When companies invest in b, employees feel valued and motivated. The teams who don’t face the customers directly, when trained for client experience training, they feel inspired and make sure they provide a better experience for a customer next time. Let’s take the example of the accounting team of a firm, who has to deal with invoices etc. When the trained accounting team knows what kind of experience the brand is trying to provide, their invoice emails will no longer be cold and will view the customer as a living breathing human being, they will be more engaging and responsive to customer demands. Needless to say, such customer experience training programs help in creating a positive work environment. Trained employees feel well informed and well aligned with the organization.

  • Employees imbibe the customer-centric nature

    As mentioned earlier, customer experience is not for one team or person. To make the entire company customer-centric, it is important to provide customer experience management training to all teams. It aids in improving the customer purchasing experience, increases customer satisfaction, and enhances customer loyalty in the long run as every single employee that the customer deals with speaks with a consistent voice and tone.

  • Training can help avoid conflict scenarios

    Conflict is inevitable. However, if ignored or mismanaged, and if not resolved in its earliest stages, it hurts the business. Customer experience strategy training gives a proper perception of how employees can tackle a conflict. Training the teams enlightens them like how allowing the customers to talk their heart out, showing that you are there to help, using the correct tone, and being neutral can help the conflict turn around. Client experience training helps in avoiding and resolving conflicts in their early stages before they damage the relationship between the company and the customer.

  • Increases turnover and profit

    Customer experience strategy training focuses on broad improvements on CX, for both, the worst and the most positive customer experiences. According to Forrester Research, making good customer experiences better leads to a larger revenue gain rather than making poor experiences OK. An exceptional customer experience can lead to advocacy, enrichment, and client retention, which all have loyalty-driven revenue potential. Customer experience strategy training helps in understanding the shape of the relationship between customer experience and revenue, which allows brands to prioritize the CX improvements to improve revenue.

  • It helps everyone understand the product challenges

    An employee can never be sure of what questions, queries and feedback customers will come up with. With increasing competition in the market, businesses shouldn’t sit and assume what challenges they might face while providing a better CX. To be prepared for such situations, training the employees is a must. Customer experience management training gives an insight to all employees about how to deal with tricky situations with clients.

The Bottomline

In the present scenario, where customers don’t hesitate to pay more and switch brands for a better customer experience, customer experience training should be top priority. To create standardized customer experience that fosters customer delight across touchpoints you’ll have to invest in Learning management Systems and other learning tools that can provide scalable customer experience training.