Methods For Enhancing Customer Support Training Programs

“Train-the-trainers” (TTT) is one of the most common methods used to scale up improvement & change capability across organisations, yet we often fail to set it up for success. A recent article, drawing on teacher professional development & transfer-of-training research, argues TTT should always be based on an “offer-and-use” model: OFFER: what the programme provides—facilitator expertise, session design, practice opportunities, feedback, follow-up support & evaluation. USE: what participants do with those opportunities—what they notice, how they make sense of it, how much they engage, what they learn, & whether they apply it in real work. How to design TTT that works & sticks: 1. Design for real-world use: Clarify the practical outcome - what trainers should do differently in their next sessions & what that should improve for the organisation. Plan beyond the classroom with post-course support so people can apply learning. Space learning over time rather than delivering it in one intensive block, because spacing & follow-ups support sustained use. 2. Use strong facilitators: Select facilitators who know the topic & how adults learn, how groups work & how to give useful feedback. Ensure they teach “how to make this stick at work” (apply & sustain practices), not only “how to deliver a session.” 3. Make practice central: Build the programme around realistic rehearsal: deliver, get feedback, & practise again until skills become automatic. Use participants’ real scenarios (especially change situations) to strengthen transfer. Include safe practice for difficult moments (challenge, unexpected questions) & treat mistakes as learning. Build peer learning so participants learn with & from each other, not just the facilitator. 4. Prepare participants to succeed: Assess what participants already know & can do, then tailor the learning. Build confidence to use skills at work (confidence predicts application). Help each person create a simple, specific plan for when & how they will use the approaches in their next training sessions. 5. Ensure workplace transfer support: Enable quick application (opportunities to deliver training soon after the course), plus time & resources to do it well. Provide ongoing support (feedback, coaching, & encouragement) from leaders, peers &/or the wider organisation. 6. Evaluate what matters: Go beyond satisfaction scores - assess whether trainers changed their practice & whether this improved outcomes for learners & the organisation. Use findings to improve the next iteration as a continuous improvement cycle, not a one-off event. https://lnkd.in/eJ-Xrxwm. By Prof. Dr. Susanne Wisshak & colleagues, sourced via John Whitfield MBA

Don't call customer service soft skills. This 3-part framework makes them just skills. 📚A quick history lesson before we dive in... The term "soft skills" likely originated with the U.S. Army in the 1960s. The Continental Army Command regulation 350-100-1 defined them this way: "job related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g., inspecting troops, supervising." Over time, "soft skills" have come to mean two things to trainers: 1. Interpersonal skills, like customer service 2. Vague skills that are hard to define or measure 🫤 It's the second part that hurts training. You can't consistently train or evaluate a skill that isn't clearly defined or measurable. In 1972, the Continental Army Command held a soft skills training conference to tackle this issue. Dr. Paul G. Whitmore from HumRRO (a contractor) presented a framework to make soft skills easier to evaluate: 1. What is the purpose of the skill? 2. What are typical situations where this skill is used? 3. What behaviors will successfully achieve the purpose? This framework works really well for customer service skills. 🤝 Let's use rapport as an example. The scenario is receptionists at a health club: 1. What is the purpose of building rapport with customers? ↳ Rapport creates a positive experience that encourages prospective members to join, encourages existing members to renew, and makes it easier to quickly solve problems. 2. What are typical situations where rapport is used? ↳ Examples where the health club receptions might use rapport skills include: ✅ Welcoming new and prospective members ✅ Greeting existing members ✅ Assisting members with membership-related issues 3. What specific rapport behaviors should receptionists exhibit? ↳ A few things might be on this list: (1) Use welcoming body language, such as a friendly wave and a smile. (2) Give visitor a friendly greeting such as "Welcome," "Good morning!", or "Hey (name of member)!" (3) Learn and use member names (4) Demonstrate an interest in the member Yes, this takes a bit more effort upfront to define each customer service skill. Here's the payoff: Clear expectations + consistent training + easy evaluation = Skills

I used to train budtenders to increase average basket size. Then I realized I was training them to lose customers. Three months ago, I sat in on a transaction that changed the game: Our "top performer" convinced a first-time customer to buy a $60 eighth when they came in for a $15 pre-roll. The numbers looked great. The customer never came back. Meanwhile, our "underperformer" spent 10 minutes educating a nervous newcomer, recommended a single $10 gummy to start, and earned a customer who now visits twice a week. The difference wasn't sales skills. It was relationship skills. I rebuilt our training from the ground up: - Always suggest the premium option → Match products to actual needs  - Add-on at every transaction → Educate for the customer's journey  - Maximize today's ticket → Build tomorrow's regular Instead of only focusing on upselling techniques, we added on customer education. Instead of pushing premium products, we taught needs assessment. Results after 90 days: Average ticket increased 8%. Customer retention increased 34%. At C3 Industries, we train budtenders to be educators, not salespeople. Your team's performance isn't measured in today's transactions. It's measured in tomorrow's relationships. Stop training for the transaction. Start training for the customer. #BudtenderTraining #CannabisEducation #RetailDevelopment 

Many Customer Experience Managers are set up for failure—and it’s not their fault. CXMs play a crucial role in driving retention, growth, and loyalty. Yet, they’re often left to navigate challenges without the necessary tools or support. Here’s the hidden truth no one talks about: →Leadership is Number 1 Support to Customer Experience's Mindset and CXMs in their company → Poor workforce planning leads to hiring delays → Onboarding is rushed just to fill positions → Continuous training and development are treated as an afterthought And the impact? ❌ Teams feeling overwhelmed ❌ CXMs lacking confidence in their role ❌ Customers feel undervalued So why does this keep happening? Because CX enablement isn’t a priority, instead, companies focus on Sales and Support and expect CXMs to build the bridge between them. Newsflash: Without the right tools and training, they can’t. CXMs aren’t magicians. For CX programs to thrive, businesses need a dedicated CX enablement strategy that focuses on: 1️⃣Employee Experience Integration: They focus heavily on customer interactions but neglect the employee experience, which is essential for delivering great CX. 2️⃣Emotional Intelligence & Soft Skills Training: While tools and processes are covered, frontline teams often lack training in empathy, active listening, and emotional intelligence. 3️⃣Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Many programs treat CX as a siloed function instead of embedding it across marketing, operations, and product development. 4️⃣Customer-Centric Decision-Making Frameworks: Employees are trained on service standards but not on how to make customer-focused decisions when exceptions arise. 5️⃣Real-World Application & Coaching: Training often stops at theory and doesn’t include hands-on coaching, role-playing, or real-world scenario practice. 6️⃣Personalization & Adaptive CX Skills: Programs fail to prepare employees for dealing with diverse customer personalities, preferences, and cultural differences. 7️⃣Long-Term CX Mindset vs. One-Time Training: CX is treated as a workshop or certification rather than an ongoing transformation that requires continuous learning and reinforcement. 8️⃣Data Literacy & CX Metrics Understanding: Many frontline employees and even leaders don’t fully grasp how to interpret customer feedback and key CX metrics to drive improvements. 9️⃣Empowerment & Autonomy: Employees are often given strict scripts but not the autonomy to resolve issues creatively or make judgment calls that enhance CX. 🔟AI & Digital Enablement: With the rise of AI and automation, many programs don’t equip teams with the skills to blend human and digital experiences effectively. Share your suggestions in the comments section, and let us work together to create the plan.

🚀 Steal Our Customer Education Strategy: Leverage AI to Expedite Course Maintenance 🚀 Keeping training content aligned with fast-paced product releases can feel like running on a treadmill that never stops. That’s why we built a streamlined AI-powered workflow to bridge the gap between quarterly product release notes and our eLearning courses—with speed, precision, and scale. Keeping customer training up to date with product changes is critical—but here’s why it’s hard: - Quarterly product updates often introduce new features, rename elements, or sunset functionality. - Release notes can be long and dense, making manual comparison slow and error-prone. - Instructional designers must understand product context and rewrite training content. It’s easy to fall behind on course maintenance given the time-consuming nature of the task, and the reality that everyone is more interested in and tends to prioritize what’s shiny and new. Recently my teammate Julie Gasparro designed a process to streamline content review and revision using AI: 1. Prepare Input PDFs: Export your course content and quarterly release notes as clean, selectable PDFs (OCR if needed). 2. Upload to AI: Use ChatGPT or a similar document-aware AI. Prompt it to: Compare each course with the latest release notes. Flag: ✳️ New features 🛠️ Modified functionality 🚫 Deprecated or removed content Recommend exact textual and structural updates. 3. Review & Apply: Get a detailed report for each course: ✅ Summary of what’s missing or outdated ✍️ Suggested updates for scripts, narration, or screens 📄 Annotated course PDFs with red callouts and insert suggestions 🧠  Try This Prompt: “I would like to provide PDFs of eLearning courses and several quarters of release notes. Please identify differences, new features, and updates to each course, and recommend specific content changes. Prepare annotated, callout-enhanced versions of the course PDFs that were provided.” 💡 The benefits of this approach include eliminating hours of manual review, ensuring training is accurate and current, scaling across multiple courses and quarters (as well as products), reducing time-to-update after each product release, and building trust in your training programs. This AI-driven process has transformed how we maintain training accuracy—faster updates, less effort, and better learning outcomes. How are you using AI for course maintenance? #InstructionalDesign #eLearning #AIforLearning #CustomerEducation #ChatGPT #courseupdates #coursemaintenance

𝐀 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐡 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐮𝐬 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝟒𝟎%. 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐬 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐲. 𝐓𝐰𝐨 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐬𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠… Technician training and customer follow-ups. He created a mentorship program pairing experienced techs with new hires.  Not just to teach repairs, but how to communicate clearly, explain work, and build trust. Then he implemented a simple follow-up system.  Every customer got a call 48 hours after service. "How's your equipment running? Any concerns?" Within 12 months: ✔️ Service revenue doubled.  ✔️ Technician retention went from 60% to 85%.  ✔️ Customer satisfaction scores hit all-time highs. The owner went from considering closure to now considering to expand the branch The solution wasn't expensive technology or revolutionary processes. It was investing in people and relationships. Because in heavy equipment, your technicians are your brand ambassadors. And your customer relationships are your competitive advantage.

We’ve interviewed over 1,000+ support reps — and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Great customer support isn’t luck. It’s the outcome of the right people, the right training, and the right systems working together. The truth is most companies treat their support team like a cost center rather than a product. We’ve spent years identifying what holds most support teams back. After interviewing and assessing over 1,000 candidates, we discovered three pain points that prevent customer support teams from excelling: 1/ Lack of problem-solving skills: Most agents focus on answering questions, but they cannot dig deeper and solve the complex problems. 2/ Poor onboarding processes: Many organizations can rush new hires into the field without, leaving them unprepared for real-world challenges. 3/ Limited resources and documentation: Without clear processes or quick access to information, even the best agents struggle to provide fast, accurate answers, especially in high-pressure situations. These insights shaped how we recruit, train, and empower our agents to deliver world-class customer support every single day. Here’s how we’ve built a team that stands out: 1. We hire for real-world problem-solving, not just experience. Every candidate is tested on three things: 1/ Travel knowledge: Can they understand the complexities of travel and logistics? 2/ Software skills: Can they quickly adapt to new tools and platforms? 3/ Problem-solving ability: Can they think critically and deliver creative solutions? We’re not looking for someone who says, “Your flight’s canceled.” We want the person who says, “Here’s a better option and I’ve already checked your loyalty benefits along with it” 2. We invest in onboarding and continuous learning. Every new agent goes through a two-month onboarding program designed to prepare them for real-world travel challenges. During this time: They’re mentored by experienced managers who provide feedback and coaching in real time. They must pass a certification assessment before working with customers directly. But the learning doesn’t stop there. Our agents have access to detailed SOPs integrated into our CRM, giving them access to critical information while they assist travelers. 3. We empower reps to act like travel consultants, not ticket agents. That means going beyond what's being asked, understanding the context, identifying the real issue, and delivering the best possible solution every single time. Great support doesn’t happen by default — it takes intentional hiring, structured training, and systems designed to enable smart decisions under pressure. That’s why we were named a Leader in Global Travel & Expense in 2024. If you're building or fixing your companies travel support, I’d love to hear: What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to travel support? Drop them in the comments ⬇️

Your customers are leaving, and it’s not (all) because of your product. Let's take a look at your people-focus! Your employees! Too many businesses invest heavily in customer acquisition; fancy marketing campaigns, optimized funnels, and aggressive sales tactics… Only to lose, those hard-earned customers, because their teams aren’t trained to deliver exceptional experiences. Here’s the reality: Your staff are your brand! 👎A disengaged, undertrained team = frustrated customers who churn.  👍A well-equipped, empowered team = loyal customers who stay and spend more. So why are companies still treating employee empowerment like an afterthought? Want to build a brand that customers love? Start here: ♦️Onboarding = Culture-Setting. New hires need to feel the company’s customer-first mindset from day one. If they don’t, neither will your customers. ♦️Train for Proactive Service, Not Just Damage Control. Customer experience is about proactively solving for the customer! ♦️Empathy as a Core Skill. AI can automate responses, but only humans can build trust. The best teams know how to listen, personalize, and connect. ♦️Make Training a Habit. The companies winning in CX don’t train once a year; they invest in continuous learning. Real-world scenarios. Peer coaching. Role-playing tough conversations. ♦️Technology = Training Accelerator. AI-driven coaching, customer feedback loops, and VR simulations aren’t the future; they’re the present. At the end of the day, your customer experience is only as good as your least trained employee. Question: If I asked your newest hire(s) what makes your customer experience different, would they know the answer? Here's an excerpt from a conversation with Stephen Ouma on matters #EmployeeExperience. The full episode link is in the comments. Let’s discuss. #CustomerExperience #EmployeeTraining #CX #CustomerRetention #CustomerSuccess #Leadership #GrowthStrategy #CustomerCentric #Training #CustomerObsession #Sustainable #Business

Why Your Customer Support Team Keeps Making Mistakes—and How to Fix It 🤔 I’ve noticed a common issue among enterprises trying to improve their customer support. They struggle to ensure their teams are following processes and reducing mistakes. But why is this happening? 1. It’s hard to remember everything Agents go through 4 to 12 weeks of training, absorbing tons of information about the business and countless ways to solve customer issues. Let’s be honest—no one can remember all that! 2. Knowledge is everywhere—and nowhere Information is scattered across multiple systems. When knowledge is everywhere, it’s nowhere. Agents waste valuable time searching for what they need. Your goal should be to standardize agent activities so everyone on your team is on the same page—saying the same things and following the same processes. Here’s how to make it happen: 1. Document your processes in a digestible manner Create dynamic workflows where agents can access knowledge in real-time. Make it easy for them to find exactly what they need when they need it. Think of it as giving them a GPS for customer interactions. 2. Start automating less complex processes Begin by automating simple tasks so agents can focus on more challenging issues. For example, automate password resets or note-taking after calls. 3. Analyze and iterate Keep an eye on your agents’ performance. What’s working? What’s not? Use this data to improve processes and drive more automation. Imagine being an agent on the front lines—dealing with upset customers, trying to diagnose issues, find solutions, and show empathy—all in real-time. It’s a tough job. By standardizing processes, providing easily accessible knowledge, and automating where possible, you can make their lives easier and reduce mistakes. — What strategies have you used to help them follow processes and reduce errors? 💬 #CustomerSupport #ProcessImprovement #Automation 

How are you training your staff to meet customer needs? At Sutherlin Automotive Group, we do this in several ways... 1. Every staff member is a product expert We require every customer-facing employee to get their OEM certification(s) so that any one of them can answer customer questions about our inventory. 2. Staff cross-trains for more cohesion across the customer journey Our sales staff shadows fixed ops and vice versa. These are our focus areas right now, but we also offer other positions cross-training opportunities. Not only does it improve customer experience, but it gives staff more future career paths and exposes them to other areas of the business for their own enrichment. 3. Consistent management training Managers need to do all the training their departments do for any new processes, etc., but they also get consistent management training and are trained in utilizing forecasting for meeting their targets. What else are we doing/planning to improve the customer experience? Decreasing wait times, improving customer service, offering mobile service and pick-up/drop-off service for customers... Most dealers are hyper-focused on sales when they should be hyper-focused on delivering an incredible experience to existing customers. #autoretail #customerexperience