Skills & Workforce Development

Why is Customer Experience Training a must for everyone?

PS
Priya Sharma L&D Specialist
| March 20, 2020 | 7 min read
Why is Customer Experience Training a must for everyone?

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.

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.

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PS

Priya Sharma

L&D Specialist

Priya has 9 years of experience designing corporate training programmes for BFSI and retail organisations across India. She specialises in onboarding, soft skills, and building learning cultures that actually stick.

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