Top 5 online courses for customer service

There’s no doubt about it, customer service is still one of the most important factors when it comes to deciding to do business with a company. It’s no good having the most up-to-date tech gear, or fancy office suites – if your business doesn’t deliver on customer service you’ll find it hard to stay ahead of the competition.

What’s more, with the ever-increasing impact of social media, providing excellent customer service has never been so important. Customers now have the potential to provide instant feedback on any company across social media and review sites. So if you work in a customer service role, you’ll want to be sure your skills are up to scratch.

Online learning is a great way to improve your customer service skills.

To get you started, we’ve put together five of the best eLearning courses for customer service. Through these short, interactive online courses, you'll learn how to listen to customers, form positive connections, build customer loyalty, improve your telephone technique, and handle complaints.

These courses aren’t just beneficial for people working in a customer-facing role. Improving your customer service skills will greatly help your career, whatever position you’re in – because we all deal with customers daily, whether they’re external or internal to the business.

Customer Service Success

This first online course is a great introduction to the world of customer service, providing plenty of interesting statistics and facts about today’s consumers.

For example, 89% of people say they’ve stopped doing business with companies because of poor customer service – that’s a huge percentage! This course is designed to give you the skills you need to provide great customer service, so you don’t become one of those companies.

The short online course covers seven specific skills that you can use to drastically improve your interactions with customers on a daily basis. You’ll learn how to:

• Be a Great Listener
• Master Positive Language
• Have Patience
• Communicate Clearly
• Learn to be Persuasive
• Close the Conversation
• Develop a Willingness to Learn

The course content has a strong focus on improving your listening skills, as without this fundamental skill you won’t be able to respond to your customers’ needs.

You’ll also learn about paying attention to your body language and gestures, as well as the words and language you use in the work environment. All of these things have a significant impact on how customers perceive you and the company you work for.

Connect with the Customer

Building on the fundamentals of the previous course, this eLearning content looks at the importance of creating a connection with your customers. Because the fact is, your sales approach matters just as much as the product you’re selling.

This course will really get you delivering exceptional customer service, helping to develop the skills you need to engage and connect with your customers. You’ll explore listening skills, as well as questioning skills, to learn how to show an interest in your customer as opposed to your product.

As this course explains, it’s the “connection between you and the customer that provides an elevated customer experience.” People can buy their products or select services from any number of sources, especially now that most of us shop around online. It’s the connection we feel with certain service reps that keeps us coming back to their store or company.

Customer Loyalty

On that note, it’s important to talk about customer loyalty.

Many businesses tend to spend a lot of time, money and energy attracting new clients, running plenty of special promotions and deals for new customers. But did you know that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one?

This is just one of the many ‘real world’ things you’ll learn throughout this short eLearning course. The course brings customer loyalty back into focus, highlighting the benefits of retaining your existing customer base in a world where customer loyalty is on the decline – people don’t stick to one product or service provider like they used to.

However, as the course instructor tells us: “Great customer service can turn average customers into loyal fans of your business.” What’s more, if you can increase your customer retention rates by just 5%, you can increase profits by a whopping 95%!

This course may especially appeal to managers who are keen to train up their employees in better service techniques, as it really shows the importance of building a loyal customer base.

Telephone Etiquette

Also part of the Customer Service collection, this course focuses on something that you might not think is all that important.

But as you’ll see, your telephone manner when dealing with customers can quickly shape their entire perception of your company. In fact, it takes just six seconds for a caller to make an impression of your business – six seconds!

For many of us, text messaging has pretty much replaced talking on the phone, but if you’re in a customer service role you need to be skilled in the art of the phone call. If you don’t have the right telephone etiquette, you’ll find yourself losing customers, fast. But on the other hand, if you know how to communicate well with your callers, you could soon build up your loyal customer base.

This eLearning course takes you through the seven steps of telephone customer service:

• Step 1 – Answering the Call
• Step 2 – Begin with an Introduction
• Step 3 – Give Your Full Attention
• Step 4 – Take Good Notes and Repeat
• Step 5 – Avoid Annoying Habits
• Step 6 – Try to Resolve Issues Immediately
• Step 7 – End on a Positive

Following these steps will have you impressing customers with your communication and service skills, while also giving you more confidence on the phone.

Handling Complaints

Last, but not least – we all know customer service can have its tricky moments. And a key component of providing great service is knowing how to handle negative feedback and complaints.

This course can help you with this, by providing you with tools and techniques you can draw on in difficult situations. The absolute best way to manage customer complaints is to have a system in place that helps you to control the situation and lead it towards a positive outcome. And fortunately, 95% of customers will give your company a second chance if you handle their complaint successfully.

Throughout the course materials, you’ll learn how to use the LAST technique – an acronym you can draw on to remember the steps you can take to handle and control a customer complaint: Listen – Apologise – Solution – Thank you.

These four steps are easy to remember and will work for many workplace situations and scenarios. We’ll let you enrol in the course and discover all the tips and tricks of the LAST technique for yourself!

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