Article • 5 min read
How can customer service training help during an economic downturn ?
With rising customer expectations around better service, combined with macroeconomic factors, businesses around the world must set up their service teams for success. Discover how customer education programs can contribute to better agent productivity, and ultimately, help your organisation retain customers and come out of this economic storm stronger.
By Lilia Krauser and Lauren Jumper, Staff Writers
Last updated March 3, 2023
With 74 per cent of business leaders saying that customer service has become even more important due to the economic downturn, companies need to ensure that their service teams are set up for success.
Meanwhile, customers want better service–especially since the pandemic–and they’re growing impatient for it. In fact, according to our CX Trends 2023 Report, almost half of European customers (48 per cent) are willing to walk out the door after a single bad service experience. So, how can companies ensure good customer service?
The best way to guarantee positive service experience is by training your customer service agents. In fact, as we’re entering a period of uncertainty, customer education programs can play an important role in the longevity of an organisation, and its customers. By establishing an ongoing relationship focused on helping customers, trust is built that can weather the most turbulent of times.
With that in mind, discover the best practices from Zendesk’s customer education programs, and how training your agents can ultimately help your business ride out the economic storm.
The importance of customer education programs
In today’s economic environment, companies are definitely feeling the pressure to deliver even greater customer service. So, a strong focus on enhancing the quality and content of your customer education programs can–and will–not only help your service agents at any given moment, but also empower them to deliver experiences beyond industry standards, known as immersive experiences.
By having interactive, up to date content in your education programs, you enable your agents to refer to these while handling complex requests or challenging customers. To make the most out of these programs, ensuring that they are interactive and engaging will be key. These can range from quizzes, videos and even made up scenarios where agents have to solve specific customer enquiries and situations.
At Zendesk, we’ve developed customer education programs, providing learning across the various budgets, skills and use cases of our customers. We offer:
- Online Training: With courses available for administrators, agents and developers, learners can consume training at their own pace by taking a single course or learning path consisting of multiple courses with short lessons.
- Certifications: our offering in 7 different exams, our affordable certification program is the best way for users to prove they have reached a Zendesk-verified level of proficiency, offering both expert and specialist-level certifications.
- Private training: for customers who are looking for a tailored curriculum with the inclusion of custom examples, private training with Zendesk experts is available at an affordable cost.
Agent learning leads to happier customers
Most of us have heard the saying ‘Happy employees, happy customers’. And, it couldn’t be more accurate when it comes to service agents as they’re directly responsible for how customers view an organisation.
Providing agents with quality, interactive training means that they are much more likely to solve challenging customer enquiries. For instance, providing training on how to deal with angry customers, agents are equipped to turn unhappy customers into happy ones–and even loyal ones. However, without the proper training, customers would get even more frustrated, would be tossed between multiple service agents and might not have their issue resolved. The latter scenario can negatively impact an organisation, especially as customers are very likely to share negative reviews online and inform their friends and family about their frustrating experience.
So, providing your service agents with the right training will directly impact your customers’ service experience. And, with 72 per cent of customers saying that they are much more likely to make another purchase after a positive service experience, organisations across the world must ensure they set their agents up for success.
At Zendesk, the availability of free online training removes barriers, gets new hires up and running faster, and ensures customers new to Zendesk can deploy their solution the right way. In addition to helping anyone new to Zendesk, online training includes resources to refresh skills of existing employees who might not be leveraging the latest Zendesk features.
In addition, Zendesk program managers assist customers with mass enrollment for entire agent and admin teams into various online training courses and learning paths and provide the reporting needed to chart progress against a customer organisation’s highest priorities.
How training programs contribute to business performance
As previously stated, trained agents are the key to retaining your customers, especially as customers are looking for meaningful service experiences. According to our research, over half of business leaders in Europe (54 per cent) say that customer service has had an impact on customer retention. Sixty-five per cent of these leaders also believe customer service has had a positive impact on business growth.
And while service agents support customers with their queries, they can also be responsible for driving revenue for many businesses. Provided they are given the right training, agents can identify cross-selling opportunities while conversing with customers. In fact, nearly half of business leaders report an increase in their ability to cross-sell in 2022.
Your service teams are becoming solely responsible for increasing revenue through cross-selling opportunities, customers’ perception of your organisation and the loyalty they have towards you. Investing in the training of your customer service agents puts the odds in your favour when it comes to emerging from this economic downturn successfully.
Zendesk’s certification program is designed for managers, top performers, or those eager to advance by testing and showcasing their CX solution knowledge and Zendesk product mastery.
It’s more cost-effective to improve existing employee learning experiences than it is to continue losing seasoned employees and hiring new staff. And since customers leveraging Zendesk have CX expertise in house, leveraging a customer education program keeps teams knowledgeable and engaged.
Across all industries and geographies, Zendesk has customers who are investing in their own success by investing in training. Customers who have incorporated Zendesk’s training and certification into their practice see a 43 per cent increase in product engagement/adoption.
As of 2022, Zendesk’s customer education program includes localised learning content in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. That means 55 courses, 7 learning paths, and 3 certification exams can be leveraged by global users, who can expect the same experience previously only offered in English.
