How to Conduct a Customer Service Workshop

Smiling is a good tip for customer service agents.

Companies around the country demand top-level customer service agents to help recover or maintain clients. Highly sought-after agents are friendly, trainable and knowledgeable about a product/service. Customer agents deal with the best and worst moments of the customer experience. Therefore, customer service workshops must be conducted with the heightened awareness of the pitfalls that agents may encounter within their industry. Conducting a customer service workshop is about communicating well to your audience, and providing them with solutions that they can use within their role.

Things You'll Need

• Outline
• Handouts
• Visual aids

Instructions

1. Meet your workshop audience by arriving early. Introducing yourself can help you assess what you may need to clarify or how to approach the training. For instance, you may need to expound on certain definitions, while others words you don't have to do that at all. Also, an ice-breaker session to get acquainted may suit the situation. Have everyone share something about themselves to start off.

2. Provide an outline covering your learning outcome expectations regarding the customer service workshop. In other words, describe what the customer service workshop will enable participants to do after finishing the workshop. Also, an outline should tell how long the workshop will last and what activities are included.

3. Distribute handouts. Handouts can provide additional exposure to the topic. For instance, use case studies and research from universities to demonstrate or emphasize your points. Case studies can be found online from college studies or from independent research marketing companies.

4. Use visual aids to help make the presentation come alive. Include videos and pictures to help communicate your customer service message. This is helpful for slide show presentations that have a lot of information. For instance, watch a video after about 15 slides of note-taking content to help maintain the attention of your audience.

5. Encourage active participation. Create a break-out session of brainstorming activities and conduct role-playing in small groups. Help customer service agents solve their own problems and come up with ways to defuse hypothetical situations. The University of Virginia website offers more insight on teaching techniques that can be used for a workshop experience.

6. Have a set time for questions and answers (Q&A). Make sure handout materials and activity exercises are clearly understood by the workshop participants. Reserve time at the end of each topic session.

Tips & Warnings

• Add the contact information and a short summary of facilitator to the workshop outline.

References

• Business Balls: "Customer Service"
• University Of Virginia: "How To Conduct An Interactive Workshop"

Resources

• Training-Classes: "Customer Service Training And Seminars"