Soft Skills Training

Jun 27, 2016

Looking for anyone who has created a Customer Service Soft Skills training course on Articulate who can share what they have done with me please.

9 Replies
Trina Rimmer

Hi Linda. May I ask what problems your training is trying to solve? Do employees lack an understanding of basic customer service, or are there some specific skills you're trying to target with your training?

I've created a lot of soft skills customer service training over the years. Some of them have been effective, but very simple, with no audio or video. Sometimes just a series of interactions similar to the types Kelly shared above can be all folks need if there's already a good foundation of understanding and they just need a little refresher or simple practice. Other customer service soft skills course I've seen and/or worked on have used branching scenarios similar in design to this one or have used interactive video as a way of immersing learners and letting them experience the consequences of their choices. It sounds like these types of approaches are more along the lines of what you're looking for, but feel free to give us a shout if you're still feeling stuck for inspiration. 

 

Bob S

To Trina's point above, the design should follow the need. 

That being said, if your learners are starting from scratch you may want to consider a less-is-more approach.  With the CS topic, one way to do this effectively is to teach just a couple of rules or keys to success and show them in action. For example....

Rule #1 - Make it your problem, not there problem. 
Give some examples, Then go into explaining the impact this has on de-escalation, confidence rebuilding. And then how to do it.... use of language, what not to say, etc.   Then show it in action with the results..... good and bad. Then have them choose responses/approaches that exemplify this mantra and provide feedback.  (ie Nice complete Tell-Show-Do-Review cycle for this rule)

Rule #2 - Focus on what you can do, not what you can't.
Then explain why this is important.... ((etc as example above))

I know you said you had CS material, but the problem with many of the courses/approaches out there is that they are either too broad and squishy, or they feature prescribed scripts that winde up being far from genuine in practice.

For whatever it's worth... the approach above was central to creating, training, and implementing a CS program with which one company went on to win a JD Powers #1 award for best CS in that industry.

Hope this helps.

Linda Smith

Thank you all who have replied to my request.

I will take on board what has been suggested but as I have to make this viable for over 4,000 people, you can maybe appreciate that I need to stick to specific scripting and was looking for some way to make it 'not boring'.

Ben there are a couple of good ideas in the articles that I may be using with the video and voice over stuff.

Thanks again.

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