Few things are as hard to get right in business like customer service. After all, it’s nigh impossible to please everyone, and the old adage “the customer is always right” certainly doesn’t help.
However, when done right, happy customers can make or break a business. The best companies in the world all boast excellent customer service, and that’s one of the major reasons why they got to where they are today.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to write a training manual for your customer service reps. The right training manual will ensure that your team knows how to provide a high level of service to all of the customers they interact with.
Focus on SLA’s
The focus of the beginning of your training manual should be on SLA’s. An SLA is a Service-Level Agreement, which basically details all of the customer service standards that your company holds itself to.
For instance, it’s common for a company to hold itself to a 24-hour respond time as one of its SLA’s. This SLA says that the customer service rep must reply to every new support ticket submitted within 24 hours.
It’s important that you plan out the SLA’s you want your company to use, and train your employees on them so that you can hold them to that standard.
Provide Extensive Product Training
The training manual should contain training on the product(s) that the customer service team will be supporting. They should be the expert on the product so that they appear knowledgeable to the customer and are genuinely able to help and solve issues fast.
List Common FAQ’s
Another important component of an employee training manual is a list of frequently asked questions along with their answers. The 80/20 rule dictates that 80% of your customer service requests will be on 20% of the topics that you see. Make sure that the 20% is detailed in a bunch of FAQ’s in the manual, and your customer service rep will be able to easily and efficiently solve many issues.
Create a Troubleshooting Template
If you decide to customize one of the training manual templates out there, make sure that it includes a section for troubleshooting. For those issues which aren’t answerable in an FAQ section, then the employee should follow a standardized procedure to troubleshoot what the problem is.
Otherwise, you’ll have reps making up their own steps as they go, which will make support tickets very confusing if they ever have to be escalated to the next tier. Also, ensure that the template is customized to the software you use. Freshdesk vs. Zendesk, for instance, shows you how many differences there are between the two software products, and your manual should be tailor-made for the one that you use.
How to Write a Training Manual, Made Easy
Now that you know how to write a training manual, all that’s left is to go ahead and get started writing it! With a good manual under your belt, your customer service quality will definitely go up a few notches.
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