Making or receiving phone calls is often a primary function for employees working in customer service roles and that interaction can have a significant impact on the customer experience. Done well, it can improve customer loyalty, increase sales, increase efficiency and so on. Done poorly, it can result in missed opportunities for your business,  loss of existing customers or failure to convert new ones, increase costs of rework etc.

The courses below are designed for any phone-based employee. It doesn’t matter whether you have an office team, a customer support team or you identify as a contact centre – the skills for phone-based customer service employees apply regardless.

Click on a course to learn more about it including costs, upcoming dates and private or public training options.

Note: If you have employees that deal with more than just phone calls (e.g. emails, face-to-face etc.) please check out one of the other categories.

With COVID lockdowns hopefully a thing of the past, it’s great to be able to get back to helping customers in person.

So whether the skills are a little rusty or you’d like to ensure your team has the skills they need to take your business to the next level, the courses below are suitable for all customer-facing employees where they interact with customers in person and other channels (i.e. email, phone)

Typical roles include: Receptionists, office/admin staff, front-of-house staff, assistants etc.

The courses below are designed for employees who work in a retail store serving customers.

From beginner courses to our ‘PRO’ course as well as how to manage difficult customers, we’ve got a course for you!

Emails are still an effective way to communicate with customers and as there is a record of each interaction, it is often regarded as even more important than phone calls to ensure you provide the right experience for your customers.

Live Chat continues to gather momentum in Australia with many customers preferring to engage via Live Chat as opposed to voice so ensuring your employees have the right skills has never been more important (it’s not the same as the phone!).

Handling difficult customers is a skill that can and must be taught and with frustration for customers and employees at an all time high,  equipping your employees with the skills on how to handle difficult customers and situations, taught by industry professionals, has even been more critical!

With the rising costs of living and record unemployment making it hard to find staff,  employees are often finding it harder than ever to cope with the everyday pressures of work and home.

Equipping your employees with the skills to improve their resilience, as well as how to improve their overall health and wellness has never been more important.

Click on the courses below to learn more.

With technology making it easier for customers to connect to your business than ever before, we are now expecting employees to be a ‘jack of all trades’ and be able to handle phone calls, emails, live chat, face-to-face enquires and more – and often all at once!

Whilst it can be easy to assume that all these different channels require ‘customer service skills’ the reality is that each of these channels requires different skills to be executed correctly.

If your employees have not been trained correctly, it can result in increased stress for them and a less-than-ideal experience for your customers.

If your employees just need training on a particular channel, then please refer to the courses above. But if you’d like to equip your employees with the skills they need to be effective across all channels, refer below for our omnichannel courses.

CX Skills offers two types of customer service training courses:

Public Customer Service Training Courses

The public customer service training courses are perfect if you have small numbers of employees that require training as you only have to purchase one ticket, or you can purchase multiple tickets to train more employees – the flexibility is yours!

The public courses offer numerous benefits including:

• Cost-effective for small numbers of employees.
• The course dates are times are fixed so you can plan ahead to minimise any operational impact.
• Fixed course agenda so you know exactly what is getting delivered and it’s repeatable, so if you send one employee this month, and a different employee another month – they’ll have both received the same great training.
• Employees will get to hear and learn from others on the course which can expand their knowledge and help them build a professional network.

You’ll find a list of all the upcoming public customer service training courses at the bottom of this page!

Private Customer Service Training Courses

Private customer service training courses mean the training is conducted exclusively for your employees only. This offers the following benefits:

• Flexibility over the date, times and duration of your training so it can fit in perfectly with your operational requirements.
• More cost-effective for larger numbers/groups.
• Able to share/talk about more sensitive/specific examples as part of the training.
• Ability to customise course content (e.g. we can include specific case studies, examples etc directly related to your business or we can add/delete particular modules where applicable).

Learn more about the benefits of a private training course or contact us to have a no-obligation chat with us.

The majority of our customer service training courses are delivered via three methods:

• Onsite – For those that still want on-site/in-person training, we can provide training directly at your premises.
• Online – all our courses are now delivered online via ZOOM. Customer service training online  provides a number of benefits over in-person training including:
  • Less time wasted on travel so less downtime for employees and less impact to operations.
  • Easier to break training into small chunks (e.g. 2 x 4-hour courses) so it can be easier to absorb learning and stay on top of critical work.
  • More cost-effective as there are no travel and facility costs built into the training course prices.
• Self-paced – Most of our training is facilitated live by an instructor however we are now starting to offer some of our courses via self-paced modules comprising of videos, workbooks etc that can be completed at a time and date that suits you for the ultimate flexibility.

When it comes to the different types of customer service training, they can be broadly split into these four categories:

1. Customer Service Induction Training

Typically one of the largest costs, induction customer service training is for your new employees and typically compromises a range of different components including:

• Company culture
• Technical Skills (how to use the systems and software)
• Product and Services
• Soft Skills (customer service, sales etc depending on the role)

Depending on the complexity of the role, it’s not uncommon for induction periods to last several months whereas for some customer service employees it can be as short as a few hours!

We offer a range of customer service training courses that can be used as part of your induction program, enabling you to focus on your product, services and systems training.

2. Fundamental Customer Service Skills Training

For employees who are new to customer service, learning the ‘basics’ is an important consideration for a successful outcome. This can include skills such as:

• Getting the greeting right
• How to engage with customers/build rapport
• Empathy
• Active Listening
• Call control
• Upselling and Cross-selling

We have a variety of courses that can ensure your employees are equipped with the right skills that are appropriate for your business.

3. Customer Service Refresher Training

Even if you’ve worked in a role for a long period of time, we all need to fine-tune our skills to ensure we are performing at our best.

If you’re looking for a short course for customer service, whether it’s to keep up with industry best-practic, perhaps formal training was never initially provided and they just ‘learnt on the job’ or you just need to give your employees a boost, the customer service refresher courses are a perfect solution!

Most of our ‘essential’ courses are just 3 hours long, making them efficient and effective in making an immediate improvement to your customer service.

4. Specialist Training

If you’ve got lots of employees on the phones, you may want to look at our contact centre team leader or manager courses that will enable you to improve efficiencies, quality and of course the customer experience.

You don’t need to be running a ‘call centre’ to benefit from these courses! Call Centres are simply a term used when there are a lot of employees working on the phones so don’t be put off.

Learning how to coach, monitor and lead employees who work on the phone, setting quality standards and so on are just as critical in a small team of admin employees as in a large contact centre.

View the call centre training courses >

I can’t see a course I like, do you offer customised courses?

Yes! Please contact us to discuss your exact requirements.

We aren’t a call centre/contact centre so will these courses be suitable?

Absolutely! Unfortunately, the word call centre/contact centre often has a negative perception and many businesses do not identify as having a call centre in their business.

Rather, they have a customer support team, office/admin team, customer service team, customer service centre, customer resolutions group, customer management team, customer liaison group and so on.

The good news is whatever name you have for your team, if you have employees who spend time on the phone talking to customers, all our courses are suitable!