There’s an old adage in the service industry that every dissatisfied customer will tell ten people about their negative experience, but a satisfied customer will only tell one. Add to that the widely held belief that for every one customer that complains, another 25 were just as unhappy; they just didn’t complain. At least not to you. They did, however, in all likelihood tell their friends. So, simple math tells us that a single customer complaint to management represents roughly 250 current or potential customers receiving negative information about your product, brand or service. This is why excellent customer service is so important.

Excellent customer service takes preparation and planning

You cannot control everything that impacts a customer’s experience, but you can manage a lot of it and train to handle the rest. It’s raining and she’s in a bad mood; excellent customer service with a smile and a friendly greeting can, if not make the day better, at least not make it worse. His item is backordered; excellent customer service training will help your employee explain the situation, apologize and find a way to make it right.

It takes more time and money to get a new customer than to keep an existing one, and the proliferation of social sites on the internet has made it much easier to spread information faster than ever before, making it more important than ever to conduct pre-emptive customer service training. Videos, manuals, seminars and posters can all be used effectively, but to really make it stick you need more than just canned customer service tips; you need hands on role playing that demonstrates how to provide excellent customer service.

Develop customer service tips for damage control

As we all know, there’s only so much you can plan for. All the best intentioned customer service tips and customer service training videos aren’t going to help if a customer already had a bad experience. After the fact, it’s time to switch into damage mode and control the situation before it turns into a public relations nightmare. There are countless sites dedicated to customer service horror stories; address the issue before you end up on one.

If you train your employees to consistently provide excellent customer service you'll save a lot of headaches and work in the long run. To bring in another trite saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But, if something does go awry, it helps if you already have a plan outlined for how to fix it. Invest in some customer service training videos and seminars to educate your employees, and always keep a list of customer service tips on hand for emergencies.

The advent of the “Do Not Call” list has taken a toll on the call center industry, putting a lot of pressure on call center managers to improve call center education and get the most out of their employees. As more people sign up for the list and are moved from “potential customers” to “blacklisted phone numbers,” call centers must work that much harder to keep and sell to the numbers they have.

As the pool of potential sales dwindles, the number of successful sales must increase to keep the same sales percentage and profit margin. So, the push for call center education is on the rise and new call center training programs are popping up everywhere.

Unfortunately, as more call center training facilities, sites and classes pop up, it becomes harder and harder to find programs that offer any type of useful call center education. Call center cartoons are easy to find, but call center cartoons that impart useful knowledge and can be used in serious call center training sessions? Much harder to come by.

Fun and informative call center education has become a myth, an urban legend: something that was based in truth but never actually occurred. Until now.

Call center training websites are always offering advice on how to avoid presenting a boring call center education program, but not how to actually create fun call center training that works. Well, we’ve figured it out, and it’s actually very simple.

Get your call center employees involved. If they’re engaged with the training, it will stick, and you should absolutely see performance improve. Present instruction in a way they can relate to, and keep it lighthearted with some call center cartoons or videos. Posters, props and power point presentations can move things along; then, really drive the lessons home with coordinated call center cartoons that function as reminders and updates.

Humor works, if you use it correctly. The trick to call center training is to make sure your employees are engaged and interacting with the material. If your call center education can do that, you’re success rate is almost guaranteed to go up.

There are a lot of different approaches to sales training, and the truth is, none of them work any better than the next. In fact, some of them don’t work at all—at least not by themselves. No single sales training session will work for anyone, let along everyone; the trick is to mix and match sales training programs that present the best information in a variety of formats to appeal to the widest audience and repeat information in a new and engaging way to make sure it “sinks in.”

Finding sales consulting training tools and programs that work

Sales training is less about selling and more about people. A good salesperson can sell anything; sure, it helps if the product is good, but sales skills are about making the product useful, necessary or relevant to the person you are trying to sell it to. When searching for sales training programs, look for ones that stress personality and interpersonal skills over sales consulting; training tools should cover how to relate to your customer more than how to push a product.

Create your own sales training programs and sessions

Once you’ve found some lessons you like, take what you’ve learned and apply it to your office environment, culture and employees. If you do your homework, you’ll have a variety of sales consulting training tools and tips at your disposal to rearrange and adjust as you see fit. Don’t stick to one method or model; mix up serious lessons with humorous examples, get employees involved and don’t be afraid to try new things. The most famous sales training programs are not necessarily the most effective way to go; they’re simply the most well-known.

If you hire great people to start with (which I hope you have!) then sales training programs can only make them better at skills that can be taught; innate personality traits have a lot to do with sales consulting. Training tools will help, but you need a good foundation. And who knows better than you what will work with the foundation your employees started with? Be bold, try new things and don’t be afraid to create your own customized sales training programs. Who knows, some day we could be reading about you.