Giving Customer Service a Soul
Empathy: something we all crave, especially in customer service experiences. It can be a hard thing to define, and even harder to train. Despite this difficulty, it’s often the small things that can make or break customer service interactions. Having an empathetic person on the other end of the line can make all the difference, especially when emotions are high and you’re frustrated.
One international beauty company recognized this as a game-changer and had begun to develop an in-person training to help improve empathy skills. Scaling their ILT (instructor-led training) to all of their markets was critical to their mission, but they didn’t want to lose the impact of the training. They worried that a move to eLearning would mean a serious decrease in effectiveness and behavior change, and simply become a box to check for employees to fulfill their training responsibilities. That’s where we come in.
We partnered with this company and the instructor to help not just convert the training from instructor-led to eLearning, but we redesigned the training to be just as impactful as their ILT version, across a different modality.
Rethinking what has worked phenomenally in person to be sound and memorable in an online format can be extremely challenging. It’s important to remember what makes each modality valuable, and leverage those interactions. What can’t be simulated in an online experience, can often be used as supplemental assignments outside of the training with in-person grounds, management intervention through manager guides, or detailed action planners with management accountability.
Additionally, considering the difficult nature of teaching empathy and customer service in general, we employed a complex skill-building series of activities that allowed learners to not only see and hear behaviors demonstrated and modeled both correctly and incorrectly, but also practice the behaviors themselves in realistic scenarios in email, chat, in person, and phone conversations.
With all of these strategies in place, we were able to develop a robust online experience that the company was able to take to their offices globally to transform their personal interactions both internally and externally.
