Customer experience training can be a hard idea to wrap your mind around, understandably. People have a time of understanding exactly what customer experience is in its entirety, and this is because in typical business jargon, it’s not really indicative of its own meaning, is it? What is customer experience?
If we want to conduct effective customer experience training, we need to really know what all skills are needed to work with it effectively. To really do that, we have to know what’s all involved in the concept. So, let’s outline that first, and then touch on four big guidelines for training in this science.
In a nutshell, customer experience pertains to all interactions a customer has with your company, or on account of your company. This means that when and how they become aware of you, all research and comparisons they make, as well as using your product/service, and customer service as a potential final phase, are all parts of customer experience. That’s a lot of stuff isn’t it? Well, it’s possible to train people to master this difficult science, and we’ll set you in the right direction now.
#1 – Understanding Marketing and Perception
Training for customer experience needs first to address how marketing works. That’s not just understanding how to design and work with marketing for outreach. It’s about understanding that marketing, making a customer aware of the company and product, will put the customer in a certain mindset.
This mindset depends on the campaign and how it sells the product. There are a few angles this can come from, either conveyed image, solution to a problem, or pure emotional appeal (along with a few other hybrids of this concept). This affects the next phase, and as a result, training staff on the different mindsets and preconceptions that can come from this phase is important.
#2 – Understanding Research
Training in SEO practices, internet technologies, social network principles and other information interchange and access is important, especially considering the different mindsets that can come into being from the first point. Understanding what kind of information different types of searches, governed by different mindsets from initial awareness, will result in, is important.
Understanding how this sort of thing works will help your customer experience by empowering you and your staff to make information for the evaluation and research phase much better and more effective.
#3 – A Sense of Product Management
Oh no, you have to train them on some product management principals? But that’s another obscure and complex soft science! Yep, but it’s not so bad. For customer experience, it’s all about the storefront and presentation aspects. This is increasingly important outside just product management, due to ecommerce, meaning that the transition from research to purchase is rapid and often requires the click of a couple buttons, rather than sleeping on it, and going out to a brick and mortar location to handle the transaction.
So, to make for the best customer experience, understanding how to facilitate a good transaction and shopping interface, be it digital or physical, is key.
#4 – Customer Service
Customer service is probably the biggest part to train for, and we’ve discussed at length quite a bit about training for customer service. But, suffice it to say, practicing good experience-driven gamification in training for this is important. Social games that cover working with that human element that raw numbers and lectures just can’t really get you to grips with is really necessary, and it’s hard to understand how training on this aspect worked at all before gamification was embraced by the masses!
Customer experience training is about training your staff in selected aspects of several other disciplines, and now that you can see which ones, and a little bit of guidance on which aspects of each to focus upon, you can look at our archives of training guidelines on these different disciplines, with this as a guideline, and become a master of customer experience. Not only that, you can shape others into masters as well.
