Whether you’re planning a training course or using external courses (we’ve compiled a list of free and paid training courses for you to choose from), it’s important to take a break and have some fun in order to keep your team members engaged.
The following customer service training games may seem trivial, but they do more than simply drive a concept or point home: they help foster a sense of teamwork and shared direction. (For more games, see our post: 10 Free, Quick and Easy Customer Service Training Games with Ready Debriefs.)
Although each of these activities work brilliantly as general customer service training activities, there may be times you want to focus on a particular area of learning. The below table shows which activities cover certain areas especially well.
Additionally, some activities are especially short and fun so are ideal for running as energizers, to raise energy levels during the course of a day or when a team has returned from a break. These are also marked here.
| Activity Title | Energizer | Teamwork | Communication | Questioning Techniques | Listening Skills | Self-Awareness | Best Practice | Difficult Customers | Empathy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Road Trip | |||||||||
| Attitude Anchors | |||||||||
| What Are You Doing? | |||||||||
| Four Square | |||||||||
| Write Customer Letters | |||||||||
| Telephone | |||||||||
| Say My Name | |||||||||
| Questions Only | |||||||||
| Step into the Difficult Customer’s Shoes | |||||||||
| HEARD Roleplay | |||||||||
| Candid Camera | |||||||||
| A Tangled Web | |||||||||
| Marshmallow Challenge | |||||||||
| Customer Service Means… | |||||||||
| Mission Possible | |||||||||
| Show and Tell | |||||||||
| True, True, False | |||||||||
| The Stranger Challenge | |||||||||
| The Egg Drop | |||||||||
| Customer Service Charades |
Duration: 5-10 minutes
What You’ll Need: Paper and pens
This activity is adapted from 10 Customer Service Activities To Supercharge Your Team.
Have groups of two to four get together and decide collectively what are the three best items to bring on a trip. Give them a short amount of time and then ask them to share their answers.
Afterwards, direct them into the point of specificity. If a person says clothes, for example, ask them if the clothes are for warm or cold weather. If someone says money, ask if cash or card is better where they are heading.
In the second round, give each group a slip of paper with a destination, and ask them to repeat the activity.
This way participants can see the difference between planning for a trip in which they know their destination, and planning for one in which they don’t. The key point is that it’s easier to plan when everyone on your team agrees on the final destination.
Duration: 5-10 minutes
What You’ll Need: Worksheets and pens
The concept of an attitude anchor is an activity or thing that helps you maintain the awesome attitude you need in order to be effective in customer service.
There are two attitude anchors: maintenance anchors, which help you maintain a positive attitude, and repair anchors, which help you fix your bad moods.
Hand out worksheets that prompt your group to think about and write down their anchors: it may be something like exercising or drinking tea—encourage your workers to think about little things that help them elevate their moods.
Then encourage sharing, so that everyone can borrow each other ideas if they find they are lacking in anchors.
Duration: 5-10 minutes
What You’ll Need: A measuring tape, random items of clothing and accessories
Ask for a volunteer and begin taking measurements and placing the items of clothing on them, encouraging them to put on the jacket, or hat, etc. without saying a single word.
After several uncomfortable minutes of measuring their arms and even the distance between their eyes, ask the other participants what they think you were doing.
Ask another volunteer to stand up, and offer her the coat, asking questions like:
The purpose here is to show how much more comfortable it is for customers if they know exactly what is going on.
Duration: 5-10 minutes
What You’ll Need: Masking Tape and a timer
This activity will help participants see the value in a comfortable working environment, as well as the importance of creating a good and comfortable environment for their customers.
Divide the room into four quadrants with the masking tape, and assign a number to each quadrant.
Explain to team members that within each quadrant they are expected to perform the assigned activity for 45 seconds:
At first you will assign people to their first quadrant to keep the amount in each space even. Then after 20 seconds, shout: “Switch!” Participants are allowed to go to any other square they want, but they must switch, and they must visit each quadrant once.
By the fifth round, you will find that most people are in the fourth quadrant—by far the most comfortable!
Duration: 10 minutes
What You’ll Need: Pen and paper
This activity is adapted from Green Rock Customer Connect.
Ask one participant to share a customer they serviced the other day; have them share the customer’s name, their most recent purchase, and what they needed help with.
Now ask the group to each compose thank you letters to your company from the perspective of this customer.
Have participants imagine how this interaction made the customer’s day better, and to effusively praise the company’s best points.
Then ask for volunteers to share their letters in order to prompt a discussion.
The idea here is not only to raise team morale, but actively engages them in considering what a customer is really looking for when they seek help from one of your team members.
Duration: 10-15 minutes
What You’ll Need: Smiling participants
Telephone is a familiar game for many, as it teaches the importance of direct communication.
To start, you can break the size of the group into smaller groups (but try not to make the group smaller than 10).
Have each group sit or stand side by side in a line. Then whisper a “top-secret” company mission in the first participant’s ear, quietly so that no one else can hear it. Then that person will whisper it to the next person and so on and so on, until the last person will declare the message out loud.
Count on lots of laughing, as usually the last message is so radically different than the first that people can’t help but chuckle!
Duration: 10-15 minutes
What You’ll Need: Worksheets and a timer
This activity requires at least six people. Have two groups of three line up to face each other, and give them two minutes with each person to ask and answer the following questions:
Then after three rounds, have each individual fill out a sheet in which they recall each answer for each person they talked to (feel free to get creative with the questions). The activity may be difficult, but with each round your team members will improve as they realize the importance of listening when providing quality customer service.
Duration: 10-15 minutes
What You’ll Need: A timer
This activity comes from the classic TV show, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
To play, ask for several sets of two volunteers.
Then invite a set to the front, prompting one of the two to ask a question a customer has asked him or her before.
Then the other volunteer must respond with a question—the entire conversation should be composed of questions for a minute.
This activity serves as a fun ice-breaker, but also encourages team members to actively think about questions they have been asked by customers, and to realize that they are often asked similar questions as their fellow team members.
Duration: 10-20 minutes
What You’ll Need: Sheets of paper and pens
With this exercise, break your team up into smaller groups of 3 or 4. Then have each group spend five minutes coming up with a rude, demanding, or vague statement a customer could say based off of their own experiences. Then have someone in the team fold the paper over and hand it to the team to their left.
For the second round, give teams 5-10 minutes to develop both a backstory and response to the fictitious customer.
The idea here is to explain why the customer may have become difficult—for example, maybe the difficult customer had a bad day or a subpar experience.
Have groups share the message, the created backstory, and their appropriate customer service response.
Duration: 15-20 minutes
What You’ll Need: Prompts
Disney has to handle over 135 million customers in their parks each year, so customer service isn’t something they take lightly.
The technique Disney has developed to train customer service representatives on angry customers is called HEARD:
You will precede the activity with a HEARD lesson. Then you’ll ask for a set of volunteers and tell the other participants that they’ll act as judges.
Provide the volunteers with a scenario that you may have seen happen in your company—something either common or comical to keep their interest.
Assign one role-player to be the customer service agent, and the other to be the customer.
Then have them move through each of the five steps, encouraging them with the next step if they seem stuck.
Afterwards, ask your judges to discuss how the customer service agent handled each step, and to come up with their own diagnosis.
Duration: 15-20 minutes
What You’ll Need: Pictures of each team member/character, and a recall test
This activity is adapted from The Big Book of Team Building Games.
This activity, like
Whether in person or online, have each person state their name.
If this is online, have each team member share a picture of themselves in a group chat as they state their name.
If you are all well-acquainted with one another, have each team member create a customer persona, with a fake name and a picture of a celebrity.
Then hand out or email a test. Encourage team members to turn it in within two minutes—then share the answers. The key here is to test how quickly team members can learn names.
Additionally, this memory game created by the BBC is a great resource to send to your team members if they’re having trouble remembering names or faces.
Duration: 15-30 minutes
What You’ll Need: A ball of yarn
This activity is adapted from mftrou.com.
A Tangled Web is an activity that everyone can participate in together, making it an exceptional team building activity.
Have everyone stand up in a circle, facing inward. The first person is to hold the ball of yarn in his or her hands, and then state a fact about themselves. (For example, “My favorite food is sushi.”).
Everyone who relates or agrees to that statement raises their hand. The first hand the yarn-holding individual sees will get the rest of the yarn. He or she will hand the ball to this person, while still holding on to an end of the yarn.
At the end (and after a number of chuckles), you’ll find that the web is incredibly tangled—proving the importance of your interconnected team.
Duration: 20-25 minutes
What You’ll Need: String, 30 pieces of dry pasta (per group), one marshmallow (per group), one meter of tape (per group), one piece of string (per group), a timer
This design challenge was made famous by Peter Skillman at a conference in 2007, and even has a Ted Talk effusing its benefits.
To start, divide people into groups of 3 to 6, and give them the supplies listed above. Then give them 18 minutes to build the tallest, free-standing tower.
Introducing a competitive element helps inspire teamwork, but beyond that it also drives home the importance of resourcefulness and communication in the most dire of customer service scenarios.
Don’t forget to take pictures of the resulting towers—you’ll be inspired the creativity!
Duration: 20-30 minutes
What You’ll Need: Pen and index cards, a timer
This activity is adapted from The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games.
Write the following words and phrases onto index cards:
Separate individuals into groups of two or three. Hand each group an index card, and ask them to write down, based off of the word or phrase given, a definition for excellent customer service. Give each group 5-8 minutes to complete the activity.
Then ask a representative from each group to read their mission statements out loud to the other groups. Guide the discussion to find the common link between all definitions, and create a definition together on a white board.
Duration: 20-30 minutes
What You’ll Need: Print outs of your company’s mission statement (or digital copies), and pieces of paper, pens (or access to a shared document)
This activity is adapted from The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games.
Create teams based off of different departments, or people who share similar duties or shifts.
Discuss the company mission statement as a whole, and then ask each group to create a collective mission statement for their team.
Have a spokesperson from each group present their mission statement after fifteen minutes.
Then, with the extra time, encourage individuals to create their own personal mission statement with the company, and suggest they keep it in their office or on a sticky attached to their computer.
Duration: 20-40 minutes
What You’ll Need: Sheets of paper and pens (or a prompt in a document for virtual teams)
Give each participant a piece of paper and five minutes to recreate a difficult customer service experience they had and to share how they resolved it.
This could be due to a number of factors, whether it be a difficult customer, internal error, or multitasking strains.
Encourage participants to think creatively. Then have the group break up into smaller groups of 3 to 5.
Each person should share with their group the situation and how they handled it. Then other members in the group should be encouraged to offer a compliment on what the speaker did well in the situation, as well as offer suggestions for the future.
Duration: 20-40 minutes
What You’ll Need: Smiling participants
Keep groups no smaller than 10 and have the group seated in a circle.
Have each person state two truths about themselves and one lie. For example, you might say that you had a burger for lunch (true), have two siblings (false), and like to play hockey (true).
Then have the next person in the circle decide which statements were true and which statement was false.
After the second individual guesses, the first person will reveal the lie to the group.
This is especially fun for new teams, and can be exercised over a group chat or forum (in this case, just set the order of respondents beforehand by assigning each person a number).
Duration: One Week
What You’ll Need: Smiling participants
AppSumo has developed a great challenge to get people out of their comfort zone and making connections, which is important for customer service agents who need to be a little more assertive than shy.
This is a great challenge for virtual teams as well, as it doesn’t require an immediate presence and can be done on individual time.
All you have to do is direct workers to this website and have them follow the instructions.
The Stranger Challenge requires that workers print out the “I Don’t Know This Person” sign, and find a stranger who agrees to pose for the photo with them, effectively pushing them out of the bounds of introverted behavior.
Then challengers can upload their photo onto the site to be featured in the gallery!
Duration: One Week
What You’ll Need: Eggs and miscellaneous packing materials and office supplies
This classic science class project isn’t just for teenagers—it’s also an activity that can help adults think outside of the box and connect with their deeper problem-solving skills and abilities.
Have your team split into smaller groups by randomly selecting a name from a hat.
The idea here is to face challenges with co-workers they might not traditionally work with, just like how you can’t pick what customers you’re dealing with or what problems you may face.
Now present each group with an egg and encourage them to use whatever supplies exist around the office to create a casing/contraption that can survive a drop form the top of the building, and to convene with their groups over lunch.
At the end of the week have teams drop their eggs from the top of a building to see which eggs survives and which go splat.
Duration: Depends on group size (and how much fun you’re having!)
What You’ll Need: A list of relevant phrases/words to your industry and company
Good old-fashioned charades can teach your team a lot about the importance of both verbal communication and body language. Also, it’s just plain fun, and as a result sure to help your team bond.
Give each individual a term or phrase. Have the first participant stand up and act out their term (without saying a single word!).
While the traditional game has the person who guesses the term/phrases correctly perform next, it’s easier and more efficient to assign turns no matter who guesses correctly.
Hopefully the above customer service ideas, activities, and exercises will help you develop a customer service training program that keeps all of your team members actively engaged.
Whether you need a debriefing activity or transitional one, the activities and games above are sure to inspire insight as well as laughter.
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Carla Jerez is a senior content writer at Comm100. She has a degree in Creative Writing from Florida State University and has years' experience writing for the SaaS industry. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, traveling, or playing around on Photoshop. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
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