50 Customer Service Training Activities for Live Chat and Telephone Teams

21st century customer service is tougher and more demanding than ever. The drive to increase the efficiency of your staff, paired with the need for them to continuously improve their skills, means that fitting in truly effective training can be difficult.

If you’re looking to improve customer service or morale in your teams, or just fill short gaps in existing programs with fun and effective, yet topic-relevant activities, this eBook is for you.

This eBook has been designed with 50 tried and tested customer service training activities, featuring:

• Simple-to-deliver activities which require practically zero preparation or equipment.
• Marked focus to indicate the areas of learning an activity covers especially well, such as listening skills, energizer, empathy, etc.
• Suggested debriefs to help your team link activities to learning and apply the learning to the workplace.

About These Activities

When running a training activity, there are a few fundamental points which are important to consider.

• Be adaptable. None of these activities will only work the way they have been set out here. If you can think of a variation which would work really well for your particular business or illustrate a particular learning point you want to focus on, go for it.
• Know your audience. If there is an activity here that you think might not work so well with your team, adapt it or don’t use it. You also need to be happy to deliver these activities comfortably yourself. Beware of any training which might make participants feel awkward or uncomfortable, including yourself.
• Facilitate, don’t preach. Learning works best when you can help your group figure out answers and connections by themselves, not when you just tell them what you need them to know. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and dig deeply into their statements to allow your team to draw out information which is important. If this feels unnatural to you, there are plenty of suggested questions within these activities to help you with this.
• Always debrief. It can seem obvious to you how a game has parallels with real life customer service, but it may not be so obvious to your team. A solid debrief is essential to link the activity to learning, and to give your team some ideas as to how they can apply the learning to the workplace. All of the activities here have suggested debriefs so you can make these links clearly.

At Comm100 we love to hear about your experiences and successes with these activities – please let us know how they work for you!

Focus

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.