customer service presentation topics

10 Customer Service Training Topics & Ideas

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, customer expectations are higher than ever. Therefore, in order to meet and exceed these expectations, businesses must look to enhance their customer service.

And the best way to do just that? Optimizing your customer service training. By rolling out comprehensive training to your workforce, you empower your employees to deliver outstanding service and memorable experiences with every interaction.

Like what you hear? Then keep reading to discover 10 essential training topics and ideas to enhance your customer service.

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1. What is customer service? 2. Why is customer service important? 3. Customer service training topics

What is customer service?

Customer service is the all-encompassing service you offer to your customers. What this looks like varies from business to business, however, common customer service actions include product information and recommendation, problem-solving, and responding to general questions. Today’s consumers have the option to interact with companies across a multitude of touchpoints that include face-to-face, email and social media.

It’s important for businesses to know the difference between customer service and customer experience. Customer service is one part of the customer experience or, another way to put it, customer service is a single interaction between customer and business, whereas customer experience is the customer’s entire journey with your brand.

Why is customer service important?

Customer service is crucial because it directly impacts a plethora of business areas. Companies with outstanding service outperform those without. Let's take a closer look:

Increased customer retention

Returning customers spend 67% more on average than new ones, making it important to build loyalty. Additionally, 96% of customers say good service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand, and 89% are more likely to make a repeat purchase after an excellent customer service experience.

Reviews and recommendations

Customer service directly impacts customers’ perceptions of your business. Great service results in great reviews, and negative interactions often lead to poor reviews. And in today’s online world, reviews are more important than ever .

Increased Revenue

The ability of CS to increase sales, foster loyalty, and generate positive recommendations results in increased revenue. In fact, businesses can grow revenue by 4%-8% when they prioritize the customer service experience.

10 customer service training topics

Product-related training

Product knowledge.

The foundation of excellent CS. With an in-depth understanding of the products you sell, your workforce can provide accurate answers to product-related questions, offer practical recommendations, and provide expert insight to your customers about the products they’re interested in. 

Today’s consumers are more informed than ever, making it increasingly difficult for store associates to position themselves as experts. In fact, 83% of consumers believe they know more than store associates. But with thorough knowledge of your products and services, employees are empowered to help shoppers with every interaction.

Training tip: Utilize microlearning to increase knowledge retention. Learning the details of every single product can seem almost impossible, but breaking the knowledge down into bite-sized lessons presents the task as more manageable while accounting for our shortening attention spans.

Product demonstration

65% of humans are visual learners, meaning they need to see something happen in order to remember it. Product information is invaluable, but customers may struggle to keep up with the facts in real time. 

Employees can improve customer service by taking that extra step and demonstrating how to use the product. Once you’ve finished explaining how to set up the T.V., take the time to show them . Not only does this add to your image of expertise, but consumers will also appreciate you taking the extra time to help them.

Upselling skills

Upselling is the art of convincing a customer to purchase either an upgraded product or product-related add-ons. When optimized, upselling can increase revenue by up to 30% .

However, it’s important to remember that the customer also benefits. While hearing the word ‘sales’ often conjures up the image of a shady salesman who prioritizes self-interest above all else, upselling is actually a mutually beneficial experience . When done well, upselling presents all available options to the customer and helps them make an informed decision. The sales process then becomes a consultative experience instead of a transactional one. The customer leaves, satisfied with their experience, and the business profits from the sale. 

Training tip: Teach basic sales techniques . Product knowledge is important, but it’s useless if employees don’t know how to utilize it. Role-play is an effective way to account for the variety of customers your workforce will face, and enough simulations can help you build a script that acts as an upselling foundation for your team.

Store optimization training

Visual merchandising.

Customer service extends beyond face-to-face interaction, and the layout of your store plays a major role in defining the customer’s experience. 

We already know the majority of us prefer visual stimuli, and a further 93% of consumers list visual appearance as an important factor during the purchasing process. Optimizing your visual merchandising draws customers in, assists your workforce during interactions, and improves the overall service.

Training tip: Follow the rule of three. Grouping three items together appeals to our brains' psychological bias of positively responding to things in threes.

Store layout training

A good store layout (whether physical or virtual) can enhance the overall customer experience. Similar to visual merchandising, there’s a psychology that comes with optimizing the layout of your business, such as the customer’s inclination to turn right upon entering a store, or that consumers are easily overwhelmed by cluttered entrances. 

Reinforcing the importance of an optimized store layout to your managers and employees can make a huge difference.

Training tip: Provide employees with knowledge hubs so they can access relevant information when they need it.

Tech optimization

Technology is now a vital part of customer service . Chatbots, mobile POS systems , Augmented Reality—all are leveraged to enhance the overall experience. Technology is valued by both customers and employees,  ranking third on a list of factors that frontline workers say could help reduce workplace stress.

However, the wrong technological investment can act as a hindrance to your employees, with one-third of all frontline workers saying they do not have the right technological tools to do their jobs effectively. And without an optimized workforce, you can never have an optimized customer service.

Training Tip: We recommend utilizing short, snappy G uides to instruct your workers on how to use new technology. Present practical instructions in a fun and engaging way.

Customer-related training

Active listening.

Listening is a skill we often take for granted, after all, we do it every day. But active listening goes beyond simply hearing the words a customer is saying, instead one must seek to understand the intent behind the words and become an active participant. This often includes reading non-verbal cues, asking open-ended questions, and paraphrasing (among many others!).

When you employ a team of active listeners, it positively impacts customer service and can even increase sales by up to 8% .

Training tip: employ quizzes to test your employees on their active listening! Have them watch a customer interaction via video and ask them what they would have done differently.

Empathy training

Empathy is the capacity to understand the emotional response of the customer, even if the problem is out of your control.

An empathetic workforce is highly valued by consumers. In fact, 96% of consumers view empathy as a key element of customer service, and 61% stopped buying from a company because a competitor offered a more empathetic experience. 

Training tip: Role-play really is the best way to mimic real-life situations and improve employee-customer interactions. Variation is key and you should present your workforce with a variety of problems to prepare them for any real-life scenario .

Complaints handling

As most businesses have already discovered: it’s impossible to keep everyone happy. However, it’s how you respond to complaints that define the brand. 

This is a chance for your employees to put their empathy and active listening training to the test! Identify the problem, put forward an empathetic response, and resolve the issue. 

Training tip: Make training standardized . Many businesses today employ an omnichannel approach where customers can reach out over multiple channels. Consistent service is key to a thriving business, and those who roll out a strong omnichannel approach have increased customer retention and revenue.

Crisis management

Your website crashes. You're short-staffed. Your POS systems are down. Whatever it is, you’re in crisis mode. How do you respond? 

Crisis management is about predicting a future crisis and formulating a plan that minimizes disruption and maintains excellent levels of service. Covid was an excellent barometer for crisis strategies, and 30% of respondents agreed they did not have a core crisis management team in place when the pandemic struck.

Training Tip: Formulate a crisis plan. Train your workforce on what steps to take when a crisis occurs. You can’t avoid a crisis forever, so preparing for one is the next best thing.

eduMe is the platform of choice for businesses looking to optimize their workforce training and enhance their customer service. By leveraging the power of microlearning and seamlessly integrating into existing technology, we make it easy to roll out engaging training at scale. After partnering with eduMe, food delivery company Takeout Central experienced a 10% increase in quality of service.

Get in touch with us now to see how we can help!

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10 Customer Service Training Topics

January 31, 2022

Shera Bariuad

Identifying the most important customer service training topics is a crucial step in developing your employees, and ensuring that they are fully equipped with relevant information and vital skills in representing the business to your customers. Check out these customer service training topics you shouldn’t miss out on. 

Customer Service Topic

The customer service topic in training highlights the important skills required to guarantee a fantastic client experience. Customer service is crucial for fostering brand loyalty and generating revenue. It includes giving clients the help they need to use your product or service smoothly both before and after they buy it, so they always feel appreciated and supported. It also requires responding to consumer concerns, which is essential for keeping current clients.

A company with stellar customer service enables clients to connect with the brand on a personal level. Because of this, it’s critical to always provide clients with a favorable experience. On the other hand, according to the Netomi Pulse Report: State of Customer Service in 2020, 78 percent of US customers discontinued conducting business as a result of bad customer service. This demonstrates the value of excellent customer service. 

1. Company’s core values

Building foundational knowledge of your company’s core values is an essential customer service training topic, whether for onboarding or even as refresher training. With customer service employees serving as representatives of your brand or service, teaching customer service skills is important alongside the company’s mission, vision, and values. This topic allows your employees to have a clear understanding of how the organization wants to present itself and embody its values in every conversation with customers. It also helps develop accountability for your representatives in contributing to consistent and good customer service no matter what the situation. 

To avoid overwhelming your employees with loads of information, you can deliver this training topic through microlearning. This strategy breaks down information into bite-sized modules that are only focused on key information, which helps improve knowledge retention. EdApp is one of the best microlearning apps in the market that makes this easy and convenient for you. It provides an intuitive creator tool to help you build microlessons using interactive templates.

Sign Up For Free * to start using EdApp as your mobile LMS!

*Up to 10 learners.

2. Product training 

Product training is another important customer service training topic that will provide your customer service representatives with core knowledge so they can properly assist customers with any kind of concern and avoid providing bad customer service. This topic can cover the features, principles, and insights about your product or service. Your representatives should also be aware of the important processes behind the scenes that can be relevant information for the customers as well. When equipped with thorough knowledge of your product or service, your representatives will be able to guide customers about your offerings. They will also be more clear and concise in providing answers or solutions to their questions or problems. 

You can reinforce this training topic among your customer service representatives through quizzes. It can serve as a refresher quiz after completing a course, or as an assessment test to check the level of their understanding of your product or service. This is made easy by using quiz software like EdApp which provides quizzing features. It includes Rapid Refresh, an in-app quiz creator feature for standalone tests. Plus, a system-automated personalized quiz feature called Brain Boost, which can be made available by request only.

3. Active listening

Active listening is a skill that enables your customer service representatives to fully pay attention to a customer without interrupting before thoughtfully responding. This customer service training topic should tackle the importance of being an active listener and how to apply active listening in interactions with customers, especially when they are communicating a problem or frustration. By developing this essential skill, customer feedback will be clearly heard and understood. People who seek customer service assistance instead of self service should feel validated about their concerns, which can be easily achieved by actively listening. This helps improve customer satisfaction and customer engagement which can result in stronger customer retention and customer loyalty. 

You can deploy the free course on Active Listening that’s available on EdApp editable course library. This course highlights the main principles and barriers of active listening. It also provides other techniques on how to improve good communication and address customer complaints. 

Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand problems and pain points from the customer’s perspective. By including this customer-centric topic in your program, you’ll be able to develop interpersonal skills among your customer support and customer success teams in tuning in to verbal and non-verbal cues of customers, as well as validate their feelings, worries, and frustrations. This allows your representatives to be more compassionate and responsive in dealing with the problems of customers. As a result, they’re able to work on providing assistance and solutions that will satisfy the customers. It’s also a way to build better relationships with customers and make sure that word of mouth is positive.

Contrary to common misconception, empathy is not a fixed skill but can be rather learned. Develop and strengthen this soft skill with courses like EdApp’s The Power of Empathy course . This course highlights the importance of empathy and provides techniques for developing this skill.

It’s also beneficial to provide your customer service teams with mental health training programs . This will help them to better understand and empathize with the customers they’re serving, and will create a more positive and inclusive customer service culture.

5. Effective Communication

Effective communication entails written and verbal communication skill that enables your customer service representatives to deliver the right message to your customers in a clear way, and with proper tone and delivery. It entails being well-versed in communicating effectively through a simple and easy-to-understand manner to avoid misunderstandings with customers. By including this topic in your customer service training, your representatives can effectively address the needs of your clients and meet customer expectations, whether they’re guiding customers through a process, or delivering good or bad news. This topic will also train them on how to read body-language and how to keep interactions friendly, but still professional. 

EdApp’s course on Excellent Customer Service Through Communication is created to guide your employees in developing proper enunciation, active listening, and confidence in speaking. These lessons can be applied especially in phone call interactions with customers. Deploy this to hone communication skills among your representatives!

6. Customer-focused mindset

Having a customer-focused mindset gives your customer service representatives the ability to go above and beyond to provide the best customer service. With this training topic, you should be able to introduce the different types of customers your representatives will encounter, which will be especially crucial for the new hires. This sets the expectation for the possible concerns your representatives will encounter with customers and allows them to have a clearer understanding of the people they are interacting with. This topic is equally essential as a refresher training to reinforce techniques and ways to develop this mindset.

Another course available on EdApp is the Building a Customer-Focused Culture course which will encourage your representatives to be customer advocates. It highlights the importance of customer focus. It also helps develop a customer-focused mindset and behavior so your representatives can better understand the customers’ buying habits. 

7. Telephone Skills

Enhancing telephone skills is a crucial part of honing your customer service teams. In this training topic, you can guide your representatives and reinforce phone call etiquette, policies, and techniques. This will help your employees leave a good impression, handle different situations, and communicate with confidence over a phone call. Customer service teams with exemplary telephone skills are able to apply their listening and communication skills to achieve more meaningful customer interactions. 

EdApp’s Call Center Customer Service course is designed to support your representatives in acing the call process in customer service. To help them develop essential customer service skills, this course covers call preparations, etiquette, how to properly hold and transfer calls, and more. It also tackles ways to deal with difficult customers.                                                                                                                 

8. Diversity and sensitivity training 

Diversity and sensitivity training is an essential topic, especially for industries like customer service that constantly interact with people from all walks of life. This topic will help you create a positive and inclusive customer service culture by breaking unconscious bias and preventing discrimination. Each customer that your customer service teams can encounter comes with different attitudes, viewpoints, and cultures. If your representatives lack knowledge of concepts of diversity and sensitivity, these factors can bring about misunderstandings and miscommunications with customers, which can result in poor customer service. Lessons from this topic will not only be applicable in customer interactions, but also in building diversity and equality in the workplace. 

To get started, you can share EdApp’s Diversity & Inclusion course to boost understanding of the value of key concepts of diversity and inclusivity. It also provides ways to recognize and eliminate unconscious biases, as well as guidelines on cultivating an inclusive culture. 

9. Problem-solving 

Problem-solving skills are a topic that needs to be constantly reinforced in customer service. It supports improving the decision-making process by covering topics like understanding motivations and behaviors. It can also include lessons on developing strategic skills, as well as handling challenges and situations with a logical approach. By honing these skills among your customer service representatives, they can easily recognize the main problem, especially when the customer is unclear in communicating them. As a result, it can speed up the process of solving the problem, while still not compromising the quality of assistance and solutions provided to the customer. 

EdApp provides the Problem Solver course that contains customer service tips for solving problems with a systematic and logical approach. This course highlights creative problem solving and its importance. It also covers the different principles and types of creative problem solving, and types of decision-making for any situation. 

10. Crisis Management 

Crisis management is a highly important customer service training topic as your representatives are the frontline of customer interactions, especially when crises arise. It’s crucial to prepare your teams for potential customer concerns and how to respond accordingly in times of unexpected crises. By emphasizing crisis management before any problem arises, your representatives will have the confidence to handle stressful situations and have the skills to soothe worried customers. It also helps ensure that relationships with loyal customers are still maintained by reassuring them and assisting in solving their problems. If representatives do not anticipate any issue and are not well-prepared, they won’t be able to address concerns or customers properly, which can potentially result in losing customers to the churn. 

To prepare your customer service representatives for any situation, you can use scenario-based training to create an immersive and interactive learning experience. It uses high impact learning strategies like eLearning gamification, virtual reality, and the like to help employees use and practice skills that they’ll need in times of crisis, in a controlled and simulated environment. Among other templates in EdApp’s template library, the Chat template is your best choice for creating scenario-based training with gamification. This template allows you to simulate common questions during a crisis using speech bubbles, and ask learners to pick the most appropriate response for a given situation.

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Shera is a workplace learning expert with a background in planning performance-driven solutions for various business industries. She’s dedicated to driving better learning and development outcomes by providing training strategies for training managers and curating lists of tools and courses for learners. Outside of work, she spends her time reading, illustrating, and designing.

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10 topics to include in every customer service training manual.

The key to customer satisfaction is a team of well-trained and dedicated customer service representatives. That’s why it’s essential to thoroughly and consistently train your customer service reps. One way you can effectively educate your team is with a customer service training manual . 

As we begin a new year, it’s the perfect time to review the manual and update it to reflect new changes and trends. Read on to learn about how you can refresh your customer service training manual for 2022 and see some helpful customer service training topics that it should include.

1. The importance of customer service

One topic that every customer service training manual should cover is the importance of customer service. The goal is to inform every customer service rep and show them how their role impacts the success of your business. This type of customer service policy is also a great tool to provide motivation as your team members want to feel fulfilled, important, and challenged.

2. Policy for customer service interactions

Your customer service training manual should also touch the standard process for interactions with customers. You’ll want to outline a process that includes the best customer service policies that are applicable to the most situations, in a way that’s easy to understand.

3. Different verticals and industries

If your company spans across multiple industries, it’s worthwhile to feature different sections in the customer service training manual for each one. While there are many questions, complaints, and requests that are applicable to all industries, there are some that only pertain to certain segments and could call for different types of customer service training manuals.

4. Definition of service

Every company defines customer service differently. It’s important that you include a definition of how your company defines customer service to keep your people on the same page. In fact, just about every training manual template includes a definition of service. The definition of service provides a clear direction for every representative to address the customers’ needs as much as possible.

5. How to take a customer-friendly approach

Your customer service training manual template should emphasize a customer-friendly approach for customer service procedures and processes. The two major elements of a customer-friendly approach include communication and relationships. Give applicable and relevant examples of how reps should demonstrate these ideals in your manual. 

6. A clear understanding of your customers

You should also have a section that provides your customer service reps with information about the types of customers they’ll commonly work with. This will give your team the information needed to help customers feel cared for and understood.

7. Soft skills for a top-notch customer service rep to have

Every customer service training manual should include a list of all the soft skills that a top-notch customer representative should embody. Some essential customer service skills include active listening, attentiveness, communication, confidence, decision-making, empathy, flexibility, positivity, problem-solving, and being a team player. By making these soft skills tangible, reps know what they should be aiming for. 

8. How to make a good first impression

There should also be a section about how your customer representatives can make good impressions with customers. For added context, consider showing reps what it looks like to create a positive impression versus a negative one. That way, your customer representatives will know which behaviors and actions to avoid.

9. Non-verbal communication

You should also include a section about non-verbal communication since a significant amount of communication is non-verbal. This section should touch upon how customer reps can take advantage of non-verbal communication to satisfy customers. Some examples of non-verbal communication include smiling, eye contact, and hand gestures, and posture.

10. Telephone etiquette

If you have customer service reps who provide support over the phone, you should definitely have a section about telephone etiquette. Provide your team with information about how to best answer the phone and how to troubleshoot effectively. 

Get started with our Free Customer Service Training Manual

Is it time to revisit your customer service training manual? Our free customer service training customer service training manual is a great tool to help your team deliver consistent customer service training and delight customers.

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13 Customer Service Training Ideas & Topics

Published January 12, 2024

Published Jan 12, 2024

REVIEWED BY: Robie Ann Ferrer

WRITTEN BY: Jennifer Soper

This article is part of a larger series on Hiring .

• 13 Customer Service Training Ideas & Topics
• Training Topics
• Training Ideas

Bottom Line

• Related Articles

Customer service training involves the coaching and support a customer service representative receives to improve their handling of customer issues and create excellent customer satisfaction and experiences. Regardless of the product or service you offer, going the extra mile in customer service builds trust, loyalty, and customer retention.

To bring out your reps’ full potential and provide exceptional customer service, we’ve put together our top customer service training ideas and topics.

Customer Service Training Topics

It’s important that your reps show professionalism when dealing with customers. To achieve this, it’s best to brush up on the basic customer experience training topics, like core competency skills, how to say no, your product portfolio, your company’s brand, how to be authentic, and complaint management.

1. Core Competency Skills

The first step is to pinpoint and train on the core skills your customer service representatives need. To start, reflect on your personal experiences with customer service teams. Think back to both positive and negative experiences. Ask yourself what made a rep great to deal with or—if things didn’t go according to plan—why it transpired that way.

Some of these key customer support skills may include:

• Empathy : Reps need to see a customer’s point of view and understand their emotions––even if they’re extremely irate or frustrated. Have your reps practice empathy by staying focused on the customer, listening for key facts and feelings, taking notes, and confirming what they heard.
• Active Listening : Striking the right balance between asking questions and listening can be challenging. It can be tempting to jump to a solution without fully understanding the depth of the problem. Train agents to know when to let customers take the lead in the conversation and when to pipe up with their insight. Reps can practice active listening by repeating what the customer says and paraphrasing it so the customer knows they understand.
• Clear Communication : Agents need to properly answer customer questions and stay focused on the conversation all the time; using vague language, disengaging, or muttering can be frustrating for customers. Meanwhile, being articulate and staying on topic will instill confidence. Have your reps act as “customers” during customer service training activities. This will give them a chance to better understand what it’s like on the other side and how they should address common issues in a professional manner.
• Solutions Focus : Agents need to think on their feet and offer suitable solutions for all types of problems. Provide your agents with basic problem-solving techniques and explain how they can be used in real-world scenarios. Trainees should understand why it is useful for them to approach customer issues with an open mind, identify root causes of problems, utilize available resources and technologies, and consider multiple solutions before making a final decision.
• Prioritize : It’s not possible to respond to all customers at the same time. Agents need to identify the most pressing customer issues and act accordingly in an acceptable time frame. Ignoring a customer complaint for too long may push them to take their valuable business elsewhere. Mock scenarios provide an opportunity for participants to practice their prioritization skills with realistic examples that resemble actual problems they may encounter on the job.
• Continuous Learning : To answer customer questions effectively, reps need to be up-to-date on new products, company policies, and how the purchasing process works from the customers’ point of view. Companies should establish clear guidelines and expectations for staying informed. They should set specific deadlines for employees to follow when it comes to learning and sharing new information with customers. Additionally, they should ensure that their employees have access to reliable sources of information, such as industry news outlets or company intranet sites.
• Patience : Keeping a cool head and understanding the person’s anger isn’t a personal attack is vital. Trainers can give examples of situations where a lack of patience could negatively impact customer relations and explain how having more patience could help to solve or de-escalate those situations. This will give trainees an understanding of why it’s important for them to remain patient when communicating with customers.
• Honesty : No one can know the answer to every possible customer issue—and faking it could fire up a customer even more. Instead, agents should admit when they don’t know the answer and offer to get back to the customer. One way to teach honesty in customer service professional development is to create situations where employees must practice responding honestly while also navigating tricky customer inquiries or requests.
• Optimism : When customers contact a rep, it’s because there’s a problem. Staying positive and focusing on the solution will reassure customers that their issue is being addressed. Organizations should provide instruction on how employees can frame conversations in a way that reflects an optimistic outlook without appearing insincere or patronizing.
• Openness to Feedback : Reps who are open to further training and constructive feedback will help maintain high standards. Role-playing scenarios that simulate real-life situations allow them to practice responding effectively in difficult moments, while also learning from mistakes made by others throughout the simulation.

Developing these key skills will equip your customer service team for a range of challenging customer issues and ensure they’re on top of their game. Communicating expectations and core values during new employee onboarding will keep customer service reps on track from day one. This can even start from the job interviews—treat these like conversations and communicate what your organization values the most from the get-go. Even your job descriptions should demonstrate your company values in order to make it clear across the board.

2. The Art of Saying No

No one enjoys hearing the word no––least of all your customers who want a solution to their issue. It’s only normal for anyone to feel disappointed when they’re told there’s something they can’t have. But of course, you’ll have to decline some of your client’s requests.

Instead of saying a short no, the key is to offer some solid alternatives and options that may appeal to the customer.

Here are some examples.

Instead of: “No, I can’t send you a replacement blue jacket because it’s out of stock.” Try: “Could I interest you in one of our jackets in black? I know you love blue but there may be a delay of several weeks until we’re restocked.”

Instead of: “No, it’s against company policy to provide you with a refund for delayed delivery.” Try: “I apologize for the delivery delay. Would you accept some credit toward your next order?”

When customers have options instead of a hard no, they’re less likely to become irate and will usually accept one of your solutions.

3. Your Product Portfolio

The more your staff understands and knows about your products, the more they can help the customer. Instead of bluffing their way through possible solutions or referring to colleagues, reps should have the confidence to provide technical solutions themselves.

Provide regular product training sessions where you share new additions or business changes. That way, when a customer complains about a product-related technical issue, your agent can be sure they know the answer and can provide a solution.

It’s good to provide them with a constantly updated document on topic details and frequently asked questions. These critical-thinking skills will also come in handy when dealing with customer issues on the spot.

4. Company Branding Alignment

These days, most business conversations happen via email, chat, and over calls instead of in person. For that reason, the choice of words, language, punctuation, and emojis is incredibly important.

It’s a good idea to draft a company document that outlines your brand presence . Categorize it into sections that include how reps should interact with customers across different communication channels. Depending on how you offer customer service, you should provide brand voice guidelines for phone calls, emails, and live chat. Prepare canned or customer service training template responses to commonly asked questions.

Here are some examples of what to include:

• Tone of voice: Do you want reps to sound upbeat, formal, or informal?
• Language: Can reps speak colloquially, or do you want them to use formal language only? Should they write in British or American English?
• Emojis: Do you prefer written communication to be with or without emojis?
• Punctuation: How correct should punctuation be in written communication?

Maintaining a brand voice will ensure reps provide a consistent customer experience.

5. Authenticity

Building authentic relationships with customers starts by treating them with kindness and respect. If reps show that they genuinely care about customers and their experience, customers will feel comfortable doing business with you and are more likely to remain loyal.

It’s important to train your customer service reps or anyone else who talks to your clients to build meaningful business relationships.

Here are a few ways to do this:

• Understand that customers are individuals: It’s easy to think of customers as just data on a screen, but you need to remind reps that they’re individual people with worries, questions, stress, and hopes. Reps need to remember to listen to customers as people and treat them with respect.
• Be yourself: Customers can sense inauthenticity from a mile away, and it’s not a good look for reps or businesses. So be yourself, be honest, and admit when there’s not an immediate solution.
• Use some small talk: During calls, it can be easy to jump right into the issue instead of asking how a person is or how their day is going. Engaging in some small talk, especially if you have a smaller base of customers, will help build rapport. Be careful, though, as some customers may be less willing to engage in small talk than others.
• Say thank you: People are busy and like to feel that their time is valued. Saying thank you to someone for their patience or help in solving an issue is a great way to show your appreciation.
• Don’t just go through the motions: It’s easy to go into autopilot mode and just say everything on repeat. But no one likes to feel that they’re talking to a robot or a broken record. Take the time to properly engage with what the customer is saying and react accordingly.

6. Customer Complaint Management

Being on the front line means being on the receiving end of an irate customer’s frustrations. Without some customer complaint training, the situation can catch any well-meaning customer service representative off guard. It’s easy for reps to panic, get flustered, and lose sight of how they need to respond.

It’s crucial to provide training on how to handle customer complaints calmly and professionally. If done effectively, you can turn negative experiences into opportunities to gain loyal customers.

Here’s how to best handle customer complaints:

• Keep your cool : Sometimes customers need to vent, and reps need to be adept at being neutral and letting customers share their frustrations––even if they’re shouting. Simply acknowledge the customers’ feelings by saying things like “I understand.” Soon the customer will see that the person on the other end of the line is calm and professional. This will encourage them to approach things with a calm mindset too.
• Get a complete picture : Before jumping to a solution, make sure reps have a complete understanding of the issue and all the facts surrounding it. This is the right moment to ask relevant questions to understand what the customer needs.
• Accept there’s a problem : Defensive reps who pin the problem on the customer will only irritate them further. Instead, reps should acknowledge the problem and reassure customers that they understand the issue.
• Don’t be afraid to apologize : Mistakes happen to all businesses, and if your business has made a mistake, own up and apologize. Customers appreciate honesty and will have more respect for the business in the long run if it can accept fault.
• Provide a solution : Once reps understand the full extent of the issue, they should offer solutions to the customer. They need to understand what’s an appropriate solution within company guidelines––offering something the business can’t commit to will generate further problems later on.

Customer Service Training Ideas

Training, for any topic or role, is a continuous process—and for customer service roles, it’s essential for your team to absorb as it impacts your bottom line. Here are some customer service training ideas you can use to make sure that your team learns what they need to.

7. Use a Variety of Training & Development Methods

Everyone learns differently, and most people prefer certain training and development methods over others. Plus, providing information in multiple formats helps learners retain it more successfully. As such, you’ll want to appeal to all learning styles.

Here are a few customer service presentation ideas for making your training methods accessible to different learner types:

• Virtual : Provide reps with online resources outlining support workflows. Share documents outlining the kind of language and solutions they should use to solve common issues.
• Videos : Share video re-enactments of reps successfully resolving issues as well as re-enactments of calls that miss the mark. Explain why some were successful and others were not.
• Recordings : Give reps access to real-life recordings of conversations between reps and customers. Ask them to think about the positives and negatives of each one.
• Group : Dynamic group sessions provide opportunities for role-playing and bouncing ideas off each other.
• One-on-one : Some individuals may find group sessions to be higher pressure. Balance them out with one-on-one (1:1) pairings with more experienced reps who can share their experience.
• On-the-job : There’s no substitute for real-world experience. When agents have a foundation of knowledge, it’s time to help them learn from experience and real-life customer issues.

Using all or a mix of these methods will appeal to different learning styles. Over time, see how your reps react to each training method—you’ll probably notice some work best for certain individuals.

8. Gamify the Training Process

Customer service training might induce some anxiety in your reps. Gamifying your training to make it a little less serious will help them look forward to training sessions.

One area in which gamifying might help is in recalling names. Calling customers by their names builds rapport and personalizes the experience. But when dealing with complaints and trying to find solutions, it can be easy for reps to get flustered and quickly forget a customer’s name or, worse, get it wrong or mispronounce it. A quick five-minute group game to boost reps’ ability to remember names correctly could be a fun warm-up to the day.

Some customer service software, like Freshdesk, uses built-in gamification to motivate agents.

By gamifying training, reps will be more engaged and thus more likely to remember key best practices and solutions to customer problems. You’ll avoid the danger of boring or overloading reps with the same information and training techniques.

9. Integrate Customer Feedback Into Customer Service Training

Customers are the ones interacting with reps on a daily basis. For that reason, their feedback is vital for improving customer service . There are a couple of ways to get the needed feedback from your customers, the most basic of which involve holding a focus group and conducting surveys.

• Hold a Focus Group
• Conduct Surveys

Everyone’s definition of top-quality customer service will be different, so it makes sense to ask customers what excellent customer service means to them. Conduct a focus group with customers who’ve recently contacted your customer service team.

Try to gather a collection of both satisfied and frustrated customers, so you can hear contrasting perspectives and build an accurate picture of how customers see your support team. Then, prepare some questions beforehand and leave some space for customers to share their honest opinions with you.

Some example questions might include:

• Were you satisfied with the solutions offered by your rep? Why?
• How long were you waiting to speak to a rep?
• Would you be happy to call our customer service team again?

Use these questions as a launchpad to dive into customers’ opinions about your service. Make sure to record these focus sessions either with audio or video recordings.

Make it a habit to conduct regular customer satisfaction surveys . Send out questionnaires at regular intervals throughout the year to existing customers to identify how they feel about your customer service.

Any time a customer interacts with a rep, follow up with a quick NPS (net promoter score) survey to measure their overall satisfaction with the service. It’s a good idea to send out a longer, more detailed questionnaire asking more specific questions about their satisfaction with things like wait time, the overall solution, and the helpfulness of the rep.

Once you have some honest customer feedback, create an action plan that directly addresses customer concerns.

10. Involve Management & Other Departments

Exceptional customer service starts at the top and trickles down through all team members. To help create the most effective customer service agents, look to your supervisors and managers. Their position of authority has the potential to inspire, motivate, and engage your reps so they provide the best customer experience possible.

Make hiring and training skilled leaders a priority in your business. Strong leaders know how to create a performance-driven customer experience culture and will help mentor and coach other team members. And, since an average of 33% of frontline service workforces are contractors , It’s important that decision-makers are equipped to handle the challenge.

Customer service isn’t just limited to a single department. Your whole organization needs to understand that customer experience is a priority. For that reason, it’s a good idea to do cross-departmental training and hold regular knowledge-sharing sessions.

For example, your reps could share feedback with the product team that they’re receiving lots of complaints about products being out of stock. The product team could then research product alternatives that ship more easily so that customers who want quick delivery have another option.

Documenting everything keeps everyone on the same page and prevents misinterpretation and protocols and processes ensure reps always know what the appropriate next step is. To start with, create protocols and processes on the following:

• Brand voice
• Company refund and return policy
• Training sessions

By creating documentation on key protocols and processes, reps will always know the appropriate next step. This boosts morale and confidence in your team, too.

11. Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes Through Role-playing

Listening to feedback from real customers will help your business identify recurring issues that require fixing. You can help employees develop empathy and understand the customer’s viewpoint through different role-playing situations. When team members understand issues from the customers’ perspective, they’ll be more likely to proactively find a suitable solution.

• Mock Phone Calls

Every customer call is unique and requires a unique approach. Regularly improvising different customer service scenarios will encourage agents to think on their feet, which is exactly what they’ll need to do in real-world situations.

Choose different customer scenarios so your agents get up to speed on all the different types of issues they may need to handle.

For example, you could try improvising these scenarios:

• An irate customer who has already called three times and hasn’t been offered an appealing solution
• A customer complaint about a lost delivery
• A customer who wants a product that isn’t available
• A customer whose phone line connection keeps dropping
• A customer who doesn’t understand the company’s returns policy or wants to bend the policy
• A customer who’s lost their account password and can’t figure out how to retrieve it

Practicing what to say and which solutions to offer will help agents feel confident that they can handle any scenario when they’re in touch with a customer.

While looking at what was said during the improv session, ask your reps to think about where the communication could have been improved. Could they have listened and understood more? Could they have asked more questions? Could they have spoken more clearly and succinctly?

A phone call may be a customer’s first interaction with your business, so make sure you go the extra mile to create a good impression. Newer reps may get flustered on phone calls or not know the right way to clearly communicate over the phone. Mock phone calls will help your employees feel confident in real-life phone conversations with customers.

Prior to scheduling mock phone calls, give your reps some communication tips and guidelines to help them communicate effectively. These might include:

• Speak with an upbeat tone.
• Use clear and simple language to avoid misunderstandings.
• Give customers space to speak and avoid talking over them.
• Use positive and reassuring language.

Live chat is a popular first point of contact for customer service. The key is to equip team members with the right information about each contact so they can respond efficiently. This is where your CRM and help desk software come into play. Make sure reps can easily access all relevant customer data to help them offer the best service possible.

Provide training around accepted company language and how reps should address customers. You should also provide guidance on knowing the right time to take customer service off the live chat platform and onto email or a phone call so they can provide the right amount of detail.

12. Learn From Companies With Exceptional Customer Service

Identify businesses known for providing exceptional customer service and see if you can arrange for your reps to learn about their customer service techniques. Ask your reps to create a list of questions for the company and report on their findings. They can then share with the rest of the group their learnings and reflections on what worked well and what could be improved.

Trader Joe’s is known for its excellent customer service with a library of resources for submitting a specific form.

Learning from industry leaders encourages reps to reflect on their own techniques and how they could develop them. It’s also worth checking out some of the worst customer service examples to ensure you’re not guilty of any of the same mistakes.

13. Never Stop Training

Continual training and development is key to maintaining success across your customer service department. Encourage reps to strive to be their best selves by taking initiative in their own growth and development.

Provide resources and organize regular training for customer service teams so they’re at the forefront of providing the best possible customer experience. You do this by holding and attending:

• Conferences
• Expert interviews
• Whole-team training days

Talk about how continual learning and development are key for successful growth and sustainable success in customer service.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the qualities of good customer service.

Good customer service involves maintaining the basic core competency skills, like empathy, problem-solving, and friendliness. Besides that, having extensive product/service knowledge and translating that into each call with a customer can elevate your customer service handling even further.

What are the 7 C’s of customer relationship management?

Customer service reps live by the 7 C’s of marketing and customer relationship management. These include communication, collaboration, connection, context, customization, customer service, and culture. Each allows for effective management of customer relationships.

How do you handle an angry customer?

The key is to maintain a pleasant attitude while approaching the situation with facts and helpful information. If you are simply unable to diffuse the situation, offer to let the customer speak to a supervisor.

Taking the time to consider and implement customer service training ideas will help your reps create a welcoming type of environment and reach their full potential. Experiment with the customer service training ideas and topics we’ve covered above and see which resonates the most with your agents. Remember to keep things interesting and don’t be afraid to introduce new ideas to the mix.

About the Author

Find Jennifer On LinkedIn

Jennifer Soper

Jennifer Soper has 25+ years of writing and content design experience, working with small businesses and Fortune 100 companies. For over a decade, Jennifer worked as an HR generalist, providing expertise in accounting, payroll, and HR by implementing payroll and benefits best practices and creating onboarding and employee-relations documentation.

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How A Customer Service Presentation Will Set Your Business Up For Success

Table of contents.

Customer service is one of the most important aspects of your business. You could have the greatest product or be the best price, but if your customer service isn’t up to par, growing your business will be a tough job.

Especially for client/customer-facing roles, strong customer service can not only improve your brand image, but also help retain current clients and gain referrals.

What were saying here is that it’s critical to properly train your employees to deliver consistent and stellar customer service . You might consider creating a training presentation that walks your employees through their customer service responsibilities. Let’s break down the importance of these presentations and how you can set your business up for success.

What Is A Customer Service Presentation?

One aspect of employee training involves walking through what good customer service looks like. Customer service itself is when employees assist and give sound advice to those who buy or use the products or services being offered.

Training your employees on this topic can often be done through a presentation that provides a thorough understanding of good service, how to handle problems and questions, and why customer service is so important.

The slides in the presentation should included relevant and quality information for your employees about customer service and how to deal with difficult inquiries or situations. This will enable them to provide good service when faced with those calls, emails, or interactions with customers.

Here’s an example we created for Sherwin Williams.

Sherwin Williams Customer Education Presentation

What Benefits Will A Presentation on Customer Service Provide My Business?

A thorough understanding of customer service expectations and guidelines in a presentation can set your company up for success in a few key ways, including:

Well Trained Customer Service Representatives

Effective customer service for your customers, helps to build a good reputation.

Customer service presentations are primarily created to inform and educate employees who will be providing service to customers or clients.

When your employees are properly trained in all things customer service, they will be able to deliver exceptional service to your customers. Not only will properly trained employees complete their duties to company standard, it’s peace of mind knowing you have your aces in the right places .

In your customer service training presentation, you should have slides that include overviews and discussions on the following objectives:

Product and Service Knowledge

Communication Styles

Conflict Management/Resolution

Common Consumer Problems

Reasons for Consumer Complaints

Ideas for Cultivating Strong Relationships

Measure of Success

Authority or Hierarchy Understanding

Depending on the tools provided to your employees by your company, you might also include a segment on IT and other customer service tools that the employees will need to work with.

With properly trained employees comes great interactions with your customers.

If a consumer has a problem and they need some to listen to and understand their complaints but your employees aren’t trained in customer service, it can lead to all sorts of problems. Whether it’s on the phone, email, or in person, your customers will expect quality services from your employees.

A customer’s experience can often dictate whether they will return as a customer or point their direction somewhere else. On a financial level, it is more cost effective to keep a current customer than bring in a new one.

Retaining customers and maintaining relationships with them can be done when your customers have a great experience and feel important.

As social media platforms continue to grow in popularity, they have also become platforms for people who want to share their good or bad experiences with a company. Whether it’s through Google reviews , Tweets, TikTok videos, or Facebook posts, words and experiences from customers who visit your store or website can have a huge impact on your business.

Maintaining a good reputation with great service to your customers will go a long way. A good reputation can be built and maintained when you:

Serve customers by putting them first

Avoid increasing conflict

Learn from mistakes

Should My Presentation Be Editable?

As your create your presentation, you should consider the adaptability of the content. An editable presentation deck can benefit your business by adapting to changes in customer service best practices .

Especially if you use apt research when you organize your content, be sure to edit the ppt deck as research evolves and changes.

You Should Always Consider A Custom Presentation

Whether you need sixteen slides or sixty, you should consider having a custom presentation deck created .

With custom slides, you can tailor the content, theme, graphs, and topic to your business. The point is to train your employees on how to deliver service for your specific company and you may have different guidelines than other companies.

What Other Digital Tools Should I Use To Equip My Team?

When it comes to equipping your team and setting them up for success, there are a few other tools you might consider providing your employees. These include:

a personal work computer

ability to download slides from presentation

planners or planning software

e-learning courses on customer service

As a manager or employer, you should consider the ways in which you can work with the people on your team and set them up for success in the customer service department.

Our Final Thoughts On Having A Presentation on Customer Service

A great customer service ppt deck comprises of relevant information, employee guidelines, product knowledge, and department specific slides. Creating slides that reach your employees and that enable them to succeed in their positions is vital for success.

Are You In Need Of A Custom(er) Service Presentation? The Geeks Are Here!

Need someone to create great customer service training slides for your business and employees? The geeks at Presentation Geeks are here to help. We can build your PowerPoint presentation that can help you succeed in your customer service department!

Contact us today to see how we can help!

Author:  Content Team

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50 Must-See Customer Engagement Presentations

The Team at CallMiner

September 26, 2018

Customer engagement has evolved from the origins of customer satisfaction and customer delight. Today, customer engagement is defined as the profound relationship that the customer has with your brand.

In today’s digital age, irrespective of which industry you are in, customers expect an immediate or near-instant response as well as a picture-perfect anticipation of their wants. To meet this requirement, businesses are getting competitive and aiming to provide hyper-personalized experiences to keep their customers enrolled and engaged with their brand, products, and services.

Designing a well-crafted customer engagement strategy is an excellent way to boost sales and drive profitability. More companies are incorporating customer engagement tools such as  speech analytics  and chatbots to better gain deeper insight into customer engagement and respond readily to consumers across digital channels by leveraging technologies such as  artificial intelligence .

With many tools, technologies, and tactics that play a role in customer engagement, developing a strategy can seem daunting. To get you started, we’ve compiled a list of 50 different customer engagement resources, including both videos and slide presentations, by highly regarded individuals in the industry. For more expert insights on customer engagement, visit  CallMiner’s Learning Center  to access dozens of white papers, videos, articles, and other resources to help you develop and execute a top-notch customer engagement strategy.

The 50 must-see presentations below are listed in no particular order, but are separated by category including:

Video Presentations

Slide presentations, engage business media.

Twitter :  @EngageCustomer

1: Important Considerations for your Customer Management

This video is presented by Mike Havard, Director at Ember Services, at the Telecos/Utilities Director Forum 2014. The video covers customer engagement opportunities and challenges and covers topics such as regulation in a social context, the value of complaints, personal data implications, and what transformation and growth means in customer engagement.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding customer engagement and why organizations make it so hard
• Securing board commitment for funding solutions
• Discusses nine important themes around customer engagement

2: Employee and Customer Engagement

This video, from the fifth Directors Forum of 2014, takes a look at the important connection between employees and customer engagement. One of the key highlights includes understanding the shift between wanting to be customer-centric and enforcing an actionable strategy to actually make it happen. The video covers a panel of different speakers who discuss the relationship between employees and customer engagement.

• Understanding the bridge between staff engagement and customer engagement
• Incorporating employee engagement in putting the customer first
• Using staff engagement to delight the customer

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Twitter:   @awscloud

3: Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users

Gaining users is the key to the cloud. This presentation is one that is regularly at the AWS conference “re:Invent”. However, in this particular version, Joel Williams changes the game a bit to help you scale to your first  11  million users. If you have a great product for sale, but can’t handle a large amount of traffic at once — this presentation will help you plan to scale AWS resources quickly.

• Techniques for scaling an application on AWS
• Why “auto-scaling” is not where you should start
• Reasoning for starting with SQL databases for your scalabilty
• Direct gameplans and examples from 1 million to 11 million users

4: Engaging Your Customers with SNS Mobile Push and Amazon Analytics

Push notifications are a crucial part of creating a game play experience that retains and reengages users. If an app that keeps running in the cloud, messages can be delivered to your players. The right communication at the right time can improve your engagement and build long-term relationships with your users.

• 65% of mobile apps are abandoned within 90 days
• Effectively sending mass messages versus using 1 to 1 communication based on analytics and player actions
• Real time examples of notifications as well as a look at analytics and how to process data

5: How I discovered the black art of cult branding

Rob Howard, founder of Cult Collective, delivers this compelling talk at a TEDx event at St. Lawrence College. Howard boasts a marketing career spanning 20+ years, and in addition to founding Cult Collective, he founded a think tank, a global summit (The Gathering), and authored a book,  Fix: Break the Addiction That’s Killing Brands . Howard discusses how consumers tend to “evangelize” to others in the spur of the moment and how brands can capitalize on this enthusiasm and win the allegiance of die-hard fans through customer engagement.

• What makes customers loyal to the world’s most coveted brands
• How successful brands are like modern-day cults in disguise (in a good way)
• What successful brands did to survive in times of economic diversity while spending less on traditional forms of marketing

Doug Stephens

Twitter :  @TheLavinAgency

6: Customer Engagement is the Key to Success

This video is presented by Doug Stephens at the Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau. He holds the opinion that every retailer understands that customer experience is crucial, but very few really know how to implement it. Being one of the world’s foremost retail speakers and consumer futurists, he drives the idea that, “We have to allow customers to feel like they’re not just walking into a different store, but walking into a different world.”

• Retail stores have to be a “story”
• Making stores less static
• Engaging customers by creating a sensory experience

Mathew Sweezey

Twitter:   @msweezey

7: The New Rules for Customer Engagement

This video is a talk by Mathew Sweezey, “marketing evangelist” for Salesforce.com. He is also the author of “Marketing Automation for Dummies.” He provides an overview of modern customer engagement and explains how to execute a marketing strategy that drives lasting results.

• How to value buy-in for your efforts
• Social media tactics and strategies that get results
• How the modern customer makes buying decisions
• Lead nurturing best practices to increase lead flow

Twitter:  @Microsoft

8: New Customer Engagement Models

This video discusses how customers and Microsoft Retail Stores are successfully executing new customer engagement models. Microsoft Solutions Specialist and Retail Industry Solutions Director Pinar Salk covers how Microsoft Retail Stores are implementing an end-to-end customer engagement experience from mobile browsing to in-store purchases and more.

• Implementing a frictionless shopping experience using a mobile app
• Driving higher conversion and customer retention in the engagement process to impact the bottom line
• Empowering sales associates to recommend curated products catered to the customer based on individual personal insights and data

Twitter:   @salesforce

9: The Future of Customer Engagement

This video from Salesforce brings together a panel of experts who impart expert tips and insights about the latest customer engagement strategies that are ready to be implemented and put into action. Discussions are centered around a properly designed customer engagement strategy that inspires, creates loyalty, and drives profit.

• Defining customer engagement and discussing example case studies
• Meeting customer expectations and personalizing the engagement process
• Handling and understanding customer data and acting on it
• Customer engagement best practices and strategies

Jon Suarez-Davis

Twitter:   @jsuarezdavis

10:  Customer Engagement in the Age of Intelligent Marketing

This video features keynote speaker Jon Suarez-Davis (“JSD”), who is Salesforce’s chief cloud marketing officer. He has experience working with some of the world’s biggest brands. In his talk, he draws upon real life examples to explain how customer engagement can be enhanced in the age of intelligent marketing.

• New level of engagement
• Brand marketing and performance marketing
• Salesforce’s vision for the future of marketing
• Predictions for digital advertising in 2020
• Core competencies: Know, Engage, and Personalize

Pegasystems

Twitter:   @pega

11:  AI in Customer Engagement

In this video by PegaWorld, Dr. Rob Walker, VP of Decision Management and Analytics at Pegasystems, discusses both the advantages and potential risks of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the customer engagement process.

• Balancing the risks and rewards of Artificial Intelligence
• Discussing how AI can be a threat to human existence and how we can control and trust it
• Difference between Opaque and Transparent AI
• Where to allow Opaque AI and where to insist on transparency
• Predicting outcomes based on AI

12: Automation, AI and Customer Engagement

In this video, 25-year veteran employee and Senior Vice President of Products at Pegasystems, Kerim Akgonul, discusses how technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), DevOps, and robotic automation are building agility and transforming customer engagement in organizations.

• Automating AI for customer engagement
• Providing real-life case studies on how AI is being used today to enhance customer engagement
• Bridging the gap between customer engagement, operational efficiency, and business agility

IBM Analytics

Twitter:   @IBMAnalytics

13.  Data-driven Customer Engagement

This video gives a walkthrough of how to spot customers who are at risk of churn and use preemptive measures before they are defected. It talks about using predictive analytics capabilities to drive customer retention by accurately targeting campaigns, which allows you to retain valuable customers while boosting your revenue.

• Deliver customer insights to front-line decision-makers and systems
• Boost customer lifetime value through personalized efforts
• Predict which customers are at risk of leaving
• Identify choice prospects for highly targeted marketing programs
• Enhance sales forecasting, accelerating sales cycles

Insurance Nexus

Twitter:   @InsuranceNexus

14.  Raising Customer Engagement in the Insurance Industry

This video covers a webinar conducted by Insurance Nexus with a panel of three leading speakers and discusses how to raise customer engagement in the insurance industry. Key topics covered include analyzing the customer journey and identifying where the pain points are, how to improve customer engagement, and measuring interactions with customers.

• How insurance carriers can improve their customer engagement
• Practical advice, case study examples and best practices for the insurance industry
• Innovating and using technology to interact with customers

Twitter:   @SAP

15: Beyond CRM: Digital Transformation Starts with Customer Engagement

This video, delivered by enterprise resource planning (ERP) giant SAP, talks about how digital transformation is impacting how to deal with customers and why organizations need to think beyond the CRM. Leading speakers from SAP discuss actionable strategies for customer engagement and reveal how SAP offerings, such as the “SAP Hybris portfolio and SAP Jam Communities,” can help you reach digital transformation objectives.

• How to exceed customer expectations and delight with digital solutions
• Delivering richer, faster, and better digital experiences personalized to the customer
• Understanding digital businesses and why customers are their most important assets
• Assisted and unassisted customer support before, during, and after the purchase

CustomerEdge TV

Google+:   CustomerEdge TV

16: How Social Media Has Impacted Customer Engagement – Customer Edge

This video talks about the role that social media has played on the way businesses sell, market, and serve their customers. Irrespective of industry, whether it is telecom or heavy machinery, the competition is ever increasing which makes it necessary to provide a personalized experience to each customer.

• How to engage with personalized social media in B2B and B2C situations
• How to involve influencers and advocates, and foster their growth
• Learning from best practices and avoiding pitfalls

Twitter:   @couchbase

17:  Revolutionizing customer engagement – Connect Silicon Valley 2017

Couchbase CMO Peter Finter discusses the attributes and values of an engagement database and how Couchbase clients are transforming their organizations with improved customer engagement, personalized experiences, lower costs, and time-sensitive innovation.

• Changes impacting businesses today that requires them to rethink customer experience
• Challenges of customer engagement and how to overcome them
• How businesses can revolutionize customer engagement and reap the rewards
• Employing technology to give customers a unique experience

Google G Suite

Twitter:  @gsuite

18: Connecting your sales associates to drive customer engagement and satisfaction

There are a many “real world” problems in the retail and ecommerce space — especially when it comes to customer engagement. Google has provided a short tutorial about how Chrome can help alleviate many of these scenarios. The focus of the webinar is to help connect sales associates in a way that improves customer engagement through the production of “regular, lively content”.

• Discovering the top two operational challenges of the retail world
• How Chrome can help modernize and rethink workflows
• Enhancing and improving communication across a distributed workforce

Twitter:  @Dreamforce

19:  Workshop: Transform Customer Service to a Customer Engagement Center

In this video, Service Cloud experts from Salesforce discuss the importance of adapting your service organization to engage a whole new breed of technology savvy customers who expect immediate answers and support at every step of their customer experience journey. They uncover strategies for connecting with customers and building meaningful relationships, and the role of a customer engagement center to transform customer experience.

• How mobile and social media are transforming customer service today
• Delivering outstanding customer service at every point of customer interaction
• Deploying and running a customer engagement center successfully
• Achieving measurable results through increased agent productivity

Pitney Bowes

Twitter:  @pb_digital

20: Digital Transformation with Mobile First Customer Engagement

This demo by Pitney Bowes covers how organizations need to be relevant and interact with customers on every marketing channel today. It shows ways to optimize and simplify communication for mobile devices and discusses the importance of AV interactions to create engaging and personal customer experiences.

• Identifying current trends in customer engagement
• Providing digitized customer engagement management solutions
• Discussing the future of customer driven “predictive” engagement
• Scalable, compliant and secure mobile-first customer engagement

TiE Silicon Valley

Twitter:   @tiesv

21:  Inhi Cho Suh – GM Watson Customer Engagement, IBM – MarTech Track TiE Inflect 2018

Inhi Cho Suh, GM Watson Customer Engagement at IBM, discusses the human and business impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how AI combined with other disruptive technologies such as IOT and Blockchain are drastically transforming different industries including HealthTech, FinTech, MarTech, and more.

• How AI and machine learning is transforming customer engagement
• Creating real-time personalized experiences using AI
• Identifying the challenges of AI and offering solutions
• Employing an AI powered platform to holistically analyze customer data and deliver the best possible customer experience

Twitter:   @TheNextWeb

22:  Danielle Levitas (App Annie) on How to Grow Customer Engagement through Mobile | TNW Conference 2017

Danielle Levitas, Senior Vice President and Research and Analysis team lead at App Annie, talks about how to grow customer engagement through mobile. With most customers mobile today and a good part of them spending 2+ hours a day on mobile apps, she emphasizes the importance of mobile-first marketing. This video also covers the importance of using customer data to understand what consumers want and expect and how to use mobile apps to create an intimate level of engagement with a customer.

• Why and how to reach out to customers on mobile devices
• Growing customer engagement through mobile app interactions
• Increasing ROI and building a better business through apps

Twitter:  @Comm100

23:  [Webinar] Social Media Best Practices for Effortless Customer Engagement

Research from Gartner predicts that in the next two years almost 90% of all companies will be providing customer support on social media. This webinar video shows how to build meaningful customer relationships by providing stellar customer service through a variety of social media channels.

• Social media best practices for effortless customer engagement
• Dealing with rising expectations and providing instant/near-instant responses
• How to handle social media customer service queries
• Social media excellence checklist

Twitter:   @adtech

24:  Game On: How Gamification Drives Sales & Customer Engagement

In this video, CRO Samantha Skey from RecycleBank and leading executives from NativeX, Electronic Arts, and SponsorPay discuss relevant case studies of how brands and businesses can use gamification to push sales and increase customer engagement. Going beyond just reward points and tokens, they discuss strategies that can be borrowed from gaming to attract new leads and gaining customer loyalty.

Download our guide on  how to use gamification to improve call center performance !

• Importance of gamification to drive sales and enhance customer experience
• Offering rewards to customers for user-directed opt-ins
• ‘Mobile to in-store’ and ‘in-store to mobile’ customer engagement

Karan Verma

25: Artificial Intelligence in Customer Engagement

Karan Verma, product manager for Dry Ice at HCL Technologies, discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning and the millions of variables involved in delivering the data to be used to drive customer engagement.

• When to employ machine learning vs. human interaction
• How large-scale enterprises can use AI to enhance customer engagement
• Discussing current and future trends in AI
• Building the gap between different marketing platforms to engage a customer in their customer journey

Twitter:  @CityGro

26:  Innovative Ideas That Increase Your Customer Engagement

A live podcast video by CityGro, a company that builds marketing and client retention tools, discusses how to build customer loyalty and keep people coming back, and how businesses can improve customer retention and develop marketing strategies to better engage customers.

• Exploring innovative ways to get people to engage with your business, brand, and loyalty programs
• Getting direct feedback from customers to help businesses improve their customer experience
• Discusses the tools CityGro offers to increase customer engagement through gamification, scratch cards, and more

Twitter:   @PitneyBowes

27: Predictive Analytics + Customer Engagement = Bad Debt Prevention

Bad debt costs millions per year for utilities. Predictive analytics and properly tuned in customer engagement can alleviate and prevent many of these losses. This pre-recorded webinar has some of the foremost experts in the areas of analytics, utility companies and customer success.

• See how predictive analytics as well as a customer service strategy can prevent bad debt
• Using data to determine where your collection efforts are best spent by likeliness to pay
• Keep more debt from becoming delinquent based on indicators before payments are missed

Tom Tsongas, PMP, CSM

28: Customer engagement

This slide presentation gives an overview and discusses key aspects of customer engagement. It explains how customer engagement is the process of fostering and optimizing the relationship with the consumer, as well as the necessary steps that need to be taken to produce the most viable deliverable. It emphasizes the need for improving customer satisfaction scores and giving the customer a lasting impression of your brand.

• Difference between internal and external customers
• Challenges in engaging internal customers
• Internal customer engagement lifecycle
• Key methodologies to achieve customer engagement

David Williams

Twitter:  @HOWTOEXPERIENCE

29: Customer engagement 5 vectors

This slide presentation is shared by David Williams, Director of iPoint Solutions Ltd., in which he discusses the five vectors of customer engagement. The slides discuss the need to shift from efficiency to effectiveness and the importance of having direct engagement with the customer.

• 5 vectors of customer engagement
• Expanding opportunity with smart everything
• Offshoring and re-shoring
• Keeping up with the competition

Raghvendra Saboo

Twitter:  @jumoora

30: In-Store Customer Engagement & Analytics

This slide presentation primarily discusses the importance of in-store customer engagement and ways to improve it. It also shares analytics of customer behavior and how to grab engagement analytics of the ever connected and the ever-browsing customer. It also shares market evolution details and case studies of a couple of leading organizations.

• Enhancing experience related to shopping at physical stores
• The behavior change brought by E-commerce
• Leveraging proximity techniques and cloud NFC smart tags
• Value proposition of brands

Emilia D’Anzica, MBA, PMP

Twitter:  @emiliadanzica

31: Driving Product Advocacy: Customer Engagement

This slide presentation discusses the importance of having an engagement program and key strategies to jumpstart customer engagement in your organization. It also shares recent customer analysis and platforms that can be used for customer relationship management and offers guidance on creating an action plan for your engagement program.

• Analysis of customer journey
• Gamification of customer experience
• Strategies for mobilizing your network
• Action plan for continuous engagement

Twitter:  @plumb_five

32: Autonomous Customer Engagement

The slide presentation focuses on implementing AI that is capable of autonomous human-like customer engagement. It advocates the use of Plumb5 which is a unified data platform that is built using the concepts of a real-time decision process. It renders seamless engagement between touch-points like web, mobile, email, SMS, and other channels of communication.

• Introduction to Plumb5 platform
• Data preparation for individual customers
• Connecting all data sources
• Unification technique
• Machine learning workflow
• Segmentation and dynamic personalization

Twitter:  @Ogilvy

33: Equipping Engagement with Wearable Tech

This slide presentation talks about wearable tech that can function as a multi-disciplinary analysis. It discusses smart body apparel and various factors such as personal, environmental, and physical that come into play when designing and implementing with wearable tech.

• How to stay consumer-centric
• Utilizing mobile devices and connected watches
• Today’s wearable tech eco-system

Richard Sedley

Twitter:  @richardsedley

34: 4th Annual Online Customer Engagement Survey

This series of slides are from the 4th annual online customer engagement survey report of 2010. The presentation comments on the report, provides an executive summary and goes into an in-depth discussion regarding customer management. It discusses the importance of repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological, or physical investment of the customer in the brand, product, or company.

• Behaviors and dimensions to consider for customer engagement campaigns
• Importance of message relevance and medium selection for customer engagement
• Improving online customer engagement
• Increasing value delivered and long-term customer engagement

35: Creating Customer Engagement Strategies

This presentation created by Richard Sedley, CEO at EY-Saren, is a series of slides discussing various factors, mediums, and analysis that can be used for creating effective customer engagement strategies.

• Permission based marketing
• Touch strategies
• Proposition development
• Psycho-graphic profiling
• Behavioral targeting
• Contextual targeting

OgilvyOne Worldwide

36: eCommerce: The Crucible of Customer Engagement

This is a series of slides that talk about the core-essentials or ingredients of customer engagement. It discusses how mobile users and millennials are going to drive the future. It focuses on developing customer engagement and enhancing customer experience by a combination of either physical or digital stores, along with the application of continuous commerce.

• Using M-commerce to drive E-commerce
• Location marketing
• Instant Gratification Marketplaces

Twitter:  @davidleeking

37: Freak Out, Geek Out, or Seek Out: Dealing with Tech Change and Customer Engagement

The series of slides in this presentation talk about the rapid technology changes that need to be made to boost customer engagement. It talks about the changing web, which is a decentralized, two-way channel for public communication in real-time and also how to deal with the ever-changing competition landscape.

• Dealing with pocket web
• Enhancing visitor experience
• Improve touch-points
• Dealing with change

SAP Customer Experience

Twitter:  @SAP_CX

38: 44 Facts Defining the Future of Customer Engagement

This slide presentation offers a series of facts that gives an idea of where customer engagement is headed in the future. It shares statistics related to customer engagement in different fields such as electronics, banking, hotels, and the retail market.

• Necessity of engaging customers on social media
• Statistics relating customer spending with customer experience
• Effectiveness of customer usage algorithm
• Importance of being customer-centric

Braze (formerly Appboy)

Twitter:  @Braze

39: What is Customer Engagement

This series of slides gives an in-depth understanding of customer engagement. It talks about the process of actively building, nurturing, and managing relationships with customers. The customer journey is no longer linear, which makes creating a customer engagement strategy more complex. Therefore, it is easier to sell to an existing customer than acquire a new one.

• Customer acquisition and metrics marketing
• Leveraging CRM data to better understand customers
• Segmentation to increase the relevancy and effectiveness of campaigns
• Using multiple channels for maximum impact

Twitter:  @marketo

40: 5 Marketing Strategies for Customer Engagement

This series of informative slides discusses the upcoming “engagement economy” as the foreseen new era. It presents the 2017 marketing benchmark report and shares success stories that have worked for leading organizations.

• Need for an engagement platform
• Quality of engagements
• Personalized engagement
• Custom scoring models
• Multi-touch reporting

Twitter:  @Alterian

41: The Future of Customer Engagement

This series of slides aims at predicting the future of customer engagement. It talks about how the definition of customer engagement has changed with evolving customers, social change, and customer demands that drive marketing. It discusses how to identify the challenges in delivering customer engagement and how these challenges can be addressed.

• Strategies in customer engagement
• Identification and addressing challenges
• Customer engagement maturity model

Twitter:  @MarTechConf

42: The Four R’s of Customer Engagement for Marketing Success

This presentation discusses digital transformation and the key difference between customer experience and customer engagement. It talks about the science of marketing, and how marketing has evolved with machine learning and omni-channel architecture.

• Right message
• Right channel

David Leonarde

43: Top 7 winning customer engagement strategies for your business

This series of slides discusses some of the key strategies that are vital for increasing customer engagement. It talks about the importance of humans being multi-dimensional and how they can be engaged on other levels that are not directly related to the company’s product. It discusses the sharing of stories and how providing customers with real time benefits are keys to continuous customer engagement.

• Engage and enroll customers by sharing your story
• Use customer data effectively to generate relevant content
• Share customer reviews on social media
• Attempt to engage customers on an emotional level

Demand Metric

Twitter:  @DemandMetric

44: Customer Engagement Playbook

This series of slides shows a step-by-step guide to improve the engagement level of customers and make your organization customer-centric. It talks at length about initiatives that need to be taken to improve customer engagement, and understanding the strength and weakness of the organization to design the most effective customer engagement plan.

• Customer journey mapping
• Initiative preparation and technology selection
• Strategy selection for customer engagement and advocacy

Amazon Web Services

Twitter:  @awscloud

45: Customer Engagement in the Age of Digital Transformation

The digital customer leaves behind an explosion of data that is collected across all touchpoints. This series of slides gives a walkthrough of the research and industry analysis conducted in the field of customer engagement. It also educates about how Amazon Web Services (AWS) and FICO can help in building better customer engagement for your organization.

• Data driven, highly scientific approach to optimize omni-channel customer experience
• Using existing customer data to predict future behavior
• Model outbound and real-time customer interactions to create effective campaigns
• Core benefits of using AWS

Techedge Group

Twitter:  @techedgegroup

46: Design for Customer Engagement: Digital Marketing Strategy

This series of slides focuses on identifying all of the relevant technological components that seamlessly integrate with one another. It further discusses that end-to-end digital marketing strategies are key to developing a strong customer base for any organization.

• Search engine marketing and related online campaigns
• Accurate application of the digital marketing funnel
• Developing a successful digital marketing strategy

Twitter:  @servicenow

47: How to Develop Winning Customer Engagement Strategies

This series of slides teach how to develop customer engagement strategies that increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. The presentation talks about the advent of the digital customer and how to use omni-channel methods to build trust and engage the customer. It also covers concerns of the company regarding the cost of the campaigns and how to optimize budget limits.

• Customer engagement in the digital era
• Personal value chain of customers
• Multichannel customer engagement
• Analysis of Dialog Axiata Group case study

MIT Sloan Management Review

Twitter:   @MITSloan

48:  Turning Data into Customer Engagement

Here is a very data-based slide presentation reviewing “key findings” from the 2018 Data & Analytics Global Executive Study and Research Report. If you’re not using any form of analytics at the moment, the results found may convince you to start.

• Using analytics is a competitive advantage that continues to improve
• The data provided by analytics is improving customer engagement for those employing it
• Experienced analytics users are using more data points to improve engagement
• The power of sharing data

The Digital Insurer

Twitter:   @DigitalInsurer

49:  Customer Engagement in a Connected World

A great set of useful slides from a series of presentations at a conference specifically from insurers. There are four distinct presentations all dealing with the topic of improving both customer engagement and customer experience. While it is intended for insurers, the strategies are broad and can benefit nearly any industry.

• How insurers can specifically drive customer engagement by embracing the “age of the customer”
• How AI and Machine Learning can improve customer experience
• Insights into the customer via online engagement
• “Uplifting” the experience of an insurer’s customer

Kissmetrics

Twitter:   @Kissmetrics

50:  Data-Driven Storytelling: How To Use Qualitative and Quantitative Insights To Create Content That Fuels Your Business

A long title that says exactly what to expect within the slides. Kissmetrics is known for quality content as well as creating tools that give incredibly useful data. This presentation deals with both creating good content and using it to the fullest for data-backed engagement.

• A clean-cut definition of good content, how to “cut through the noise” and telling good stories
• Detailed, itemized list of the ways storytelling content can fuel your business objectives
• Further resources to continue your data and storytelling journey

What customer engagement strategies are most crucial to your organization in the digital world? Tweet at us  @CallMiner  and let us know! 

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120 Presentation Topic Ideas Help You Hook Your Audience

Updated: January 15, 2024

Published: August 09, 2023

Cooking is easy. The puzzle is figuring out what to eat. As soon as you know that, you can get started. The same holds for presentations. The sooner you can whip up a good, informative, and catchy topic, the easier the rest of the process becomes.

Pick a good topic that resonates with you and your audience to set a strong foundation. But select the wrong topic, and it becomes difficult to connect with your audience, find mutual interests, or hold their attention.

So, let’s learn how to develop thought-provoking and relevant topics for your presentations. You’ll also find some best practices to make your presentation memorable.

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Table of Contents

How to Choose a Great Presentation Topic in 5 Steps

120 presentation topic ideas, 5 presentation tips.

4. Choose an appropriate presentation style.

There are many ways to present a topic. Your personality, the topic at hand, and your audience’s personas will help you determine which style would best fit you and your audience.

Select a presentation style that will communicate the main idea clearly and have a lasting impact on your audience.

For instance, explore a freeform style presenter by Sir Ken Robinson.

5. Engage with your audience.

Work on your presentation skills to make a strong connection with your audience, get through to them and leave a mark.

Think of the presenter as the link between the topic and the audience. A strong or a weak presenter can make a difference between a presentation being a thriving success or a boring failure.

Hone your skills by engaging and interacting with your audience. Make them feel like a part of the presentation and not just spectators. 70% of marketers have found presentations with interactive content to be more effective than those without.

Here are a few ways you can make your presentation interactive:

• Start your speech with uncommon questions to your audience. Involve them from the get-go, like ask to raise their hands if X.
• Make eye contact to build credibility and show confidence. Don’t stare at your slides or notes. Smile occasionally and talk to the audience directly.
• Have an active and confident body language. Don’t stand in the same place the entire time. Move around the stage.
• Don’t be monotonous. Speak as you would to a colleague — with enthusiasm.
• Ask close-ended questions in between to keep the audience engaged without losing time. Address them using their names to keep things interesting.
• Share personal experiences and stories that your audience will find fascinating and relatable.
• Practice thoroughly before you present so you’re fluent with the material and delivery.
• Energy and excitement can be quite contagious. Make sure you exude enough to spread some to your audience.

Feeling Inspired Yet?

Now you have all the right ingredients for choosing amazing topics and a hundred ideas to drive inspiration from. So, go ahead and start cooking presentations that will blow your audience away.

Don’t forget to choose a super-relevant topic and add meaty information. Do it with excitement to make it enjoyable for you and your audience. Best of luck!

Don't forget to share this post!

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Customer service excellence powerpoint presentation slides

Enhance your business skills by using this Customer Service Excellence PowerPoint Presentation Slides. With the help of the service excellence model PowerPoint presentation template, a company can record the client’s feedback for their products and services. There is a specific criterion based on the positive and negative reviews from the consumer, which you can mention by using our professionally designed user satisfaction PowerPoint presentation deck. This consumer satisfaction PPT comprises a total of 16 slides that helps in creating an exclusive presentation. The client support PPT includes exclusive diagrams and high-quality icons Showcase the various key features like measuring service quality, providing a consistent level of buyer feedback, visibility of service status, and many more using digital customer journey PowerPoint presentation visuals. You can create a graph of purchasers' ratings. This helps your organization to measure the productivity level. Therefore, download this ready-to-use ERP PowerPoint presentation deck and value the reviews of your users. You have improved upon your ability to communicate. Demonstrate your skills with our Customer Service Excellence Powerpoint Presentation Slides.

Enhance your business skills by using this Customer Service Excellence PowerPoint Presentation Slides. With the help of the..

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PowerPoint presentation slides

Presenting this set of slides with name - Customer Service Excellence Powerpoint Presentation Slides. We bring to you to the point topic specific slides with apt research and understanding. Putting forth our PPT deck comprises of sixteen slides. Our tailor made Customer Service Excellence Powerpoint Presentation Slides editable presentation deck assists planners to segment and expound the topic with brevity. We provide a ready to use deck with all sorts of relevant topics subtopics templates, charts and graphs, overviews, analysis templates. Outline all the important aspects without any hassle. Can be converted into various formats like PDF, JPG, and PNG. It is available in both standard and widescreen.

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• Business Slides , Flat Designs , Concepts and Shapes , Complete Decks , All Decks , Customer Service , General , Customer Service
• Customer Service Excellence ,
• Service Innovation Management ,
• Service Excellence Model

Content of this Powerpoint Presentation

In research after research, customer service has emerged as the key area that makes or breaks businesses. Yet, there appears to be resistance to expanding this division or using it to help customers get over any hesitation in using products and services.

Excellent service is linked to both customer perception and customer expectation. Service excellence is a step-by-step process and our template explains it well here.    

Disney and Apple are two major examples of global corporations taking customer service as a revenue center, and setting new benchmarks in the field. For instance, Disney’s HEARD framework ensures that customers are always their first priority in terms of level and quality of service. 

Customer satisfaction and repeat purchases are the end-result, when customer service excellence. 

At SlideTeam, we recognize the importance of spreading the word about customer service excellence to all stakeholders, and ensure implementation. Hence, we have curated templates that incorporate all tenets and principles of customer service excellence onto a complete deck. 

Delivering excellent customer service requires a process to create an impact. Find the DNA of the process here. 

The idea is to ensure the business saves time, money it would have otherwise spent on creating a PPT Presentation. You also want to avoid the tedium for your employees and want them to focus on actual customer service excellence implementation next. 

Even better, each of the templates is 100% editable and customizable, meaning that you get the starting point, the structure of how to design the presentation. You also get the capability to tailor each presentation to the unique audience profile you want to address. 

Let’s explore!

Template 1 Customer Service Excellence Understanding What Goes into The Creation of this Culture  

Use this slide to list key ways in which businesses can achieve customer service excellence. This Table of Contents PPT Template provides as the first prescription and understanding of responses to bad and good customer service. Then, the slide depicts preferred communication channels for world-class service and building a service excellence pyramid. 

Template 2 Response to bad and good service from customers 

Customer service cuts both ways, be it excellence or bad levels of execution from a business. This PPT Template showcases how bad service leads to the customer not conducting business, while also warning friends and family to an equal degree. Good service leads to continued business and additional customers. Other behaviors include negative or positive online reviews and corresponding responses to surveys. The idea is to pledge to provide only good service as part of customer excellence. Bad service is costly in terms of increasing the customer acquisition cost. 

Template 3 Building a Service Excellence Pyramid for Customers 

This PPT Template showcases how businesses can go from just meeting customer expectations to creating customer joy through surprisingly excellent and warm service. The four-level service excellence pyramid in the slide depicts core value and proposition at the lowest level, in the absence of which businesses cannot expect customers to come to them. Complaint management, individual service, and surprising service are the following three levels. The aim is to ensure memorable service with attention to detail. 

Template 4 Service Excellence Model in Customer Service

Achieving customer delight is the goal of businesses and this requires the fusion of operational, strategic, innovation and cultural parameters. This PPT Template showcases the action points to be taken to ensure synergies and complete the circle of nine actionable steps that go into outstanding customer experiences. It starts with better designing and documentation of customer experience. Its culmination is into the use of performance indicators and metrics across all departments vis-a-vis customer focus.  

Template 5 Key Ways to Achieve Customer Service Excellence 

These are the six golden tactics or actions of customer service that create excellent customer service. Initially, the focus has to be to ensure successful measuring of service quality to continually improve customer service. Once this is done, it has to be maintained at a consistently good level, with all customer-facing professionals equipped with relevant knowledge. Finally, going beyond the basic level of service has to be a mantra ingrained across all your customer service professionals. 

Template 6 Preferred Communication Channels for Customer Service 

With the customer categorized into major categories, such as millennials, GenX and baby-boomers, use this PPT Template to study which channel of communication they are most comfortable with. For instance, for someone not wanting to hold the phone, email is the preferred mode for customer service executives. This slide covers at least six channels for businesses and the bar graph gives a clear picture of which customer should be contacted on what platform.    

Template 7 Meeting Expectations and Avoiding Pitfalls in Customer Service 

This slide on customer service excellence speaks about avoiding pitfalls and meeting expectations of the users of your products and services. Here, offering consistent channel experience is the key. In any case, should your processes ask the customer to repeat the same thing, first on phone, then on email and so on. Proactive engagement to resolve the issue needs to be adopted with care, and packaged as such. A common pitfall to avoid is the use of too much technology, when a simple call would suffix. 

NO CUSTOMER, NO BUSINESS

When you have customers liking your company, then is the time to be at your best, and ensure these never go away. It costs nearly double to acquire a new customer than to retain those happy ones, with little gifts of your appreciation. These may be coupons, a dinner or anything, but prove your sensitivity to customer needs and your desire to have them happy. Demonstrate this attitude with customer service and see the business get on the fast-track to growth and profitability. 

PS Get hold of the best-in-class customer service excellence model here.

Customer service excellence powerpoint presentation slides with all 16 slides:

Our Customer Service Excellence Powerpoint Presentation Slides aid digestion. Your advice will go down easier.

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22 Impactful Customer Service Survey Questions to Ask in 2024

When it comes to understanding your customers' perception of your brand, there is arguably nothing as powerful as a well-crafted customer service survey. Running these surveys regularly enables you to engage directly with your customers and gain insights into their experiences, which will then provide valuable data to assist in improving your products, services, and overall operations.

In this guide, we'll provide a list of questions you might want to include in your customer surveys and why, and we’ll share tips on best practices for requesting customer feedback. Additionally, you'll learn how to interpret and use those results to drive improvement and growth.

What are customer service surveys?

Customer service surveys are essentially check-ins with your customers. Imagine being able to conduct a one-on-one conversation with each customer — these surveys are a time-efficient way of doing that. They're designed to gather meaningful feedback on your customers' experiences with your service or product, often resulting in actionable data that you can put to work right away.

Integrating customer service surveys into your brand’s strategy can be a powerful gauge of customer needs and satisfaction. The insights gained help you make informed decisions, whether that’s enhancing your product, streamlining your service, or reshaping the customer journey. They're not just about collecting data; they're a way to show your customers that you're actively listening and willing to make changes that matter to them.

Understanding common customer service survey terms

If you’re new to customer service surveys, you're going to encounter a variety of terms. Let's explore some of these terms.

CES (customer effort score): This measures the effort your customers have to go through to do something, like getting an issue resolved or finding a product on your website. The easier, the better.

CSAT (customer satisfaction score): This is the go-to indicator of how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction or with your service overall. High CSAT scores are your aim here.

NPS (Net Promoter Score): This helps identify how many of your customers are fans (promoters) and how many are less enthused (detractors), calculated by asking how likely they are to recommend your product or service.

Dropout rate: This is the percentage of respondents who start but don't finish your survey. You want this to be low, so always strive for engaging and concise surveys.

Feasibility: This considers how practical your survey is. Can the questions be easily understood? Is the survey an appropriate length? Feasibility ensures your survey is as respondent-friendly as possible.

Explicit/implicit: Explicit feedback is direct — your customer specifically says what they liked or didn't like. Implicit feedback is read between the lines, derived from behavior or choices.

GIGO (garbage in, garbage out): Simply put, the quality of your survey's outcomes depends on the quality of what you put into it. This includes your survey design, question clarity, and answer options.

Incompletes: Surveys that aren’t finished fall into this category. Tracking and minimizing incompletes is crucial to maximizing the feedback you collect.

Margin of error/confidence interval: This statistical term represents the degree to which your survey results could differ from the overall population's feelings. Smaller margins of error indicate more confidence in your survey's representation of your customer base.

Population: This is the group you're ultimately interested in learning about. In the case of a customer service survey, your population is likely all your customers or a specific segment of them.

Psychographics: While demographics tell you who your customer is, psychographics tell you why they buy. This might include personal beliefs, values, and motivators.

Quantitative/qualitative: Quantitative data gives you the numbers like how many, how much, and how often. Qualitative data gives you the narrative — thoughts, stories, and reasons behind behaviors.

Response rate: This is the portion of people who completed your survey out of those who were asked. The higher the rate, the more solid the data you can glean from your survey.

Sample: This is the part of your customer population that’s selected to represent the whole in your survey. The key is to ensure that your sample matches the diversity of your entire customer base for accurate feedback.

Recommended Reading

How to Improve Customer Loyalty With Customer Effort Score

Why Customer Satisfaction is Important for Your Business

An Overview of NPS for Customer Service Teams

The benefits of conducting customer service surveys.

Understanding your customers' needs and experiences is like having a road map for your business's journey toward improvement and success. Conducting customer service surveys is a crucial step in gathering this essential feedback. Let's take a look at two key reasons why these surveys are so important and how they can provide valuable insights for product and process improvement.

Product and process improvement

Feedback is the cornerstone of growth for any business. It serves as a mirror, reflecting not only the strengths of your products or services but also areas that need enhancement. By actively seeking feedback through customer service surveys, you're telling your customers that their opinions matter, fostering a sense of value and loyalty. This process allows you to identify specific aspects of your product or service that customers are happy with and those that may require adjustments.

Moreover, in today’s fast-paced market, the ability to quickly adapt and refine your offerings based on customer feedback can set you apart from competitors. It encourages continuous improvement, ensuring that your product or service evolves in alignment with customer expectations and emerging trends. This proactive approach can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately contributing to your business's long-term success.

Valuable customer insights

Customer service surveys offer a direct line to your customers’ thoughts and feelings about their experiences with your company. They can uncover not just superficial reactions but deep insights into how your products or services are actually being used, perceived, and valued. These surveys can provide quantitative data that highlight trends and patterns as well as qualitative feedback that offers deeper understanding into customer sentiments.

Furthermore, the structured nature of surveys allows you to ask targeted questions that address specific areas of your business operations. This can range from product features and usability to customer support and overall satisfaction . By analyzing the responses, you can pinpoint exactly where your business excels and where there is room for improvement. This level of insight is invaluable in shaping decision-making processes and strategic planning.

22 customer service survey questions to ask

Customer survey questions can be categorized based on their purpose, the nature of the data they seek to collect, and the way they engage respondents. We recommend creating a customer service survey template for each type of feedback you need. Here’s a list of customer survey questions broken down into five types to help you get started.

Customer satisfaction survey questions

Customer satisfaction questions are used to measure how well a company's product or service meets, exceeds, or falls short of customer expectations. They offer direct insight into what's working well and what areas may require improvement. These questions can show the likelihood of repeat business, the potential for positive word-of-mouth promotion, and serve as early indicators of market trends.

By regularly assessing customer satisfaction using ratings and yes or no customer service survey questions, businesses maintain a customer-centric approach, which helps in building loyalty and long-term relationships. Additionally, this feedback can be used to benchmark performance over time or against competitors.

How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the product/service you received? (Scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being very unsatisfied and 10 being very satisfied.)

Considering your complete experience with our company, how likely are you to recommend our products or services to a friend or colleague? (NPS surverys run on a scale from 0 to 10.)

What did you like most about your experience with our product/service?

Was our product/service able to meet your needs effectively? (Yes/No; If no, please explain.)

What, if anything, would you change about our product/service to better meet your needs?

Product/service usage questions

Product/service usage questions enable you to understand how customers are actually interacting with your products or services. This makes it possible to identify which features are most popular and which may require more attention or improvement.

Understanding usage patterns also aids in product development and innovation, as real customer data can be used to prioritize which new features or changes might be most impactful.

How often do you use our product or service? (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Rarely)

Which features of our product/service do you use the most?

In what context or situation do you most commonly use our product/service?

Did you find our product/service user-friendly when you first started using it? (Yes/No; If no, what was difficult?)

Compared to our competitors, how do you rate our product in terms of usability? (Better, About the same, Worse; Please explain.)

Customer effort score (CES) questions

Customer effort score questions measure the ease with which customers can achieve their goals when interacting with your product or service. Lower effort typically indicates higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repurchase intention.

CES feedback can be pivotal for streamlining processes, reducing customer pain points, and ensuring that the provided solutions are user-friendly. By focusing on reducing customer effort, you can not only enhance your customer service but also differentiate your company in a competitive market.

When you contacted us for support, how easy was it to interact with our customer support team? (Very difficult, Somewhat difficult, Neutral, Somewhat easy, Very easy)

After purchasing, how easy was it to set up and start using the product? (Very difficult, Somewhat difficult, Neutral, Somewhat easy, Very easy)

When you contacted us for support, did we resolve your issue promptly and with minimal effort on your part? (Strongly agree, Somewhat agree, Neutral, Somewhat disagree, Strongly disagree)

Customer expectations and desires questions

Asking customers about their expectations and desires enables you to align product offerings with customer needs. You can use this feedback to refine your value proposition, ensuring that marketing and communication strategies set accurate customer expectations.

Understanding customer desires can also drive innovation and help prioritize the development of new features, services, or products. By keeping the customer's voice at the center of development, you can increase the likelihood of market acceptance and continued engagement.

Before purchasing our product/service, what was your top expectation, and did we meet it?

What additional features would you like to see in our product/service in the future?

How well does our product/service align with what was promised in our marketing or advertising? (Not at all, Somewhat, Very well; Please provide more detail.)

What other services or products do you wish our company offered?

Post-purchase feedback questions

Post-purchase feedback questions provide an understanding of the customer journey after the point of sale. This feedback is great for assessing the overall buying experience, identifying any roadblocks in the purchase process, and improving after-sales support.

Collecting post-purchase insights can also show the perceived value of the product or service, which enables you to maintain competitive pricing and offers. This feedback can also help you develop loyalty-building opportunities and effective customer retention strategies.

What motivated you to choose our product/service over our competitors?

How smooth was the purchasing process on our website or in our store? (Very difficult, Somewhat difficult, Neutral, Somewhat easy, Very easy)

If you experienced any issues with your product/service after purchase, were they addressed efficiently? (Yes/No; If no, please provide more detail.)

How satisfied are you with the after-sales support you received? (Very unsatisfied, Unsatisfied, Neutral, Satisfied, Very satisfied)

Did you find our product/service to be a good value for your money? (Yes/No; If no, why not?)

Best practices for requesting customer feedback

Knowing what to ask is only part of the customer survey equation. Here are some best practices and strategies for developing a beneficial customer service survey process.

Choose the right time to ask

Timing can be everything. Reach out for feedback when the experience is fresh in the customer's mind, whether it's immediately after a purchase, after an interaction with customer service, or at the end of a significant project. This ensures that the feedback is both reflective of the customer’s true experience and includes details that can guide improvements.

Customer service tools like Help Scout’s microsurveys are a great way to gather customer insights without being intrusive. This tool lets you reach out for feedback at specific points in the customer journey, which means you can gather feedback while the customer’s experience is top of mind.

Keep it simple

The key to getting customers to respond is making it as easy as possible for them. Long surveys can be overwhelming, so keep questions clear, concise, and relevant. It’s about striking the right balance between getting the information you need and respecting the customer’s time and effort.

Be specific with your questions

Vague questions lead to vague answers. Instead of asking if they're happy with your service, pinpoint aspects you want feedback on, like the checkout process, product range, or customer support.

Follow up on feedback

Customers who take the time to provide feedback are engaged in your brand, and they’ll appreciate knowing that their voice is heard. A simple acknowledgment can go a long way toward fostering trust with your customer base.

How to use survey results

Gathering feedback from your customers is like striking gold, but striking gold is only the first step. Whether through direct changes based on CSAT feedback, strategic shifts informed by report trends, or internal education spurred by documentation insights, each step you take based on feedback is a step toward a more customer-centric business model.

Here’s how you can apply customer feedback effectively.

Identify patterns and trends: Look beyond individual comments and identify recurring themes or concerns. These patterns can highlight areas in need of improvement or potential opportunities you might not have considered.

Prioritize action based on feedback: Not all feedback will require immediate action, but some might highlight critical issues. Use customer feedback to prioritize changes that will have the most significant impact on customer satisfaction and business success.

Share insights across teams: Feedback shouldn't be siloed within the customer service team. Sharing customer insights across departments ensures that everyone understands customer needs and how they can contribute to meeting those needs.

Track changes and outcomes: After implementing changes based on feedback, track the outcomes. This will help you understand the impact of your actions and guide future decisions.

There are several Help Scout reporting features that make the process of deciphering customer feedback a whole lot easier.

Happiness report: This report can give you a high-level view of customer satisfaction over time. Use it to identify trends in satisfaction and correlate them with specific actions or changes within your business.

Microsurvey reports: Microsurveys can yield specific insights into various aspects of your customer experience. Analyzing the results can help you understand customer sentiment on new features, customer service interactions, and more. Pay attention to changes in responses after implementing new processes or updates.

Docs article reports: If you use customer self-service options like a knowledge base , understanding which articles are helping (or confusing) your customers can be incredibly valuable. These reports can inform you which areas of your product or service need clearer documentation or highlight topics that may require more in-depth customer education.

Leveraging customer service surveys for growth

For customer service and marketing teams, few things are as precious as the voice of your customers. CSAT surveys, microsurveys, and feedback reports all play crucial roles in this process.

Help Scout's customer feedback tools are designed to seamlessly integrate into your interactions, be it via email, chat, or docs . While you create remarkable experiences for your customers, these tools work silently in the background, gathering valuable insights without interrupting the customer journey. 

Whether it’s the simplicity and directness of CSAT surveys, the timeliness of microsurveys, or the impactful insights from different reports, Help Scout's functionalities are designed to help you understand your customers better.

Sign up for a free trial of Help Scout today, and start having better conversations with your customers.

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Jacinda santora.

Jacinda Santora combines marketing psychology, strategy development, and strategy execution to deliver customer-centric, data-driven solutions for brand growth. Connect with her on LinkedIn .

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More From Forbes

The most important pillar of customer service.

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All customer service pillars involve some degree of respect.

Megan Jones of Call Centre Helper recently interviewed me about the “Pillars of Customer Service.” In preparation, I did a Google search and asked, “What are the pillars of customer service?”

There are many correct answers. In other words, there are no definitive answers. Some of the information and articles included words and phrases such as:

· Personalization

· Responsiveness

· Integrity

· Knowledge

· Problem-solving skills

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· Communication

· People first

There were many others as well, but one I didn’t see in any of the Google responses was respect . I’m sure some companies have incorporated the word respect into their Pillars of Customer Service; however, the almighty and powerful Google didn’t mention them. I even asked my close friend, ChatGPT, and it didn’t come up with the word respect either. I responded, “I’m surprised none of my Google searches or my query with you didn’t mention the word respect . Maybe I’m on to something.”

ChatGPT came back with a great answer. “Your observation highlights a valuable insight into possibly underserved areas of discussion in customer service. … This could be a compelling topic for your next customer service keynote speech , article or book, offering a unique viewpoint that can resonate deeply with businesses striving to elevate their customer service quality.”

Thank you, ChatGPT!

So, let’s talk about the never-mentioned pillar: respect. First, some definitions.

· Cambridge Dictionary includes “politeness, honor and care shown toward someone or something that is considered important.”

· Merriam-Webster Dictionary includes “high or special regard.”

· Dictionary.com includes “to show regard or consideration for.”

All customer service pillars involve some degree of respect. They all aim at one single idea: to give the customer the best experience possible. In other words, respect their decision to do business with you in all possible ways, and they will respect you as a company or brand, hopefully in the form of repeat business—maybe even loyalty.

Respect is a lofty goal. Unfortunately, the majority of companies and brands don’t deliver on the concept, at least according to the more than 1,000 customers we surveyed for our annual customer service and CX study . Specifically, we asked if customers felt brands and companies respected their time. Why time? Because it’s something that, once it’s gone, can never be recaptured. It’s precious to many and one of the easiest ways to show a level of respect—or in some cases—a lack of respect. The results of the survey were telling:

61% of customers don’t think companies or brands respect their time .

This is not the answer most of us would hope for. There are many ways customers feel they are disrespected. We asked them what would likely cause them to switch to a different company or brand.

· More than half (51%) are likely to switch companies or leave a brand because they had to wait too long on hold. How long someone is willing to wait is an individual preference, so maybe this should be the next question on your customer satisfaction survey: How long are you willing to wait before you become frustrated when holding to talk to a customer service or sales agent? If a bad customer service experience includes the customer feeling disrespected for any reason, don’t be surprised if they don’t come back.

· Even more—60% of customers—are likely to switch companies or leave a brand because the company didn’t respond fast enough. How fast is fast enough? If a customer wanted to wait six hours for an answer to their question, they would have waited six hours to ask it. Once again, time is an opportunity to show respect (or disrespect).

· And 75% of customers are likely to switch companies or leave a brand because the company didn’t respond at all. This sends a message that the company doesn’t respect the customer at all.

Respecting a customer’s time is just one way to show respect. Kindness, being proactive and recognizing and appreciating a customer for their business are just a few more ways—of many—to show respect.

Here’s a homework assignment. Sit down with your team and ask two questions:

1. How do we show our customers we respect them?

2. Are we doing anything that would show our customers we don’t respect them—even if that’s not our intention?

These two questions could give you answers and ideas that will enhance your relationship with your customers by proving your respect and appreciation for them.

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