Top Online Courses You Could Take to Improve Customer Interaction
Customer interactions can make or break your brand. The right interactions can lead to rave reviews and recommendations, but the wrong ones can lead to the exact opposite: angry customers who might never want to interact with you again. Unfortunately, they’ll probably also tell their friends about their negative interactions. And you might not even know it was a negative reaction because 96% of unhappy customers1 won’t complain directly to you.
Without the right training and skills, you could be missing out on tips and tricks that can take your customer relationships truly impactful. Customer service training is much more accessible today than it used to be. Instead of having to gather your team for a training conference or buy a training DVD, you can simply access courses online and get all the information you need.
Here are five top online courses that cover different aspects of customer service:
1. Learn How to Deal with Upset Customers
Duration: Three and a half minutes
Fee: Free of cost
It’s no secret that if you’re in business, you’ll have to deal with difficult clients and customers. And if you don’t know how to deal with them correctly, you have a lot to lose. Studies show that 52% of customers2 will tell their friends and family about a negative experience, and a whopping 40% of customers will cease doing business with a company completely after an unpleasant encounter.
“How to deal with difficult customers” with Raghav Viswanathan of Freshdesk Academy is a perfect course for learning to deal with frustrated customers effectively.
This course covers ways to neutralize negative customer situations and can help you learn how to deal with people who may be aggressive, abusive, unreasonable, or just plain stressed.
All of the information is presented in nine steps:
- Show them you understand
- Be quick to apologize
- Set expectations
- Don’t play the blame game
- Escalate, it’s okay
- Change agents
- Establish equality
- Train yourself
- Face it head-on
This video course also includes resources for those who have completed the course. For example, it includes a discussion prompt where Freshdesk Academy members can share their experiences.
2. Learn How to Turn your Support Team into a Secondary Sales Channel
Duration: One hour
Fee: $12.99
Consumers don’t like blatant advertisements. So when you’re trying to sell to them, they don’t necessarily want it to feel like you are. Data shows that 64% of consumers think that advertisements are annoying or intrusive, while 54% of consumers say that advertisements disturb the work they’re doing. That’s why you’ve got to figure out alternative ways to sell more to them without advertising.
By watching this course, you will learn and master the strategies, psychology, systems, processes, and people required to create a well-rounded customer experience. The goal of this is to create brand loyalty and boost word of mouth sales via recommendations. Think ratings, here. When shopping online, do you buy from companies with negative reviews, or positive ones?
Positive reviews are just one example of a valuable recommendation that can lead to increased sales. In fact, studies show that 93% of consumers3 claim that they either always, regularly, or occasionally read online reviews to decide whether a business is good or bad – and this influences their decision to purchase.
By valuing continuous improvement, you’ll be able to grow your business organically, lower marketing costs, and drive profits. This course drives home the idea that instead of spending a ton of money on marketing trying to attract new customers, you can focus on your improving your support experience to boost profits organically. By creating a great customer experience, you will retain existing customers and attract new ones from all of the raving recommendations that existing customers hand out about you.
The real-world examples and interactive quizzes in this course will give you all the tools you need to understand what your customers truly want from you.
3. Customer Service Mastery: Delight Every Customer
Duration: Two hours and twelve minutes
Fee: Free of cost with a Skillshare trial
It’s no secret that quality digital customer service is important. This course by Chris Croft will help you sprinkle the right amount of delight into every customer interaction, and thereby improve the quality of support provided. It goes without saying that providing top-notch customer service positively impacts customer loyalty and customer retention.
With this course, you will learn:
– the foundation of customer service
– different ways to stand out from your customers
– differences between basic and delightful customer experiences
– ten things to keep in mind while supporting customers
– thirty ideas to generate delightful customer experiences.
This course has something for everyone in customer support – it covers a range of topics right from providing incredible service even with zero industry experience to turning every customer into a lifelong fan.
4. Learn How to Actively Engage Your Customers by Learning About Their Pain Points
Duration: One hour and five minutes long
Fee: $34.99 (one-time fee for lifetime access)
Customer engagement can be tricky, but it is also the key to retaining loyal customers. Customer engagement boosts your chances of selling to an existing customer4 by up to 60%, and repeat customers are easier to sell to with a 65% chance of converting. This is higher than the 13% chance of converting that new prospects have. That means that you can keep retargeting your existing customer base for a steady stream of sales.
Customer engagement is so much more than simply creating a call center or handling complaints. To truly engage with customers, you have to understand them on an emotional level and uncover all of their pain points.
This course by Chuck Wall is just the resource you need to learn how to master customer engagement and move towards customer success.
This course covers important topics such as:
- The customer engagement value chain
- The seven walls separating companies and customers
- Customer insight
- Personas and propositions
- Customer journey mapping
5. Build Customer Loyalty by Truly Understanding Buyers
Duration: Forty-three minutes long
Fee: $25 (per month for an annual unlimited Lynda membership)
Improved customer interactions not only increase customer loyalty, they also help you save money.
How? That is because it costs seven times5 more to acquire one new customer than it does to retain one. Even in today’s digital world, there are several loyal customers – you just have to fight harder to keep them.
Jill Griffin understands that and dives into how you can do exactly that, in this course. By taking this course, you will be introduced to a three-step process required for understanding who your top customers are and how you can keep them loyal to your brand. Here’s a quick overview of the three steps that are covered in detail in the course:
– The first step is understanding that not all customers are equal. You have to understand who the best customers for your business are.
– The second step includes different customer-retention techniques and tips about how to learn from your customers’ different buying behaviors.
– The third step outlines how to implement customer loyalty practices within every level of your company.
Conclusion
By improving the interactions that customers have with your brand, you can boost profits and retain more customers. But sometimes it takes a little bit of training to know exactly how to improve customer interactions. These courses will help you strengthen a variety of skills that are crucial to improving the way you interact with customers such as learning how to handle and prevent situations with angry patrons, delivering delightful customer experiences, and more.
Watch these videos with your team and kick-start the learning process as soon as possible!
Source:
1 – https://www.trackur.com/96-of-unhappy-customers-wont-complain-to-you-but-will-tell-15-friends-infographic
2 – https://www.providesupport.com/blog/cost-poor-customer-service/
3 – https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/local-consumer-review-survey/
4 – https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/marketing-branding/marketing/why-customer-engagement-is-the-growth-hack-for-small-businesses/articleshow/63409665.cms
5 – https://en.promorepublic.com/blog/12-ways-to-get-more-sales/
