The Inside Customer Service blog features tips, trends, and analysis that can help you unlock your customer service team's hidden potential. Managers often request it for customer service training, but participants don't like it.
Here are just a few comments from a discussion on LinkedIn Live :. It would be one thing if role playing was a highly effective customer service training technique. It's not. I'm a customer service trainer who has trained thousands of employees, and I can tell role playing doesn't work. There are alternatives that improve training without making your participants feel uncomfortable.
Here are four that your participants will like better. Let's take a moment to cover why role playing doesn't work for customer service training. As a trainer, I've used role playing in the past and have seen its limitations. Role playing slows down learning. That's because a role play scenario requires participants to split their attention between two tasks. One is the skill they are trying to practice and the other is the character they are playing. Here's an old video from the archive that shows what happens when people try to do more than one thing at once:.
What can you do instead? Here are four techniques that work much better. This option narrows your focus to one specific skill. Participants can practice the skill in a realistic manner without having to pretend to be a character. This option works well for skills that are easily isolated. For example:. You can use it to help your team practice using appropriate tone and body language. The video includes an explanation of how to use the skill. There are demonstrations at and in the video to illustrate what the technique looks like in action.
After watching the video, have your team practice using positive tone and body language while responding to typical customer requests. A walk-through is like a role play scenario played at half-speed without the unnatural acting.
