Customer care training is such a vital part of any customer service department or call centre’s overall development plan. However rarely is enough time given to real and meaningful role-play sessions. Too many customer care training programmes are designed with the main role-play activity squashed into the end of the programme, just before action plans and when people are tired and thinking about what’s for dinner.
Productive role-plays are so essential to the overall success of customer care training; the following suggestions might provide food for thought:
- Create a safe environment where participants feel confident to have a go and try out what they have just learned. Ideally this starts the minute the programme opens
- Structure the programme for role-plays to finish at least an hour and a half before the end of the programme so there is time for constructive feedback before the close of the day
- Prepare role specific role-play scenarios and ensure an adequate supply for all roles and different levels of participant experience. Avoid having participants using the same role-play scenario as this can create competition
- Try to create an element of the ‘real environment’ in which participants work. Frequently this is only done by replicating the negative and extreme behaviours demonstrated by customers. But a call centre or customer service environment is more than that, try to replicate this in the training room
- Before the programme starts, invite participants to bring along individual props to use during their role-plays to encourage them to get into the right mindset. This is something that actors sometimes do during rehearsals. I have used it for customer care training. One delegate bought his ‘proper’ work shoes as he said wearing them made him feel like he was at work. Another young woman had photographs of her children which usually sat on her workstation whilst she took role-played telephone enquiries
- Trainers, please don’t get involved in playing the customer, you are not there to show off your acting skills and should be observing so you can provide constructive feedback
- Ask delegates playing angry customers to temper the anger. Participants should be able to role-play typical customer related situations before moving onto the extremes
- Involve the whole group – see the blog on train the trainer training about using different techniques for role-play
- Sandwich negative feedback – something positive, something negative, something positive. If the list of negatives is so long, focus on the priorities and explore at a later date other development options
- Always link role-play feedback with actions plans and if working in-house provide an opportunity where delegates may group learn and practice together and provide feedback to each other
By Kasmin Cooney | Righttrack’s Managing Director