Why is it Important to Train Customer Service Staff? – with Kate Nasser

It is a privilege of mine to share a segment of a conversation I had with Kate Nasser, the People Skills Coach, about customer service training. In this portion, we discuss the question “why is it important to train customer service staff?” If you’d like to watch the entire chat, click here.


Let’s go ahead and get started. The first question seems like an obvious one, but I’m the marketing guy here, so I do a lot of research in Google and actually, a lot of people are doing searches for “why is it important to train customer service staff” and things like that, 0r typing into Google, “importance of customer service training” and that kind of thing.

So, Kate, why don’t you to tell us, you know, from your perspective, why is that important to train people on customer service and teamwork and things like that?


You know, it’s actually a very, very good question. A lot of people – a lot of leaders – sometimes think that it’s just in-born, you know, it’s just answer questions and deliver service, so what’s the big deal?

It all comes down to how you define customer service. So, I’m going to offer you a definition of customer service and from the definition, I think it becomes pretty apparent why people would need training.

Customer service, in my definition, is knowledge delivered with care to make like easier for the customer.

So, it’s not just the knowledge that you give or the services that you’re providing or whatever. It’s that have to do it with care to make life easier for the customer. Now, when you stop and think about that – how many kinds of people and expectations are there in the world?

Everyone defines it differently, but it is not – leaders say “well, wait a minute, then we could never train because it would be totally random and totally like chaos” and I say, no no, not really, because once I train people for example, on how to spot the four personality types. Once you can spot someone’s personality type, you can adapt to it and now you understand their definition of “what is easy.” If you don’t have a clue, you tend to treat everybody else the way you want to be treated.

That’s the old rule right? “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” Okay, so much for the golden rule, well that works just fine if everybody is just like you. It’s not true, right?

Treat people the way they want to be treated in order to have them as loyal customers. So to do that takes training, and that’s just one of many reasons. That’s the most obvious when people say “isn’t it common sense to treat people nicely?” I say well, first of all, people define nicely differently and number two, no, it’s not common sense because if were common sense, everybody would be doing it.


Absolutely, and even just to think about, even outside of customer service, how that principle affects you know, your spouse and your kids.


Exactly! Now you know why I don’t do just customer service.

It’s just life! So, you have to teach people how to adapt, and first of all, they have to care. If you have reps that don’t give a doodle about your customers, then I generally look at what’s going on inside the business to see what’s going on in the company that the reps don’t care.

And then, you sort of re-inspire the caring. And then teach time how. How to do it. How to step outside of your own perspective. What if you woke up this morning and you had a really bad night. Maybe last night, you only got two hours of sleep or you drove to work this morning and you had a flat tire. Now, you have to get on the phones and be caring. How do you do that?

How do you set aside your own stressors for that three minutes or five minutes or ten minutes that you’re on the call or if you’re face-to-face, how you put that aside and focus on the customer? That takes training.

Just like you would train anyone who needs ultimate focus, you know, how they’ll trained for example airline pilots, you know, to focus on just the data and what they’re doing as opposed to all these other things.

All of that goes into customer service training and most people have no idea they just think I tell them to smile and be nice.

If you haven’t already, take a look at how companies are using Lessonly to train their customer service teams here.
Image source: Giphy.

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