Customer Service Training Software: Factors & Tools to Consider
The right customer service training software can help you onboard agents faster, track their learning progress, and ensure they always have access to relevant information for resolving client issues quickly.
However, most traditional tools for delivering training (called learning management systems or LMS) aren’t built specifically for customer-facing roles, which means:
- It’s difficult and time-consuming to create and deliver educational content. As a result, courses, training, and other e-learning materials are released way too slowly for agents who must keep up with evolving products and solve problems quickly.
- There’s usually no short, practical training for solving specific client problems on the spot. In most cases, agents need practical details on dealing with cases that pop up regularly. If all they have at their disposal is hour-long tutorials or presentations, their response and resolution times can take a hit, leading to a poor customer experience.
- There’s no way to evaluate how agents will use the training information when talking to customers. Traditional LMSs only let you see if an agent completed the necessary training, without showing you how they’d do in a real-life scenario.
- You can’t easily compare agents’ and teams’ training progress in one place. With most software, you’ll have to pull up each reps’ progress and scores individually.
A better way to train and educate your customer service teams is to get software that’s specifically built for that purpose.
In this article, we’ll show you how Brainshark — a Bigtincan company and our training and coaching solution for customer-facing teams — can help you solve these four issues.
We’ll also go over three other customer service training software options to consider. Here are the tools we’ll cover in this article:
Book a demo to see how Brainshark can help you easily create and deliver training to your customer service agents, so they can get onboarded faster, keep up with the latest product updates, and provide excellent customer service.
#1. Brainshark
Let anyone create interactive courses quickly with our simple content authoring tool
Traditional LMSs often require advanced technical skills to create and deliver educational content. That’s why they’re usually operated by a specialized team outside of customer service (such as HR or a design team).
This creates two big issues when training your agents: First, you need to go back and forth with the team creating the training to tell them what you need, provide feedback, and, finally, approve the training materials. Second, when other teams also need new training materials to be created, you’ll enter a queue and it may be months before the team gets to your training.
This is typically unacceptable for agents on the frontline since they need to be updated on the latest product releases, frequent client problems, and company policies right away to resolve issues whenever they come up.
Brainshark lets anyone create training videos in less than 10 minutes so you can provide the training agents need, right when they need it.
Brainshark also lets you add elements of interactivity to keep agents engaged, including polls, quizzes, questions, and embedded hyperlinks — without any advanced technical skills.
Besides creating educational content, you can narrate training materials. This capability can help you focus agents’ attention on specific parts of the training (like product features or important client issues) to make sure they aren’t overlooked.
For example, say you have an onboarding presentation that goes over your company’s product in detail. You can use narration to point out features or capabilities that clients often struggle with, resulting in customer support tickets. Or, you could upload examples of an email or chat communication where an agent did an excellent job of resolving a customers’ problem. Then, through narration, you can point out why that is and what other agents can learn from the example.
With such pointers, agents are better prepared to handle issues. Plus, they’re more engaged throughout their training, as switching between slides without any context can get tedious.
Once your training materials (videos, presentations, documents, etc.) are created, agents can go through all of them in their Brainshark account.
They can also access it online or offline and through almost any mobile device.
Make short, practical training available from your CRM
Long training materials tend to lose the learner’s attention. When it comes to customer service training, they’re also impractical, since in their day-to-day activities agents mostly need details on how to solve specific client issues. Searching for such details in hour-long presentations or documents slows agents down and hurts their response and resolution times.
With Brainshark, you can make short-form training, also called “just-in-time” microlearning, available from the CRM your agents use every day.
Thanks to the Brainshark Integration Engine, you can integrate Brainshark with your CRM, so that agents don’t have to jump between different tools every time they need to watch a training video. Instead, they can access these practical training materials right before client calls or when they need to resolve a problem on the spot, which helps improve resolution times.
Here are a few examples where short-form training content can be extremely useful:
- You can create videos explaining common customer issues that result in support tickets, and show how to resolve them. Agents usually have similar customer interactions daily, so having quick access to answers and problem solutions is essential for providing great customer service.
- You can produce regular product updates, showing what new features were added, which bugs were fixed, and how changes might affect customers. Doing this ensures agents are up-to-date and able to consistently provide good customer service.
- You can create crisis training. Company or market-wide events can lead to huge volumes of customer questions, which agents are on the receiving end of. In these cases, it’s essential to quickly provide an overview of the situations as well as practical guidelines for what your support team should do.
Simulate real-world scenarios with interactive, AI-powered coaching
With most traditional LMSs, you can only assign training to specific agents and then see if and when they’ve completed it. The problem with this method is that it only tells you whether an agent watched videos or answered some questions, without showing you how they’d do when resolving a client issue in real-life.
To counteract this problem, teams usually have senior agents work alongside new employees until they feel they’re ready to work on their own. While this method can be useful, it’s also time-consuming, as it takes up two people’s time instead of one and blocks experienced agents from working on other tasks.
And again, you can’t verify whether an agent has the necessary skills before a client call. You can only observe how they handle the situation and discuss any mistakes they made afterward.
For a better way to assess your agents’ skills, Brainshark’s machine analysis and scoring lets you simulate real-world scenarios and determine how agents deal with them.
Here’s an example of how this process works:
First, you can describe a common customer question agents are likely to face during client calls. Then, you ask them to submit a recording of themselves answering the question. Each answer is automatically analyzed by our AI-powered engine to gather data about the agents’ response and communication skills, including:
- What filler words did the agent use? And how often?
- Did the agent include and avoid specific words that should’ve been included or avoided (e.g., relevant product updates, old feature names, references to outdated knowledge base documentation, etc.)?
- Which emotions did their facial expressions portray?
- How fast were they talking and was their message clear, based on the level of speech they used?
This coaching method is useful for both managers and agents.
On the one hand, managers can evaluate answers much faster because our machine analysis does most of the evaluation for them.
On the other hand, call center agents and others who have live meetings with customers can practice their product knowledge, problem-solving and soft skills, so they feel more confident in real-life scenarios.
Before submitting their response to their manager, agents can submit their recordings to other team members, who can leave feedback and suggestions for improvement. This is also beneficial for their managers since they’ll receive a more polished version and likely won’t have to provide as much feedback.
Track training progress, identify skill gaps and keep agents motivated during their training
A big part of customer service managers’ jobs is keeping track of agents’ training progress and identifying skill gaps before they impact performance.
Managers often start this process by comparing agents or entire teams to each other and answering questions like:
- Who’s performing really well?
- What training programs have they completed and what scores did they get?
- Were agents who performed below expectations assigned the correct skills training? If they were, have they completed it and how did they score?
Answering these questions with a traditional LMS is a tedious and time-consuming process. You have to go back and forth between the LMS and CRM, pull up agent profiles individually, and take notes on each agent. And if you want to compare all agents’ training progress and scores at a glance, you have to put the information in a spreadsheet, which adds another layer to an already clumsy process.
With Brainshark’s Readiness Scorecards, you can track individual agents’ training, see which courses they’ve completed, and compare their progress to other agents.
And, if you want to learn more about a specific agent, you can always jump into their profile. There, you can see how many activities they’ve completed overall, which was the last one, their average scores, and other valuable details.
This can help you quickly identify knowledge gaps and assign relevant training to agents.
Additionally, Brainshark can pull performance data directly from Salesforce, so you can see agents’ training progress and their performance KPIs in one detailed view.
Note: You can read this article to learn more about sales performance management software.
From an agents’ point of view, everyone has a Progress Tracker, where they can see completed courses, assignments awaiting completion, due dates, and more.
After completing a specific number of courses, agents get learning badges. These are displayed next to each agent’s username and can be made public for everyone to see so that each agent has a sense of accomplishment during their training.
Another thing managers can do to keep agents motivated is to package several courses together and make it so that agents receive certificates upon completion. We have a few pre-made certificatetemplates, but you can also create a custom certificate from a PowerPoint slide.
If you want to see how Brainshark can help your client-facing teams onboard faster, provide effective customer service, and increase customer satisfaction, book a demo with our team.
#2. Lessonly
Lessonly is a training, enablement, and coaching software. They were acquired by Seismic in 2021, but continue to exist as a standalone software solution as of 2022.
Lessonly has three products that help with onboarding and training customer service representatives, as well as sales professionals:
- Learn, which makes it easier to create customer service courses and online training materials.
- Practice, which helps agents rehearse sales pitches or client interactions.
- Skills, which helps assess the performance of sales reps and provide feedback for their work.
The company also offers professional strategic and managed services, where Lessonly experts provide best practices and help optimize customers’ accounts and training experience.
#3. iSpring
iSpring offers two different products:
- iSpring Suite — a toolkit for creating customer support training courses and adding interactive elements to them with the help of iSpring’s template library. These can be PowerPoint presentations, videos, and other types of tutorials.
- iSpring Learn — an LMS for uploading and managing learning materials, as well as assigning them to learners.
The company focuses on simplicity for both products, as iSpring Suite makes it easy to create courses, while iSpring Learn aims to reduce the burden of training management by automating things like deadline tracking and reminders.
#4. Articulate
Similar to our previous entry, Articulate also has two offerings — Articulate 360 and Rise.
The Articulate 360 platform is focused entirely on helping users build online learning materials, through various content creation tools and an extensive library of assets and templates.
Articulate’s other product — Rise — is their all-in-one system for creating and managing training courses. The biggest difference between both offerings is that Rise acts as a complete LMS (meaning it also lets users manage content and track progress), while Articulate 360 only enables content creation.
Help your agents onboard faster, learn continuously, and improve their customer service skills with Brainshark
With Brainshark, you can create and distribute engaging and practical training to your agents, while tracking their progress and helping them stay motivated. Book a Brainshark demo now to see how our platform can help your customer service teams.