27 Free Customer Service & Support Training Resources

When we think about customer support and service teams, we think of reps as the point of contact for that brand -- someone who’s always there to communicate with you and help you with your challenges. And, because of the importance of addressing and resolving customer issues, it’s clear why this team is such a crucial part of any organization.

Customer support representatives have a strong relationship with the customer -- often times, it’s even stronger than their relationship with their sales rep. They have front row seats to customers’ ongoing needs, goals, and success. They’re perfectly positioned to cross-sell, upsell, and resell to maximize customer lifetime value.

To build and maintain a customer support and service team, you need to properly train them. If you need a starting point to build a training program for your team, you can refer to this post as an extensive starting resource for some of the most valuable free customer service training materials available.

Depending upon the extensiveness of the training and vastness of your industry, this training can last anywhere between two and six weeks. There's no benchmark for the duration, so you’ll need to try and see what gives you the best results.

1. Product Training

Most organizations have their own product training resources and documentation. It typically comes in the form of blogs, videos, podcasts, in-person trainings, and new hire orientation, which they share with their customer service trainees when they start at the company.

2. Industry Training

This training will be specific to your brand and to your industry as well. Industry knowledge isn’t something that trainees can master in just a few weeks -- it’s something they’ll have to stay updated about consistently throughout their career. Getting into a practice of reading expert industry blogs and other resources on a regular basis is a must.

Another thing that’s important to keep a tab on over the course of industry training is competitor analysis. Understanding the value propositions of switching to a competitor will help customer service professionals better handle objections and provide them with extensive documentation before losing a customer to churn. 

3. Skill Training

Training your team's customer service skills is the most common training for any organization. Even if you have a good product and industry knowledge, agents can not excel at their work without being trained for the right set of skills.

Below are just a few essential skills are expected of a customer support or service rep:

• Customer relationship building and management
• Clear communication
• Teaching customers
• Empathy
• Patience
• Adaptability
• Active listening

4. Situational Training

Situational training mocks a real customer interaction that employees experience on the job. For example, the HubSpot Support Team performs mock calls during training sessions. An experienced agent will pretend to be a customer and call in with a common question or roadblock. The trainee then attempts to resolve the issue as if it were a normal call.

After the call is complete, the agent pretending to be a customer will review the call. They’ll discuss the trainee's strengths and address skills that can be improved. This process not only exposes trainees to typical customer problems but also provides them with immediate feedback on their tendencies and approach to customer service.

5. Workflow Training

One aspect of customer that’s often overlooked during training is daily workflow. Customer service roles are fast-paced and involve handling multiple tasks at once. Some reps may possess product knowledge as well as communication skills but will struggle to keep pace with customer demand. It’s important to teach trainees to optimize their workflow so that they can consistently perform to the best of their abilities. 

6. Escalation Training

No matter how skilled a trainee is, every customer service rep will experience confrontation. Some trainees may be uncomfortable with the idea of confronting a frustrated or angry customer. However, it’s important to know how to de-escalate a tense situation. Not only will this training help reduce churn, but it will also give your reps more confidence to approach difficult or stressful conversations.

Now that you're familiar with different training components, let's break down how to create a training manual for your customer service team. 

How to Write a Customer Service Training Manual

As your business grows and develops, you’ll need more service reps to meet customer demand. However, hiring more employees means you’ll have to train them to the same quality as your existing team. This is where a manual creates consistency in your training program and ensures every rep is trained in the same set of skills and product knowledge. 

If your team doesn’t have a document like this, below are steps you can take to create a customer service training manual for your business.

1. Consider the customer’s journey.

Customer service training should start with the customer. After all, this role is all about delighting people and creating a personalized customer experience.

Start with considering the customer’s journey. Think about where customers will be when they reach out to your service team. Focus on their needs and goals and how you’ll relay this information to your trainees. By looking at areas where customers face the most roadblocks, you’ll be able to create training that addresses customer needs. 

2. Identify your team’s main objectives.

Once you’ve thought about the customer experience, the next step is to identify your team’s main objectives. These are three to five fundamental goals that your customer service reps will focus on at all times. For example, one objective could be to answer all support calls swiftly and efficiently. 

Now that we’ve made our goal clear, we have to understand the knowledge or skill that’s needed to achieve it. In this case, to answer calls faster we need to teach reps how to be organized and ready on the phone as much as possible. This means we need to focus on workflow training and create exercises that improve a rep’s ability to multi-task. By breaking training down into goals, you’ll provide effective courses that are relevant to your team’s workflow.

3. Develop or adopt training courses. 

At this point, you should have a good feel for the type of training your team will need. Moving forward, you have two options to choose from when selecting training courses. You can either create custom training for your team or you can adopt a course from an external source. The benefit of designing your own is that it can be personalized for your business. However, the tradeoff is that it can take time to create and will constantly need to be tweaked to remain accurate. 

Adopting a training course is more time-efficient and can be easier to integrate with an existing customer service team. While it won’t be customized for your business’s needs, it can be a cost-effective solution for teams looking for fundamental training. At the end of this post, we’ll discuss some online training options you can adopt for your company. 

4. Create practice exercises.

Learning from training courses is a great first step, but to truly master customer service your trainees need to practice what they’ve learned. You can use practice exercises to mimic common problems and put their newfound skills to the test. Just like our HubSpot example above, these exercises will expose agents to real-life situations and prepare them for customer interactions.

5. Break down the importance of daily metrics. 

Before new reps complete training, they should understand daily metrics and why they’re being measured. For starters, this lets reps know what’s expected of them and what they should be working towards each day. But, more importantly, explaining why you’ve chosen these metrics helps trainees understand their value to the organization. If they can see how their performance contributes to the company’s success, they’ll be more motivated to reach their daily goals.

These steps should help you put together a comprehensive training manual for your customer service team. However, as we mentioned above, it may be easier to adopt existing courses rather than creating your own. In the next section, we cut out the middle man and gathered some courses and exercises your team can use to build out its training manual. 

12 Free Customer Service Training Materials to Share with Your Team

There are tons of free training materials that can teach skills to your customer service team. There are blogs, videos, exercises, online courses and much more that you can leverage for your business. If you're not sure where to start, use the list below as baseline content for your training manual.

Customer Service & Support Blog Posts

1. Top 10 Things Not to Say to Angry Customers by Helprace
2. 10 'Must-Have' Skills for Being Awesome at Customer Service by Provide Support
3. How to Onboard and Train New Customer Service Reps by Zendesk
4. How to Nurture Customers During the Long Growth Stage by Totango
5. What Five Years as a Janitor Taught Me About Customer Service by Support Driven
6. Want to Be Successful? Solve Your Customers’ Problems by Shep Hyken
7. Build Your Customer Relationships Around Consistency and Trust by Intercom
8. The Ultimate Guide to Training for Customer Service & Support by HubSpot

When you’re done, read this list for more customer support resources that are applicable to anyone in their career

Customer Service & Support Training Exercises

1. Mock Calls

Mock calls are an excellent way to practice doing the job before actually starting the job. Mock calls involve a new rep and an experienced rep taking turns pretending to be the rep and the customer to run through common scenarios and situations reps might encounter when they’re on the job.

Personality testing can be an effective way to identify new employees’ communication, leadership, and conflict management styles to try to get ahead of and manage conflict with customers before it happens.

3. No ‘No’s Allowed

This is another mutual training exercise where team members role-play being the customer and the customer service rep, and they have to practice addressing issues without being allowed to say no. So, for example, if the issue to role play was a request not allowed by a rep’s software, the new employee would have to practice addressing complaints in a way that didn’t shut down the conversation with a ‘no.’

4. Employee Shadowing

There are organizations that focuses more on team collaboration and thus presses on the approach of shadowing other team members and pitch practice for training their team member. As Eric Vandenberg from G2 Crowd explains, "What I find most valuable about trainings is listening to how my peers handle objections and navigate conversations." By having new reps shadow more experienced ones, they'll pick up advanced insights that may not be covered during training sessions.

While these resources can be grouped together to form an effective training manual, there are plenty of free online courses that can do this as well. These programs feature lessons and exercises that teach trainees about one or a few components of good customer service. Using one or a combination of the online options listed below can save you time from having to manually design your training program. 

Online Customer Service Training

These customer service training videos and courses can teach new hires how to provide exceptional customer service. 

Customer Service & Support Training Videos

1. Inbound Service Fundamentals by HubSpot Academy
2. Excellent Customer Service Skills by Telephone Doctor
3. What is customer service? The 7 Essentials To Excellent Customer Service by David Brownlee
4. I Was Seduced by Exceptional Customer Service by TEDx
5. "Delight" Case Study With Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO at B12 by HubSpot Academy
6. The 7 Essentials To Excellent Customer Service by David Brownlee
7. The Customer Revolution in Customer Service by David Bequette
8. 7 Essential Customer Support Skills Every Rep Needs by HubSpot Academy

You can watch more customer service training videos found in this blog post.

Customer Service & Support Online Courses

1. ELEVATE: The Growth Accelerator by HubSpot Academy
2. Free Customer Service Training by LiveChat
3. Customer Service Training by ALISON
4. Technical Support Fundamentals by Google
5. Writing for HubSpot Academy by HubSpot Academy
6. Customer Service (Short Course) by Oxford Home Study
7. Customer Service Training: Judging People by Skills Converged

To learn more, try out our other customer service training ideas.