3 Tips For Training Your Customer Service Reps To Better Assist Senior Citizens

3 Tips For Training Your Customer Service Reps To Better Assist Senior Citizens

One area that is very easy for any company to be successful at is customer service. However, if you don’t spend the time necessary to properly train your employees in this area, you might find that it’s just as easy for your reputation surrounding customer service to take a big hit. That’s why trainings such as power bi courses are extremely vital.

While there are many principles of customer service that work for every demographic of customer, if you have a big portion of your customers that are senior citizens, you should take these people into consideration as you train your employees on how to offer the best possible customer service. To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for training your customer service reps to better assist senior citizens.

Practice Patience

Any person who works with senior citizens, be it in a customer service position or someone who cares for them at an assisted living facility, needs to know how to practice patience and learn the nursing home abuse law. Without patience, you can’t hope to ever have a positive experience with someone you’re working with.

To help show your employees how they can make their patience more obvious to your elderly customers, Nancy Friedman, a contributor to the American Bar Association, recommends answering questions very conversationally rather than just with the shortest possible answer. You should also train your employees on how to speak with a patient tone. This can often be accomplished by smiling while speaking.

Keep Notes Handy

Speaking to a customer service representative usually only happens when something has already gone wrong during the sales process. Because of this, people can often have very high emotions during customer service calls or interactions, which can make it hard to think straight or remember everything that’s discussed.

Knowing this, Anna Johansson, a contributor to MyCustomer.com, suggests that you have your employees always have a way to take notes on them. This way, if they need to give directions or suggestions to an elderly customers, they can write everything down for them. Or, if they’re handling things over the phone or through chat, you can email the notes on the conversation to be referenced back to. This will make things much easier to remember for your customers and show that you really care about creating a positive experience for them.

Train On How To Communicate Respect

One thing that can make all of your customer service and employee interactions better is to help your staff know how to communicate respect for the seniors they work with on the job.

To best do this, you should encourage your staff to actually have respect for the people they’re helping. And then to communicate this respect, Seth Bailey, a contributor to Entrepreneur.com, recommends doing training on how to speak without sounding condescending or patronizing to older customers.

If you need your customer service reps to do better when helping senior citizens, consider using the tips mentioned above to train your employees in this manner.