Make training fun with these Customer Service Games

As the famous English Poet, John Donne, once noted, “No man is an island, entire unto himself,” and that notion is behind the popularity of team-building activities for groups. Team building games assist in building communication skills and help develop problem-solving strategies. Knowing that the benefits of team-building activities transcend different learning styles, there are team-building games for adults that your team can use to improve training.

Team building exercises strengthen skill sets individuals need to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world, and they also help create a rapport among your staff. This new rapport fuels improved performance with clients and a seamless operation that is bound to result in increased customer satisfaction and lifelong loyalty to your company.

Team building activities for work

Participating in team-building activities for work translates into having an engaged staff that looks forward to these exercises as a way of honing their skills in a congenial training environment. Long gone are the days when employees watched training videos with the human resource department before filling in the obligatory informational packets and surveys that indicate you watched the material.

When it comes to team-building activities for adults, corporate team-building games are an excellent vehicle for inculcating valuable lessons in a fun-filled environment. Corporate team-building activities build on the fact that your employees work most efficiently as one team in the pursuit of your company goals.

Virtual team building games

Now that we’ve spent the last few years adjusting to a work-from-home environment, it may seem harder than ever to perform team-building exercises. But never fear! Virtual team-building games can help your customer service department share experiences across the department and grow closer together. After all, without in-person interaction, it can be hard to feel connected to your team. Virtual team games can change that by providing a fun activity that brings everyone closer while honing customer service skills at the same time. 

Since customer service is all about rapport and communication, team-building exercises are perfect for boosting these skills. As your team becomes comfortable with each other, they’re also learning how to connect with their customers more effectively.

Online games for virtual teams

Nobody likes sitting through boring training meetings, and even less so when they’re working from home. To make your virtual team-building less tedious, consider using games. Methods like virtual icebreakers or virtual team-building bingo can help your colleagues get to know each other. These exercises make people feel more integrated into your company and stay connected, even if they haven’t physically seen each other in months.

Using online games for employee engagement makes team-building fun and fosters a sense of community among your employees. Icebreaker games that ask each person questions about themselves and their interests provide a way for team members to get familiar with each other. These questions can include favourite foods, what they had for breakfast, whether they prefer cats or dogs (or fish) and other questions that reveal a person’s individuality. 

To create team-building games online, you can use various free templates, instruction manuals and integrations. The important thing is to make it fun and relevant to your employees. Employees who feel a sense of connection with their colleagues are happier, more satisfied in their work and are less likely to resign. Taking your team outside the grind and making office work enjoyable is the perfect way to boost employee engagement and performance. 

What makes customer service training games so much more effective than typical team-building exercises? In short, they are fun activities that inspire as many smiles as they do mental breakthroughs.

Customer service game ideas

Combine team-building and customer service training into one engaging game session and watch employee participation and retention soar as a result. While your team members learn to relate to each other, they’re also learning how to connect with customers, solve problems and find creative solutions to customer requests.

1. Empathy workshop

Consider setting up or using an empathy workshop to teach your sales and customer service reps how to empathise with both colleagues and customers. Empathy means sharing a feeling with another, and doing that means understanding what they’re feeling. Helping your team members recognise what others are feeling and how to appropriately respond will reap benefits not only in the workplace but also in job performance.

2. Empathy exercises for customer service

To help your team members build relationships with each other and sharpen their customer service skills, use empathy exercises. These games can help your reps identify a customer’s problem, display the proper amount of sympathy and resolve the problem while caring for the client’s needs. As a foundational skill in customer service, empathy helps us connect to and understand others. Using empathy exercises can help your employees not only perform their jobs better but feel more connected to their coworkers and customers.

3. Jeopardy game

A great way to identify knowledge gaps in your team is by organising a game of Jeopardy. By creating categories and questions related to your business, you can discover which employees know the most about the different areas of your business. Better yet, the mere act of hearing the right answer in a fun game setting makes them more likely to retain the knowledge after the fact. Positive emotions like joy and laughter are shown to make information retention easier, as well as solidify a sense of community. The goofier the questions and the more hilarious the responses, the more effective your team-building Jeopardy game will be.

4. Conflict resolution scenarios for adults

Conflict occurs when people want seemingly incompatible things, or think that they do. A customer service rep may misunderstand a problem and apply the wrong solution, or mistakenly tell the customer there’s nothing they can do. By correctly understanding what another person thinks or feels, your employees can better address the issue and resolve conflict without escalation. Role-playing scenarios are perfect to hone these skills.

Examples of role-play scenarios that you can use include having one employee pose as an angry customer. They’re demanding to return an item that falls outside of the return policy, and the customer service rep has to tell them it’s ineligible for return. How can the employee diffuse the situation? If there are other options to appease the customer, what are they and how should they be applied?

Restaurant customer service role-play scenarios are another great way to train any kind of customer-facing employee. Wait staff have to deal with all kinds of customers and situations, many of them unpleasant. By acting out possible scenarios and helping your employees resolve them, you help them feel more capable in the face of conflict. Confidence will prevent your reps from freezing up, saying the wrong thing or accidentally making the situation worse.

Customer Service Week activities

Celebrated the first full week in October, Customer Service Week celebrates and honours the hard work done by the nation’s service representatives. If you have a team of dedicated customer service workers who toil daily to preserve your brand name with their public interactions, rewarding them with Customer Service Week games and activities is a great way to show that you appreciate their contribution to the success of your organisation.

Not only can you promote Customer Service Week games for your hardworking staff, but such activities serve as great customer service icebreakers between departments. Customer Service Week games and puzzles allow your employees to continue their ongoing training, under the guise of fun-filled frivolity.

Other various team building exercises to consider

To keep your staff fresh and alert, mix up your indoor team-building games with outdoor team building activities. Whether it is a group walk around the building or an outdoor game day, moving the action outside increases the rate of retention both in and out of the building. No one said that learning had to be boring, so take that philosophy to the streets and see the supercharged results you get by simply exposing your staff to the warm rays of the sun on an otherwise busy workday.

If you’re ready to reinvigorate your support team with some new and fun customer service training games, then take a look at our free resource! If you’re looking for a way to deliver customer service training in a more engaging format that employees love, then consider taking a look at Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly by Seismic) – we’d love to help!