How To Train Your Customer Support Team in Emotional Intelligence

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Emotional intelligence — which is the ability to recognise, understand, manage, and reason with one's emotions and those of others — is an important skill to have for anyone who works in a client-facing role. This is especially true in a field like customer support, where emotions can often run high and interactions can be intense. 

Emotional intelligence enables customer support professionals to better understand and respond to the needs and emotions of customers, which results in more productive and positive interactions. It can be a key difference maker in delivering exceptional customer support experiences. 

Not everyone is naturally gifted in emotional intelligence, unfortunately. In fact, for many, it’s a skill that requires deliberate training and practice to master. 

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create an effective emotional intelligence training program for your customer support team and share strategies for fostering continuous development of this invaluable skill.

The Importance of Emotional Intelligence in Customer Support

Customer support is a high-pressure role — that goes without saying. Agents are constantly dealing with a wide range of issues and customer emotions, from confusion and frustration to outright anger.

If the agents are not adequately equipped to handle these emotions, the interactions between them and customers can quickly spiral out of control, leading to negative outcomes for all parties, including the brand. 

Emotional intelligence enables customer support teams to seamlessly navigate the complex emotional dynamics they encounter in their everyday duties. They can recognise the emotional state of the customer, stay calm under pressure, and respond with empathy and understanding. 

When a customer expresses frustration over a delayed order, for instance, a support agent with high emotional intelligence can recognise the underlying anxiety, respond empathically, and offer a thoughtful solution that addresses both the emotional and practical aspects of the issue. 

In a nutshell, customer support teams with high emotional intelligence tend to have more positive and productive interactions with clients. Other benefits of training your customer support in emotional intelligence include:

• Higher customer satisfaction: Emotionally intelligent customer support teams know how to make customers feel genuinely heard and understood. Such customers are likely to leave the interaction feeling satisfied — even when their issue is difficult to solve or requires more time.

• Increased brand loyalty: 65% of customers have switched brands after a bad customer support experience.¹ When you handle customers' concerns with genuine care and empathy, they are more likely to trust your brand, return for repeat purchases, and remain loyal to it. In fact, according to Salesforce, 89% of customers said they would make another purchase at a brand after a positive customer support experience.² 

• Reduced employee burnout and turnover: Nearly 60% of call centre agents are at risk of burnout, with 87% reporting significant workplace stress.^3,4 Emotional intelligence training can be a game-changer here. It helps teams better manage stress and build emotional resilience, leading to lower burnout rates and reduced turnover.

• More sales and revenue: A customer support team that consistently delivers emotionally intelligent support helps build a positive brand image. This positive image can attract new customers, driving more sales and revenue for your business.

Creating an Effective Emotional Intelligence Training Program

Developing an emotional intelligence training program for your customer support team requires a structured approach to ensure participants learn the right skills and in an efficient manner. 

Not sure where to start? Here’s a practical step-by-step guide.

1. Assess Current Level of Emotional Intelligence  

The first step to developing an emotional intelligence program is assessing your customer support teams' current level of emotional intelligence skills. This can be done through surveys, feedback assessments, or interviews.  

Focus on each of the key domains of emotional intelligence — which are self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. How does your customer support team perform on each of these domains? What are their key strengths and weaknesses?

This assessment and the findings from it will serve as a baseline for your training efforts. It will help you identify gaps and determine where you can make the most significant improvements.

2. Set Clear Objectives

Next, set clear objectives for your training program. Use the findings from Step 1 to guide you. 

For example, maybe your assessment revealed that your customer support team members struggle with empathy. In such a case, one of your key objectives might be to enhance their ability to understand and share the feelings of customers. 

Similarly, if self-regulation is a big challenge, you might aim to equip them with techniques to manage their emotions and remain calm under pressure. 

Establishing clear objectives will provide direction for the training.

3. Decide Training Format

With your training objectives set, it’s now time to select the format of your training. Important to note is that there’s no size fits all approach — the right format will depend on your organisation's unique needs, goals, and circumstances.

That said, an effective EI training program should include a mix of learning methods or tools to accommodate different learning styles. Here are some of the top options.

Workshops

These are interactive in-person or virtual sessions where participants engage in discussions, activities, and exercises designed to enhance their understanding of emotional intelligence concepts. These sessions encourage group participation and foster collaborative learning.

Role-playing

Role-playing is a powerful, hands-on method for developing emotional intelligence in customer support teams. It provides an opportunity to simulate real-life interactions in a safe and controlled environment.  

Here, team leaders, supervisors, or trainers can present various customer scenarios and then have customer support agents work through them — providing feedback and guidance on how to navigate the emotional dynamics of each.

Common customer support scenarios you can incorporate into your role-playing exercises include:

• Handling a frustrated customer who has experienced a support failure (e.g. product issue, a missed delivery, or poor customer support).

• Resolving an issue for a customer who feels misunderstood or ignored.

• De-escalating a call where the customer is threatening to cancel their service.

E-learning Modules

E-learning modules offer a flexible, self-paced way for team members to learn about emotional intelligence concepts through videos, quizzes, and interactive content. Agents can revisit learning materials at any time (and from anywhere) to reinforce their understanding of emotional intelligence.

Coaching and Feedback

Support coaching combined with real-time feedback is yet another powerful way to impart emotional intelligence skills to your customer support team. This particular approach can include the following components:

• Ongoing personalised coaching: Here, supervisors or coaches work closely with individual agents or small groups, offering one-on-one guidance tailored to each person’s or group’s strengths and areas for improvement.

• Real-time feedback: This involves supervisors observing live customer calls — using solutions like Aircall — and providing immediate feedback on how to better manage emotions (both their own and their customers’). 

• Post-call analysis: Reviewing recorded calls is another valuable way to offer feedback. Managers can analyse specific calls, identify and communicate emotional intelligence successes (such as active listening or empathy) as well as areas where agents could improve. 

4. Develop Engaging Training Content

Having decided on the appropriate training formats, the next step is to develop engaging and relevant training content. The content should align with the goals you’ve set and cater to different learning preferences.

Depending on the training formats or approaches you’ve chosen, you can either develop the content in-house or hire an external training team specialising in emotional intelligence development. External experts can bring fresh perspectives and proven methodologies that might be more impactful for your team.

Make sure your content is practical, interactive, and designed to address real-world scenarios that your customer support team faces. Use case studies, interactive exercises, and relatable examples to make the material more engaging and applicable.

5. Implement the Program

Now it’s time to roll out the training program. Establish realistic schedules for the training sessions. Whether it's in-person workshops, virtual sessions, live on-call coaching, role-playing, or a combination of these, ensure that the schedule allows for adequate participation without disrupting daily operations.

Where appropriate — such as in the case of workshops or personal coaching — consider breaking the training into digestible modules over several weeks to prevent overwhelm and enhance retention.

In addition, track attendance and engagement levels throughout the training program to ensure everyone is participating fully.

6. Evaluate and Adapt

After implementing the training program, evaluate its effectiveness and make any necessary adjustments.

Conduct assessments during and after the completion of the training program to measure knowledge retention and skill application. This could involve surveys, self-assessments, or even live observation of customer interactions.

Additionally, gather feedback from participants regarding the training's relevance and effectiveness. Ask specific questions about what worked well, what could be improved, and how they plan to implement their new skills.

Use the feedback and assessment data to refine your training content, format, or delivery methods for future iterations. Continuous improvement ensures that the program stays relevant, effectively addresses evolving customer support challenges, and delivers lasting impact for your team.

Continuous Learning: Keeping Your Team’s Emotional Intelligence Sharp

Emotional intelligence isn’t a one-time lesson — it’s a skill that develops and grows stronger over time. To keep your team’s EI sharp, it’s essential to integrate it into your long-term development strategy. Offer refresher courses and advanced workshops to build upon the EI skills they have gained.

Consider also establishing a mentorship program that pairs experienced agents with newer team members. Experienced agents can provide real-time feedback and support, helping newcomers navigate challenging situations and build their confidence in applying emotional intelligence skills. This peer learning approach also fosters a culture of collaboration and mutual understanding within your customer support team.

Finally, make emotional intelligence an integral part of your team’s culture. Highlight its importance during team meetings, encourage open discussions on the subject, and celebrate success stories where emotional intelligence positively impacted customer interactions. 

How Aircall Can Help Foster More Emotionally Intelligent Interactions

Aircall can be an incredibly valuable partner in your quest to boost your team’s emotional intelligence.

Aircall’s Call Centre Software offers several tools and features specifically designed to support emotionally intelligent customer interactions in small and medium-sized businesses like yours. 

One such feature is Sentiment Analysis, which detects and analyses customers’ moods and emotions after a conversation. The resultant insights empower your team to tailor future interactions with a more thoughtful, emotionally intelligent approach.

Meanwhile, Aircall’s Live Monitoring feature enables you to listen in on customer conversations and provide discreet, real-time guidance or coaching to agents without the customer being aware. You can use this feature to guide less experienced team members through challenging conversations as they happen.

Book a demo today to learn more.

Sources

1. Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024. https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics

2. Salesforce. State of the Connected Customer. https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/research/salesforce-state-of-the-connected-customer-4th-ed.pdf

3. Jeff Toister. Contact Center Agent Burnout. https://www.toistersolutions.com/burnout

Cornell eCommons. Making call center jobs better: The relationship between management practices and worker stress. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/e4ae98ca-9034-4f68-8be9-86885905f403/content

Published on December 16, 2024.