Microlearning Videos for Soft Skills Training

Soft skills refer to abilities such as communication skills, interpersonal skills, people skills, and other behavioral skills. While technical knowledge required for a job is acquired mainly through academic education and attending formal training, enhancing one’s soft skills typically takes longer. Learning can be considered successful only by the practical implementation of these skills. For instance, if an employee has undergone training for developing customer service skills, this learning must be immediately applied by him, to make the learning stick. While technical knowledge is a must, it is soft-skills that prove to be a determining factor for successful careers.

Given how important these skills are, organizations invest heavily in training employees on various aspects of soft skills. Apart from in-house trainers, instructors and experts from outside are also invited to conduct these trainings. Employees in customer-facing roles need to have excellent communication skills. A full-fledged instructor-led soft skills refresher training is usually done for those who have been newly hired for such roles.

However, organizations cannot conduct such trainings to tenured employees owing to time and cost constraints. Hence, microlearning videos on the nitty-gritties of how to interact with customers can prove to be a very effective training tool. Here are a few specific areas where they can help.

Greeting the customer

How do you greet the customer genuinely? What should be the tone of voice while greeting them? In face-to-face interactions, what should the customer service representative’s body language convey? To answer these questions, employees must be given demos, which they can watch, and then practice before implementing the learning in a ‘live’ situation. Microlearning videos are highly effective at doing this. When the required skills are demonstrated to customer service representatives through microlearning videos, they can easily practice and implement the same.

Effective questioning skills

Be it customer service, sales, or technical support, asking the customer questions is an integral part of any customer interaction. One of the most common mistakes employees make is that they assume they know what the customer wants even before asking for all the necessary details. Microlearning videos, which demonstrate the correct approach (including tone, language, non-verbal communication) are very effective in driving the message home. Besides, the importance of getting to know customers’ requirements through correct questioning can also be emphasized in the video, leading to greater learner engagement.

Rapport building and small talk with the customer

An employee who interacts with the customer either on phone or in person must necessarily strive to build a good relationship with him. Here’s where an employee’s rapport building skills and small talk abilities come into play. As these are very practical skills, microlearning videos are ideal for training employees. Real-time scenarios of rapport building between the customer service representative and the customer help employees gain the necessary skills. A variety of scenarios can be played in videos for effective training.

Enhance selling skills

Sales is one department that invests heavily in training its teams. Compared to the other departments in an organization, training is likely to be regular and ongoing in sales. Because relationship building is at the heart of sales, all critical selling skills require continuous training. Also, given their high targets, salespeople need to necessarily have exceptional selling skills in every area. For instance, effectively handling customer objections is one of the key soft skills that sales personnel must be adept at. Thus, microlearning videos that help enhance various selling skills can be a boon to sales employees.

Close customer calls

Customer service, sales, technical support, and any other customer-facing team must know how to close customer calls. The manner in which a customer call is closed defines whether or not the customer would choose to buy the company’s products again. Also, if the call is not closed appropriately, all the effort put in to build rapport would go waste. The idea is to leave a favorable impression of the product and the organization with the customer. Microlearning videos that showcase the importance of closing customer calls effectively and demonstrate it are a must-have training tool.

Organizations can create microlearning videos in which employees share about their successful customer interactions. Such best practice sharing ensures effective peer-to-peer learning for enhancing soft skills.