What are the best role-playing exercises for improving customer service skills?

Allow your top performing sales executives to demonstrate their methods to the team. Make it interactive and have fun with the exercise.

Here are some of the best role playing exercises for improving customer service skills: Angry Customer - Have one person act as an upset, angry customer who is complaining about a product or service. The other person should practice staying calm, listening actively, apologizing, and working to resolve the issue. Switch roles so each person gets practice. Difficult Questions - One person plays a customer asking difficult questions that the other person, acting as the customer service rep, has to think through and provide helpful answers to. This develops critical thinking skills.

I used real life monitoring data to create scenes. For e.g. observed call interaction or face to face interaction with customer. Turning them in to bite size role playing exercise would give it real essence and learning. Another method is to create stand up comedy/satirical style 2 people plays, it has long lasting impact and audience learns quickly. Run a competition, ask team to form groups, select situation based on their own interactions and develop 5-10 minute plays, that's fun learning method and always effective. Small prizes or some top up in their performance scores is winning combination

Upset Customer Seeking Refund - The customer service rep must calmly work through the customer's refund request, following proper policies and procedures. This teaches how to handle returns and refunds professionally. Impatient Customer - The rep will need to practice politely asking the impatient customer to wait their turn and not get flustered. This builds patience and grace under pressure. Small Talk - One person makes casual small talk, and the rep practices polite chit chat to make the interaction more pleasant. This develops rapport-building skills.

One of my favorite exercises to do in our customer service workshops is to play a game we call "What Would the Boss Do?" We have small groups work on a customer complaint or problem and ask, "What would our boss do?" (Or, "How would he/she handle this?") Different groups report out in the form of "role-playing" as if they were the boss, sharing how they would handle the problem. After the different groups have shared, the boss comes out and comments on each of the responses - and then includes what they would really do.

Let audience rate them and ask for their comments on specific areas. Don't forget to share the results it gives additional learning opportunity.

Role-playing and similar exercises are great, but they quickly fade into a distant memory unless you do training (and role-playing) regularly. Training isn't something you did. It's something you do!