Training in contact centres doesn’t have to feel routine. Well-structured exercises help advisors connect learning to everyday interactions, making training more relevant and collaborative.
They also bring variety to sessions, keeping teams engaged without losing focus on key service skills.
In this article, we share nine exercises that bring energy to training sessions while building essential contact centre skills.
What Are the Keys to Good Customer Service Training Exercises?
According to Caroline Cooper, a Trainer and Consultant at Naturally Loyal, there are two elements that need to be part of a contact centre training exercise to gain maximum value from it.
These elements include a specific and relevant key message and the need for the exercise to be participative.
“Contact centres are notoriously stretched for time, so we need to make sure that there is a key message to each engaging exercise, so that as well as developing advisor skills, and making the learning memorable, advisors can also identify the relevance to their role.
We also need to make sure that everyone gets involved. Too often the more extrovert advisors put themselves forward to do a role play and get everyone to watch.
This makes it too easy for shy advisors to sit back and not take anything in. So, it’s important to either split teams into groups and allow everyone to role play or to create exercises that involve everyone.”
With this in mind, here are a number of exercises, recommended by Caroline herself, that were designed to be all-inclusive and to develop key advisor skills.
9 Customer Service Training Ideas
We have put together nine practical activities designed to enhance key skills in a contact centre. These activities focus on team-building, listening, questioning, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving.
Each exercise is structured to improve advisor performance while fostering a positive team atmosphere, making learning both effective and engaging.
1. The Ice Breaker
This exercise is a great way to kick off an induction training session, by getting recruits up and talking to their new colleagues and gathering key learnings that they will need to bring into the contact centre.
How it Works
Participants pair up with someone they don’t know and rotate partners across three rounds of conversation:
To start, ask everyone to pair up with someone they don’t already know. Advisors will swap partners across three rounds so they keep engaging with new people throughout the game.
At the start of each round, ask your advisors to do the following:
- Round 1 – Find something you have in common with your partner outside of work (so this excludes working for the contact centre!).
- Lesson – When you find something in common with someone, it is much easier to build rapport.
- Round 2 – Share with your new partner something that you’re proud of, from any time in your life. It might be something you’ve achieved yourself or someone else you’re proud of.
- Lesson – Finding something you are proud of makes you feel good. So help celebrate with advisors, or get them talking about things they are proud of.
- Round 3 – Share with your new partner a time you came home from shopping having bought more than you planned to. What prompted you to spend more than you intended?
- Lesson – Engaging advisors with great customer service from their own life experience helps get the team thinking about the subject matter.
2. Acronyms
Acronyms is a quick, fun exercise to engage new advisors with fundamental contact centre topics, such as service excellence, soft skills and the customer experience.
How it Works
Once you have a topic in mind, split the team into small groups of three to five people and give each team a word relating to that topic. The teams can either be given the same word or a different word.
A few words that you could use for the topic of “service excellence”, for example, could be “care”, “engage” or “positive”. Their task is to turn each letter into a word or phrase relevant to the training topic.
Example for “CARE”:
- C – Courtesy
- A – Attentiveness
- R – Respect
- E – Empathy
3. Questions and Answers
A deceptively simple exercise that tests listening skills and encourages advisors to think critically rather than rely on assumptions.
How it Works
This game involves asking two questions:
- How many of each species did Moses take into the ark?
- You are driving a bus which leaves Stoke at 8:30 with 23 people on board. It stops in Leicester dropping off 10 and picking up a further 4 passengers. It travels further south to Milton Keynes, where it drops off another 5 passengers and picks up a further 6. It arrives in London two hours later. What was the drivers name?
The right answers are:
- None, it was Noah
- You
So, why do advisors nearly always answer these questions incorrectly. Caroline says it’s because:
- We hear what we expect to hear so we assumed it was Noah
- We don’t always catch the most important part of the question and get side-tracked with irrelevant information.
This is a lesson that when communicating with customers, we need to listen carefully and check our understanding.
We also must avoid assumptions at any cost, even if we’ve heard the problem before; a different solution may be required for this particular customer.
4. Ping Pong
An energising group activity that strengthens concentration, rhythm, and active listening, while also being a lot of fun.
How it Works
Advisors work in pains and alternate counting to three (1,2,3) out loud. Then, one number at a time, you substitute actions or sounds:
- Step 1: Replace “1” with a clap (clap-2-3, clap 2-3)
- Step 2: Now substitute 2 for an action – e.g. wiggle (clap-wiggle-3, clap-wiggle-3)
- Step 3: Next substitute 3 for an action and sound e.g. yeehaw (clap-wiggle-yeehaw, clap-wiggle-yeehaw)
- Step 4: Now back to 1-2-3, 1-2-3
Sounds fun, right? But what does this have to do with listening?
The key message here is that once you are fully concentrating on what the “other person” is doing, it is much easier to create rapport and spot opportunities.
For more tips on improving listening skills, read our article: Top Tips to Improve Listening Skills on the Telephone
5. Determine the Scenario
A questioning game that helps advisors practise how to lead conversations with focused, closed questions, useful for quieter or less direct customers.
Too often advisors are asked to only use open questions, in order to gain as much information about the customer as possible, so they can then find the solution that works best for them.
However, there is a lot of value in closed questions, so you can confirm the information that you hear and lead the conversation, if the customer isn’t the most talkative. The best advisors are comfortable with both forms of questions.
How it Works
To get advisors thinking about how to ask the best closed questions, to better lead the conversation, split the team into groups of three or four advisors and play this game!
The advisors, in their groups, are given a clue of a scenario, but not enough to determine what is actually going on. Tell one advisor the full story and give advisors a certain number of closed questions to help fill the gaps.
One scenario to give the team would be: “A man pushes a car round the corner and waits nervously” and the actual situation would be that you’re playing a game of Monopoly and just landed on someone else’s property with a hotel.
You are nervously waiting for the next player to throw the dice, as if you are asked for rent you will go bust! Be careful with this example, though, as if you’re playing this game with multinational advisors, they may not have a good understanding of what Monopoly is.
To better engage the team with the game, offer a prize to the team who take the fewest number of closed questions to understand the full scenario.
6. Over to You
A problem-solving discussion exercise that encourages creativity and ownership of the customer experience.
How it Works
Ask small groups of advisors to consider an issue that is fairly common amongst your customer base and ask them how they would handle the matter.
While doing so, ask the group to think about the following four questions:
- If this was your business, what would you do?
- If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do?
- If you had unlimited budget, what would you do?
- If you had a magic want, what would you do?
This exercise encourages advisors to start thinking for themselves and enables them to devise creative solutions to customer issues. Your team may just surprise you and come up with some great suggestions that you had never before considered.
As the trainer, move around each group and listen to their thoughts, always trying to give ideas some praise, to avoid stifling future creativity. Remember, even if the advisor’s suggestions are impossible to implement right now, they may spark future development plans.
For more tips on improving advisor questioning, read our article: Practical Tips for Effective Questioning and Probing Techniques
7. Real Play
This activity relies on role playing, a key ingredient to customer service training, especially during inductions and when new processes are brought into the contact centre.
According to Caroline, it can be difficult for an advisor to empathise with the customer if they have never personally experienced the issue before, and it is especially important for new advisors to experience situations from a customer’s perspective.
So, having the opportunity to role play and practise how to handle specific situations is great to give new recruits a taster of what working in the contact centre is actually like.
Take the pressure off the advisors so they can focus on the learning rather than the stress of ‘role playing’ in front of their colleagues.
How it Works?
Split the team into groups of three. One member of the group role plays as the customer, another as the adviser and the final member as the observer. Each group is given a different customer issue relevant to your contact centre.
They role-play the situation while the observer takes notes and provides feedback. After each round, rotate roles and facilitate a short discussion about what worked and what could be improved.
8. Customer’s Shoes
To fully understand the emotions a customer is feeling when they call into the contact centre, advisors need to have a good understanding of the customer journey.
How it Works
Give each group of 2-3 advisors a different section of the journey to review through the customer’s eyes – from browsing the website to post-sale follow-up.
Ask them to review it using four questions
- What were your own observations?
- What did we do well to give customers a great experience?
- If this was your business, what would you do differently?
- What one thing could you start doing tomorrow to give our customers a better experience?
Experiencing your service first-hand allows advisors to speak to customers from their own experience, improving their authenticity, while they also have the opportunity to consider why certain customers may feel the way that they do. This is the first step to creating genuine empathy.
9. Nine Dots
A visual brain teaser that challenges advisors to think beyond assumptions and look for multiple solutions to a single problem.
How it Works
To start this exercise, give each advisor a plain sheet of paper and ask them to draw a square in the centre approximately 8cm x 8cm.
Then, request that each person draws three lines of three dots in the middle of the square, so all the dots are lined up. Advisors should end up with a square that looks like this:
Then, set the group the challenge of joining all nine dots with four lines or fewer, without taking their pen off the page.
In all probability, advisors won’t be able to do so, as they will automatically assume that they have to stick to the confines of the box, while you can only complete the challenge by joining up the lines outside of the box, as shown below.
If anyone knows how to do this already, set them the challenge of joining the dots with three lines or fewer. This can be done like so:
In fact, it can even be done in one line, as we never said that the line had to be straight or even thin, did we?
This exercise is more than just a brainteaser, as Caroline points out two key learnings that can be taken away from it.
Learning 1
Just because you can’t find a solution doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. We often assume certain rules which don’t necessarily exist. For example, in this exercise, many advisors would have assumed that the lines had to be straight, when they didn’t.
Learning 2
Even when we come up with one solution, it doesn’t necessarily mean to say it’s the best solution, and normally there will be alternatives.
So don’t assume your existing way of doing something or the first solution you find for a problem is the best one. For example, we found a solution with four lines first, but eventually, we found a better way that just required the one.
With thanks to Caroline Cooper for recommending each of the training exercises that have been included on this list.
To find more examples of bringing fun into the contact centre, read our articles:
- Motivational Games for Call Centres
- 12 Fun Ideas for Your Break-Out Room
- 7 Games to Liven Up the Contact Centre
Author: Charlie Mitchell
Reviewed by: Hannah Swankie
Published On: 21st Jan 2019 - Last modified: 15th Jul 2025
Read more about - Skills, Caroline Cooper, Coaching, Editor's Picks, Fun, Games, Training
