How to onboard a support team with practice calls

What you need before day one

Your five hardest call types. Take them from tickets and call notes, in your customers' words. A list of fifteen to choose from is in 15 customer service calls worth rehearsing.

The rule for each. What can a rep offer, and what can they not? Most bad calls come from a rep who is unsure of the answer to that.

Your review checklist. Use the one your leads already apply to live calls. If you do not have one, three questions are enough, and they are further down this page.

Someone to play the caller. A colleague, a lead, or an AI caller.

Week one: the script

Days 1 and 2. The new hire listens to or reads real calls of each type. For each of the five, they write their own first line and the one thing they are allowed to offer.

Days 3 to 5. Two practice calls a day, easiest type first. The caller is polite and the problem is simple. A lead reviews one transcript per rep each day against the checklist.

By Friday the rep has made six calls and has not yet spoken to a customer. That is the idea.

Week two: the pushback

Days 6 to 8. The same five call types, with a harder caller. They interrupt, refuse the first offer and ask for a manager. Two calls a day again.

Day 9. The rep shadows live calls for half the day, then takes their first live calls with a lead listening.

Day 10. Live calls in the morning. In the afternoon, a practice call on whichever type went worst.

How to review a practice call

Three questions cover most of it.

1. Within the first minute, did the rep say what they could do?
2. When the answer was no, did they say no clearly, and then offer something?
3. Did the call end with a next step and a time?

Mark each yes or no. Keep the feedback to one thing to change on the next call, because nobody can fix five habits at once.

When a rep is ready

A rep is ready for unsupervised calls when they have passed each of the five call types twice in a row. Until then, practice the types they fail and leave the others alone.

A worked example

This example is made up to show the format, and no customer is behind it. Imagine a six-person support team at an online shop. Their five calls might be:

Each new hire would make thirteen practice calls across those five types before the second Friday.

Running the plan with murmur

You can run all of this with two colleagues and a spare meeting room. The hard part is finding the time, and colleagues tend to go easy on each other.

murmur for teams replaces the colleague. We write the callers from your scripts, help articles and call notes, so they ask about your products and push back the way your customers do. After each call the rep gets the transcript, the goals they hit and a line to try next time. Goals can follow your own checklist.

You can hear the caller now: the upset customer at the top of this page is a live call. To try the plan with your own five call types, talk to us about a pilot.

Updated 11 November 2026.