Getting Service Training to Stick is by Ray Miller and was Originally Published On: May 19, 2011
In the 20 years that I have been conducting service excellence training for thousands of participants, there is one thing that has remained constant. At the beginning of most sessions I ask the participants to introduce themselves and tell me why they are taking time from their busy lives to attend the training. Eighty percent of the time I get one answer, “I got and email that told be to be here!” This is followed closely by, “I just wanted a couple days away from my desk.”
Apart from the course title, they had no idea what kind of journey they were about to embark on, how this training would help them in fulfilling their role or what was expected of them regarding what they were to do differently after the training.
Training is an important but expensive investment. Like all investments you want a good ROI. In the case of training your ROI is measured by the extent to which people actually apply what they learn in the training, on-the-job. What you do before and after the training will dictate your ROI.
Here are some tips on how to improve your return on your service training investment.
1. Select the right training
Select customer focus training which targets everything people need to know and do in order to maximize the customer experience. This goes well beyond what many service training programs currently cover. But this is an article topic unto itself.
Ensure the training includes both customer-contact and support staff. All too often, companies focus service training only on the frontline. Yet, one of the greatest causes of service problems is o a lack of cooperation, communication and teamwork between service providers and the rest of an organization. If you can’t get it right internally, you will never get it right for the paying customer.
2. Define expectations and accountability
Prior to the training, you need to sit down with the participant(s) and discuss what the training is about, why it is important and what your expectations are regarding what they will need to do differently, and how you are going to measure this. This defines expectations and accountability. This ensures they know what’s expected of them and I guarantee they will pay attention.
The training should have some form of action planning tool within it so that participants will document how they will apply the training.
3. Review action plans and goals
Following the training, again sit down with each participant and review their action plans, establish performance goals and objectives related to the training provided and determine what you can do to support their efforts.
Now for the real work!
4. Reinforce and embed service behaviour
When it comes to customer focus training, many managers assume that once their people are trained they will do things differently. Wouldn’t it be nice if this were true. The reality is that without constant reinforcement and accountability, even with a good action plan, people will not make radical changes in their behaviour overnight.
The only way to embed new service behaviour is to spend time with your team, exploring how the concepts and strategies presented in the training apply to your department, establish performance standards related to the various strategies, agree upon how you will measure the expected performance, explain how you will help them to achieve these new performance goals and the consequence (good or poor) of service performance.
Once everyone knows your expectations and what exceptional service performance looks like in your area of responsibility:
– Pay attention
– Give feedback
– Hold everyone accountable for service performance
– Recognize and reward service excellence
– Listen to your customers and continually look for ways to add value from their perspective
…and most importantly, ensure that what you do every day when interacting with your customers and staff embodies all the service values of customer-focused leaders.
If you would like to know more about how you can ensure that your customer focus training produces the results you need, email us at support@thetrainingbank.com or give us a call at 1-519 284-8080.
Ray Miller is the Author of That’s Customer Focus and The Customer Focus Companion. He is also the creator of Maximizing the Customer Experience Online Training Certification Program and five other highly successful Customer Focus and Service Excellence Training Classroom Programs.
He is the Managing Partner of The Training Bank, a Toronto, Canada based, international training and consulting firm which specializes in Customer-Focus and Service Excellence training that gets results.