Teaching employees how to interact with customers is critical to any company's success. But getting that training right can be challenging, especially as training staffs grow.
Why? The larger a training department is, the greater the disconnect between what trainers think are best practices and the customer scenarios employees are actually encountering day to day, writes Bill Cushard, a learning experience designer and frequent contributor to the Human Capitalist blog.
"Business goals and learning goals have become disjointed when the learning becomes overly centralized," argues Cushard in a post about why best practices are overrated in customer-service training programs. "The execution of learning should occur as close to the customer interaction as possible. Centralized learning departments are too far away from the customers to understand that."
The 3 Es for Better Learning
Cushard suggests ways centralized learning departments can improve their customer-service training:
- Empower: "A sales or service department should not have to seek approval from the learning department to run a training program. The learning department should empower people close to the customer interaction to decide what learning needs to occur and how."
- Enable: Centralized learning functions needs also to provide sales managers with the tools they need to succeed, including templates, learning management systems and analysis questionnaires.
- Educate: "[T]he learning function should teach those who need [these tools], how to use them."
Image via Can Stock Photo
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