Show employees what you mean. You almost have to switch roles and get your employee to stand in the shoes of the customer. If you look at it as if you were looking in the mirror, that you’re delivering services to yourself, what is it that you like and expect as a customer?
We all make choices every day from where to send our dry cleaning to where to have a fast-food lunch or whatever, and it’s usually related to our expectation of customer satisfaction. So that’s how we focus our training. We do a lot of sort of classroom case modeling where we have one of the persons be a customer and one be an employee, and we sometimes film that and play it back.
You can learn a lot about watching yourself and listening to yourself. We try to get our employees to be in the role of being a customer.
The other thing is the classroom sessions cannot be too long. People lose their concentration rather quickly. We don’t think the class can be more than an hour.
We also think it needs to be fun, there’s got to be some fun element in it. Some of the role-playing, we even encourage some of our employees to be difficult customers and sometimes that’s pretty humorous.
Use your own employees to train others. We’ve found that some of our best trainers are our people who have been very successful, and we have them teach others what they know and what they’ve learned. They’re actually, in many cases, better teachers than bringing in outside, third-party teachers.
The No. 1 criteria (for trainers) would be attitude. No. 2 would obviously be experience and knowledge of the subject. But if you don’t have the right attitude, it doesn’t work.
They say attitude is a little word that makes a big difference. I believe that’s true in life. If people are infectious or enthused about what they do, then they tend to transmit that to others. If they don’t like what they’re doing, they also transmit that to others.
Offer training in different forms to allow flexibility. The actual classroom classes are during the workday, the Internet Web classes are after hours at people’s leisure, and it’s a combination of those two together that constitutes our training.
On a regular quarterly basis we can schedule classroom training, but let’s say a new employee came to work a week following the classroom training, we couldn’t do another classroom training for one employee because it would be cost-prohibitive. So if we could take that one employee online for whatever specific class it was, you can do them as a one off. It’s much more efficient and that employee doesn’t have to wait three months to receive vital training.
With the Internet training, some people like to do it on their own time, in the evenings, on weekends or whenever they choose. There’s some advantage to that because sometimes it’s difficult for people to be away at training an hour or two at a time.
How to reach: HomeBanc N.A., (813) 228-8300 or www.homebanc.com
