The Fastest, Simplest Way to Train New Hires

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New hire training time is unproductive time.

The new hire doesn’t yet have the skills to do their job. Someone else must take time away from their day-to-day responsibilities to train the new person. 

That puts you at least two people down at a time when you hired an extra person because you needed extra help.

It can be tempting to cut corners and provide too little training. This can be dangerous.

I recently wrote a blog post describing what happens when new customer service employees aren’t fully trained. It told the story of Jesse, a new employee in a bagel shop who felt lost because she didn’t get enough training before being asked to serve customers.

Some companies overcorrect and provide too much training. This can be wasteful.

One of the services my company provides is helping clients develop effective new hire training programs. I’ve helped clients reduce new hire training time by as much as 50 percent with no decrease in performance. 

The secret is creating a laser focus on giving new hires the specific skills they need to succeed at their jobs. Any topic that didn’t help them do their job was eliminated.

So, you don’t want to cut corners on training. You also don’t want to waste time and money. And, you’re not an expert in adult learning theory. What do you do? 

You need a performance checklist.

 

The Magic of Performance Checklists

Most training programs are doomed to fail. That’s because the emphasis is placed on what the trainer will tell the trainee. 

The result is a lot of aimless wandering and blah blah blah.

An effective training program focuses instead on what the trainee needs to do. The trainer creates clear objectives and then works backwards to figure out how to help the trainee accomplish those goals.

The easiest way to capture this is by creating a performance checklist.

A performance checklist describes a set of actions that a trainee must successfully complete to do their jobs correctly. The trainee isn’t fully trained until they complete each item on the list.

The best part is you should already have one. 

Think about the performance standards you have in place for your employees now. Chances are, there’s already a checklist of some kind involved. 

Here are some examples:

  • Mystery shopper checklist
  • Call quality monitoring form
  • Service standards checklist
  • Performance evaluation
  • Standard operating procedure checklist

Whatever you use to describe good performance, that’s your target. Get your new hire to perform at that level and they’re trained.

Now, all you need is a little bit of planning to make it happen.

 

Creating Your Training Plan

Once you’ve identified the performance checklist that will guide your training, you’ll need a plan to get there.

This involves breaking down the checklist into specific steps or lessons. By virtue of being a checklist, this may already be done for you.

Let’s say you want to train a new server in a restaurant. Your handy list of guest service standards (a.k.a. performance checklist) doubles as a lesson plan.

  • Lesson #1: Greet guests
  • Lesson #2: Suggest a specific drink
  • Etc.

The key is the new hire must demonstrate good performance to complete each lesson.

So, to complete lesson #1, your new server must demonstrate the ability to greet guests in a warm and friendly manner. You don’t focus on lesson #2 until lesson #1 is complete.

It may seem a bit simplistic, but that’s the idea. Breaking down training like this makes training easier for the new hire. That, in turn, makes good performance easier.

Getting your new hire to deliver good performance quickly is the ultimate goal.

A Lost Employee, Found Three Weeks Later

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I wrote a post a few weeks ago about Jesse, a new bagel shop employee who was lost on the learning curve. 

She was set adrift on a busy morning without proper training. As a result, she didn’t yet know how to be useful. It was clearly an awkward situation for her.

I wondered if she would last very long.

I visited the same bagel shop last weekend and saw a completely different Jesse this time. She was confident and smiling as she served her customers. She had a job to do and she knew how to do it.

Her job this day was filling orders for customers who wanted to get a dozen bagels. She helped one indecisive customer by making a few suggestions to round out his selections. Jesse even joked with customers waiting in line by suggesting that all they had to do to skip the line was buy a dozen bagels from her. 

Her personality was muffled and restrained by inhibition the first time I saw Jesse. Three weeks later, her personality sparkled.

 

What was the difference?

Jesse had two things that she lacked when I first saw her three weeks ago: competence and confidence.

Three weeks ago, Jesse was at Level 2 on the learning curve. She lacked the competence to do her job. It wasn’t her fault - she hadn’t yet been trained — but that lack of ability in turn hurt her confidence. Nobody likes to look and feel inept. Especially when there’s an audience (a.k.a. customers) to see it.

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All new employees have to go through this stage to some degree, but a lack of training exacerbated the situation by unnecessarily prolonging this stage.

This day, Jesse had attained “Level 4” on the learning curve for fulfilling requests for a dozen bagels. This is where an employee’s skill level and confidence are both high. They’ve mastered a particular task to the point where they can do the job without thinking through the steps. This ability to just flow allows them to infuse their own personality into the situation.

Getting from Level 2 to Level 4 requires time. A lack of training makes it take even longer.

Employees like Jesse are at risk during this period because they aren’t yet able to do their jobs effectively. They may even decided to quit if the process is too uncomfortable.

Good for Jesse for sticking with it.

 

How to Prevent Employees from Getting Lost

Here are some tips from my previous post that can help keep new employees from feeling lost. 

  • Let them know it’s okay to make mistakes during training.
  • Commend then on the progress they’re making.
  • Be available to guide them and provide assistance.
  • Encourage them to stay on track.

You can revisit the entire post here if you'd like a more in-depth explanation of the learning curve.

Six Ways to Improve Customer Service Without Training

What’s the fastest way to improve customer service? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not training.

A lot of customer service managers prescribe training as a cure-all for poor service.

  • Rude employees? Train ‘em to be polite.

  • Error-prone service? Train ‘em to not make errors.

  • Crappy products? Train ‘em to convince customers the products are really good.

Don’t get me wrong. I love training.

I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. I’m a past president of my local ATD chapter, a professional organization for trainers. I volunteer to mentor people who are new to their training careers. I would train more often if I could.

It’s just that training is often the wrong solution. There are at least six solutions that are almost always faster and better.

A group of employees enjoying a fun and interactive training class.

Why customer service training fails

Customer service training typically fails when it’s not the right solution to improve service. Poor products, unfriendly policies, a lack of resources, and unhelpful managers all make serving customers difficult.

My rough calculations suggest that training is responsible for just 1 percent of customer service.

Even when training is needed, the content is often poorly delivered and there’s little to no follow-up. Employees are left to implement what they learn without any meaningful support from their manager.

Most of the customer service training I’ve seen can be classified as “smile” training.

It’s chock full of time-worn platitudes such as “friendliness is free”, “the customer is always right,” and “don’t take it personally” when an angry customer is rude to you. If you need to train an employee to smile, you’ve either hired the wrong employee or you've put a good employee in a bad environment.

There’s scant evidence that suggests this approach actually results in noticeably better service.

Customer service managers typically report a one to two week bump in motivation followed by employees gradually settling back into old habits. Meanwhile, you’re out the time and cost of the training.

Here are several reasons why many customer service training programs fail:

  • The training is generic and not focused on the specific skills employees need.

  • Employees aren’t fully empowered to implement what they learn.

  • Participants are poorly prepared to attend training.

  • There is little to no skill-building follow-up or coaching after the class.

  • The manager doesn’t model the skills taught in the workshop.

  • The training isn't aligned with clearly defined objectives.

 

How to improve customer service without training

Customer service will quickly improve when you address the root causes of poor performance. This frequently involves solutions other than training, such as providing the right resources or improving processes.

Here are six ways to improve customer service that are consistently effective.

  1. Create a customer service vision. Get everyone on the same page with a shared definition of outstanding customer service. You can use this step-by-step guide to create your own.

  2. Conduct a root-cause analysis. Investigate what’s hurting employee performance. Work with employees to identify barriers that get in the way. You can use this root cause analysis primer to help you.

  3. Fix the poor products & services. No amount of training can overcome products that don’t work, or services that routinely fall short of expectations. Analyze customer feedback to identify pain points and fix them.

  4. Involve employees in the problem-solving process. Employees often know exactly why things aren’t going well. And they’re more likely to buy-in to solutions that they help create.

  5. Remove toxic employees. Toxic employees can drag down the entire team. Removing a toxic influence can be like a breath of fresh air for the entire team that instantly produces results.

  6. Provide regular coaching and feedback. Employees need regular reminders to keep their skills sharp. Have regular team and one-on-one meetings to focus on service. You can use these tips for topics.

This list is by no means exhaustive. What would you add to the list?

 

When customer service training is the right solution

The best time to train your employees is when they lack all the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need to serve customers. The key is to be specific, so rather than train employees to “handle rude customers,” hone in on the particular skills they need to be more successful such as empathizing with angry customers and refocusing on finding solutions.

Here are a few situations when customer service training makes sense makes sense.

Your team is good already. Years ago, I noticed an interesting trend with my clients. The companies that did the best after receiving training were pretty good at customer service already. They got there by having good products and services, attentive managers, and a strong customer-focused culture. The training helped to fine-tune the specific skills employees needed to take their service to the next level.

You’re growing. The larger your company becomes, the more you need to codify your tribal knowledge. This is especially important with new employees. I’ve worked with clients to formalize new hire training and cut training time by as much as 50 percent while improving performance.

You have a specific initiative. It also makes sense to provide customer service training when you’ve pinpointed a specific challenge. For example, I recently worked with a client who had developed a set of internal core values. They wanted to train their employees to deliver service in a way that aligned with those values.

Bonus Tip: If you do decide to offer your employees customer service training, make sure you first create clear learning objectives. This will help you make the training much more specific and targeted. You can learn more by reading my overview of how to create A-B-C-D learning objectives.

5 Ways to Train Contact Center Agents Faster

Faster (and better) training is possible!

Faster (and better) training is possible!

Note: this post originally appeared on ICMI.com.

New hire training represents a significant investment for many contact centers with typical training times ranging from two to six weeks or even more. Fortunately, there are ways to train new hires faster and improve their on-the-job performance.

I shared one of my biggest secrets in an article I wrote for ICMI in June called “Boost performance with scenario-based training.”  Here are five more ways to speed up the training process without compromising results.

 

#1 Keep a trainee observation log

When I ran a call center training department, my trainers all kept a log of detailed notes on their new hires’ daily in-class performance. When a new hire struggled with a particular concept, the written notes helped the trainer clearly describe the specific challenge. For example, a note describing a new hire having trouble with upselling might read, “John frequently confused features and benefits while role-playing upsell offers.”

The detailed notes made it easy for the trainer to create a strategy to get the learner back on track. John’s trainer might decide to spend a few extra minutes with John reviewing the difference between features and benefits. A little extra practice or instruction was often all that was needed to for the concept to click. Without that extra intervention, many new hires would continue to struggle and fall farther and farther behind.

Keeping a written log of trainee observations had a few additional advantages in my training department. If a trainer called in sick, someone else could easily cover their class by reviewing the log to see where they left off. The log also helped trainers get a second opinion when they faced a particularly challenging situation. I had two shifts of trainers working in two locations, so the trainer could email me the written notes if I wasn’t able to personally observe the class.

 

#2 Group new hires for live calls

The transition from new hire training to taking live calls can be a challenging one. They know how to do the job, but they may not have the speed, accuracy, or confidence to handle a heavy load of calls without asking a lot of questions.

One way to speed up this transition is to group new hires together and have them take calls under the watchful eye of a dedicated coach. This allows the new hire to be productive by handling contacts from a normal queue while still having instant access to intensive coaching when needed. Generally, a few shifts in the “new hire section” is all that’s needed for an agent to become ready to join their assigned team.

 

#3 Conduct passport tours

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for new call center agents is that they don’t fully understand their company’s operations. A passport tour is a simple training technique that takes learners to various parts of the company so they can get a first-hand look at how everything fits together. New hires collect a signature on their “passport” for each stop along the tour.

This technique was a huge help when I worked for a catalog company. New hires would tour our merchandising department so they could touch and feel our products. They visited the fulfillment center so they could see how orders were picked, packed, and shipped. They visited the returns department so they could see how and why merchandise came back to us. All of this first-hand knowledge helped new hires quickly grasp how everything fit together.

Some companies have far-flung operations, but you can easily create a virtual passport tour by using a smart phone to shoot short video tours of key operations. You can also use web-conferencing technology like GoTo Meeting or Adobe Connect to have people from remote operations provide your new hires with a guest lecture.

 

#4 Have new hires score their own calls

Many contact centers use their quality assurance form as a template for new hire training. This makes sense since you want to train agents to the same standards you use to evaluate a successful call.

You can take this a step further by having new hires score their own calls. These could be either live calls or recorded role-plays. Self-scoring invites agents to view their performance more objectively and helps them learn to analyze their own performance so they can quickly make adjustments.

 

#5 Encourage social learning

Many contact centers have social learning tools such as chat, blogs, and wikis that allow agents to share knowledge with each other. In some contact centers, these tools can mean the difference between solving a problem in five minutes or thirty minutes. Unfortunately, these resources can be underutilized if agents don’t know how to use them or aren’t even aware they exist.

You can encourage the use of social learning by designing training exercises that require new hires to make use of these tools to solve complex problems. They’ll learn the answers to difficult challenges, but more broadly, they’ll understand how to use those tools to quickly solve similar problems in the future.

Boost performance with scenario based training

Note: This article originally appeared on ICMI.com. It focuses on new hire training for call centers, but the principles can be adapted to many other environments.  

New hire training represents a significant investment for many call centers with typical training times ranging from two to six weeks or even more. It can also require a delicate balance. Train too little and employees will underperform, require too much supervision, or even quit in frustration. Train too much and you waste valuable time and money.

Scenario-based training is an accelerated learning technique that has the potential to deliver the best of both worlds. It allows you to train new hires faster and get better performance once they’re on the job. It works by solving some of the biggest limitations of the traditional approach to call center training. 

 

The Traditional Approach

Many call centers currently train their new hires using what’s called the building block method. It works by breaking down various job-related tasks into smaller learning blocks that are relatively easy for employees to learn. For example, a new employee might first learn to use the company’s CRM system, next learn about the company’s products, and finally learn how to interact with customers in a positive manner.

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It’s relatively easy to design training using the building block approach, but there are also some substantial limitations. 

The first is integration. Individual skills are trained separately, but they are used together on the job. Employees often experience a sort of mental gridlock, known as cognitive overload, when they first put all of these new skills together while taking live or simulated calls. This slows them down and makes them more prone to errors. 

The second limitation is timing. New skills must be repeated frequently in order to become second nature. The building block approach can prevent this from happening because some skills are trained early on in the program and then not revisited until days or even weeks later when the employee prepares to take live calls. This often requires additional training or coaching to remind employees of previous lessons.

 

Scenario-based Training

Scenario-based training works by structuring training to mirror how the job is actually performed. Each lesson is introduced via a realistic scenario that requires employees to utilize a variety of skills simultaneously. For example, one scenario might be a customer calling to check on an order. A new hire must look-up the customer’s order in the CRM system while applying their product knowledge to answer questions and using appropriate customer service skills to role-play the conversation. The scenarios are all modeled after the call center’s quality assurance guidelines so new hires practice handling calls correctly from Day 1.

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The scenarios are arranged in order of increasing complexity so that each one introduces a new skill while building on what has already been learned. After learning to respond to a simple “Where’s my order?” scenario, a new hire might be asked to tackle a situation where a customer received the wrong item. The added advantage is the skills that are used most often, such as answering the phone properly, are drilled to perfection throughout the training.

The initial pace of a scenario-based training program is very slow. The first few scenarios take a long time because the new hire must learn a lot of basic skills such as the proper phone greeting and how to look up customer records in the CRM. The pace improves with each successive scenario as employees become proficient with the basic skills. Eventually, the training becomes very fast-paced as employees master the ability to quickly handle new scenarios.

 

Success Stories

Scenario-based training can often reduce new hire training time by 25 to 50 percent. I first discovered this concept as a call center training supervisor in the late 90s when I was given a mandate to cut down new hire training time. One of our new hire training programs took 15 days; 10 classroom days plus up to 5 more days taking live calls with a coach present to provide intensive support. The scenario-based training approach allowed us to reduce the training to just 10 days; 6 classroom days plus 4 days taking live calls with a coach. This created a substantial savings for the call center but also enabled it to be more nimble when staffing up to meet rising call volumes.

Performance also improves with scenario-based training because it eliminates the waste inherent the building block approach while still improving the learning process. One call center implementing this method found their first group of new hires exceeded the call center’s QA score average within a week after training. Another call center reduced average handle time by 10% after implementing scenario-based training.

 

Getting Started

Moving to a scenario-based learning approach requires a little bit of upfront effort, but the savings and improved performance is more than worthwhile in the long run. 

Step 1: Identify performance requirements

Start by identifying the performance required of a fully trained employee. The training program should focus on helping new hires meet these targets. If you don’t already have a clear standard for a fully trained employee, you can look to your quality assurance standards for guidance. 

Step 2: Create Scenarios

Outline a list of progressively difficult scenarios that cover at least 90 percent of the calls agents are likely to receive. You can learn this information by reviewing call-type reports, listening to calls, and enlisting the help of your most experienced agents.

The sequencing is especially important since you want to introduce new skills in each scenario, but also use scenarios to build on skills that were previously learned. Be sure to vary the customer’s demeanor in each scenario too, since not all customers will be happy and easy to assist.

Step 3: Develop Materials

Now it’s time to develop your training materials. Here are a few of the basics:

  • Create a trainer’s manual with instructions for each of the scenario
  • Add data for each scenario to your CRM’s sandbox. 
  • Develop self-paced scenarios to allow learners to practice on their own.

ASTD 2013 ICE Conference Re-cap

I attended the ASTD 2013 International Conference & Exposition in Dallas, Texas last week. This is the premier conference for Training and Development professionals with an estimated 9,000 people in attendance. This conference is always important to me since training is at the core of what I do to help clients improve customer service.

Attending a conference like this can feel like drinking from a fire hose so I’ve put together a summary of my top take-aways from the conference.

Conference Overview
You may want to start by familiarizing yourself with the conference.

Another great resource is a collection of David Kelley’s curated resources from the ASTD 2013 Backchannel. 

Conference Themes
These are the top three themes I took away from the conference.

Theme #1: Where's the Performance?
The whole point of training should be to help people perform their jobs better. This topic was conspicuously lacking at the conference.

The conference was certainly rich in content. There were wonderful sessions, keynotes, and vendors sharing the latest trends in learning. The place was abuzz with technology. You had to literally run and hide if you wanted to avoid networking with amazing people.

The missing piece was why any of this should matter. How can we do a better job of helping the employees we serve improve their performance?

Theme #2: Problem-centered Learning
Most training courses today are built around a specific collection of content. A problem-centered learning approach builds training around a specific problem. The content is only introduced (or discovered by participants) as they need it to help solve a problem. 

For example, let’s say you wanted to learn about geography. You could take a course that taught you all sorts of geographic facts. Or, you could try playing a round of GeoGuessr where you are shown a random location and must try to locate it on a world map. The game-based approach challenges you to develop your geography skills by examining clues in the picture to narrow down the location. (Warning: this game is addictive, especially if you try to beat my high score of 27,151.)

This theme promised to move us closer to performance if we can build training around real work challenges. For example, a customer service training program could be designed around around finding ways to improve customer satisfaction ratings. This could make the training much more useful than simply providing a set of generic customer service skills.

Theme #3: Technology
ASTD released its newly updated competency model in 2013. One of the biggest changes was the introduction of Learning Technologies as an area of expertise for the Training & Development Profession. This recognizes the growing influence of technology in how we deliver training and support our employees’ performance.

Two big technology themes at the conference were social and mobile learning. Social learning is a broad term, but at the conference it primarily meant using social technology like Twitter to help foster learning. Mobile referred to learning from a mobile device such as a phone or tablet. In many ways, conference attendees were doing both since we could access most of the session materials from a mobile application and many of us were exchanging ideas and resources via Twitter throughout the conference.

Another area where I see technology growing is the use of webinars for training. Most webinars today are delivered in a boring death-by-lecture format, but they can actually be highly engaging and interactive if facilitated correctly.

For example, I recently facilitated a customer service training program entirely via webinar for a call center client. The highly interactive class was split into one-hour sessions so participants could apply what they learned before focusing on a new skill. The sessions were highly rated and, more importantly, they used what they learned to improve customer service.

If you attended the conference, or tuned in via Twitter, what were your take-aways?

Three tools that make training more effective

So you've decided to send your employees to training. Maybe it's customer service training, or a time management workshop, or perhaps it's a life-changing transformational leadership development experience.

Whatever it is, you are probably about to waste a lot of time and money.

The goal of training should be to help people improve performance. Many training programs focus instead on delivering information. In many cases, it may not even be the right information.

Fortunately, a some simple adjustments can change all this. I've assembled a few of my favorite tools to help your next training event deliver results.

Learning Objectives Worksheet
Many training programs fail to achieve their goals because, well, there are no goals. You can fix this by writing goals that target the specific performance areas you are trying to improve. This worksheet uses the classic A-B-C-D model:

  • Audience: Who is being trained?
  • Behavior: What will they be able to do?
  • Condition: Under what conditions will do it?
  • Degree: How well must they do it?

Download the Worksheet

Workshop Planner
Preparation and follow-up are the keys to a successful training program. This tool helps you perform a simple needs analysis and then create an action plan to maximize the training's impact. And, it's all done on one page.

Download the Worksheet

Employee Development Worksheet
Many Individual Development Plans (IDPs) fall short because they focus on activities rather than results. It really doesn't matter how many books you read or conferences you attend or training classes sign up for. What matters is whether you can use those books, conferences, and training classes to improve performance.

The employee development worksheet helps create a targeted IDP that gets results. 

Download the Worksheet