How to motivate employees to learn new customer service skills

I once delivered the same customer service workshop over 200 times in a two-year period. Thousands of employees attended.

Over time, I learned I could split the classes into three distinct groups:

• Motivated: Enthusiastic employees who were eager to learn.

• Neutral: Employees who willing to go along, but weren't fully engaged.

• Hostile: Upset employees who used the class to air their grievances.

I was the same trainer each time. The survey results were almost always extremely positive, even with the hostile classes. Yet it was only the motivated employees who I could count on to go back to work and implement new skills.

So what was different?

The big variable was the manager. The motivated employees all had a manager who did three specific things that the other managers didn't do.

I’m going to share their secrets with you along with a tool I use to put these secrets into action.

Secret #1: Preparation

"It's too hot in here. That's my first complaint."

The employee made it clear she didn't want to be in the customer service training class. We had a few moments before the workshop began, so I spent some time talking to her.

She hadn't been told what the class was about or why she was attending. "Mandatory training" was all her manager had given her. So she had arrived expecting to be upset.

This happened a lot.

Employees often showed up to training without a clear idea why. All they knew was the trainer was from corporate (me) and they were required to attend. It wasn't a great set-up.

A few classes were different.

Those employees had been thoroughly prepared by their manager. Specifically, they knew the answers to three important questions:

1. What is the training about?

2. Why is the training important?

3. What will I be expected to do with that I learn today?

#2: Attendance

A lot of managers chose not to attend the training with their employees. Most said they were too busy, which is manager code for "not a priority."

Employees resented this because they felt their manager should be there. The hostile classes used their manager's absence as an opportunity to air grievances.

The motivated group was different. Their manager was always there.

They kicked off the class by reinforcing what the class was about, why the class was important, and how it was going to help them all.

These managers participated and encouraged their team to get involved, too. They knew they would have to reinforce the new skills with their team after the class ended, so they learned all they could.

Secret #3: Follow-up

Many managers never followed-up with their employees after the training. They didn't coach their employees or give them any feedback. These managers couldn't reinforce the training because they didn't attend.

As a result, their employees quickly reverted back to their old habits.

The motivated group of employees were different.

Their managers instinctively understood the 70-20-10 rule, which says that employees learn more from their manager and their job experiences than they do from formal training.

These managers always reinforced the skills learned in training. Having attended the training themselves, they were very familiar with the content. They coached employees, gave feedback, and celebrated wins.

The motivated employees' managers often asked me for more tools and resources. My free Customer Service Tip of the Week email was created when a manager asked me for a resource to help remind her team of the skills we covered in class.

Conclusion

The managers whose employees were motivated to learn did three specific things:

1. Preparation: they prepared employees for training.

2. Attendance: they participated in the training, too.

3. Follow-up: they reinforced the concepts taught in training.

I've created a workshop planning tool to help you implement these three secrets the next time your employees need training. You can download it here.

The tools works in nearly every training situation:

• Live, in-person training

• Live, webinar-based training

• E-learning or other self-paced learning

You can learn more about using the tool from this short video.

Prepare employees for training from How to Design and Deliver Training Programs by Jeff Toister

How to gain customer service skills when you're not working

It's hard to build customer service skills when you can't practice.

Perhaps you're a student, in-between jobs, or transitioning into a new career. Whatever the situation, you want to practice the essential customer service skills that will help you succeed in your new job.

Fortunately, there's a way to do it, even if you aren’t currently serving customers.

A lot of customer service boils down to good people skills. So you can practice your core service skills in any situation where you're interacting with other people.

One of those opportunities is when you are the customer. Here are a few of my favorite exercises for building rapport, listening, and problem-solving skills.

Grow your rapport skills

Rapport is essential to great customer service. It's a process of creating a personal connection with another person so they know, like, and trust you.

It also makes service more fun when we get along with the other person. Here are three exercises you can use to practice your rapport skills while you are a customer.

Exercise #1: Make the first move

Practice your best greeting by greeting customer service employees, even if that means you must greet them first. For instance, you might approach an employee in a retail store to ask for assistance or ask a cashier how they're doing before they ask you.

Exercise #2: Full attention

Practice giving customers your full attention by giving service providers your full attention. Put your cell phone away and eliminate other distractions while someone is serving you. This will make it easier to make a connection and build with the other person.

Exercise #3: Introduce yourself

There are many situations where a service provider introduces themselves to customers. When this happens to you, practice introducing yourself to the employee. Get comfortable sharing your name and learning the name of the person who is helping you.

LinkedIn Learning subscribers can watch this short video to learn more about these exercises.

Create connections with people from How to Get Great Customer Service by Jeff Toister

Elevate your listening skills

Customer service professionals are in the business of helping customers. That starts with listening carefully to identify opportunities to serve.

You can practice your ability to identify customer needs by spotting opportunities to be helpful to the people serving you.

This exercise is called Make Their Day. It works by doing just two things:

1. Look for opportunities to be helpful to the person serving you.

2. Take action to make their day easier.

Here are a few examples:

• Return unwanted clothing to their displays after you use the dressing room in a retail store.

• Gather account numbers and other necessary information before calling customer service.

• Clean your table when you are finished eating at a fast food restaurant.

LinkedIn Learning subscribers can watch this short video to learn more about this exercise.

Show some customer service love from How to Get Great Customer Service by Jeff Toister

Sharpen your problem-solving skills

The real work begins after we build rapport and listen to our customers needs. Now we need to take action and provide solutions.

Here are two exercises that can help you develop your customer service problem-solving skills.

Exercise #1: Refocus on solutions

It's easy to focus on blame when you experience a service failure, but it's that blame that causes customers to get upset. You can practice the art of defusing emotional situations by refocusing the conversation on finding a solution to the issue.

Exercise #2: Admit your mistakes

Customers often make mistakes that contribute to service failures, but we're reluctant to admit it. You can improve your problem-solving skills (and get better service), when you admit any mistakes you made and politely ask a customer service employee for assistance.

LinkedIn Learning subscribers can watch this short video to learn more about these exercises.

Be part of the solution from How to Get Great Customer Service by Jeff Toister

Conclusion

You don't have to wait to get a job in customer service to build your skills. Everyday interactions are often opportunities to practice various techniques.

Here are a few more resources that can help:

LinkedIn Learning subscribers can find even more exercises in my course, How to Get Great Customer Service. If you don’t have a subscription, a 30-day trial is available. You might also get access through your local library.

If you want to take your skills to the next level, you can try my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning. It covers all the essential service skills and provides you with a nice certificate of completion that you can add to your LinkedIn profile.

You might also consider volunteering at a thrift store, museum, community theatre, or other organization where you can interact with the public. Many volunteer opportunities offer flexible scheduling without any long-term commitments.

How to improve customer service training with the 70-20-10 rule

What is the right amount of time to spend on training?

That's the question a customer service leader recently asked me. He had contacted me with some questions about lesson plans for a training class he was running with his team.

The team had gathered to take my Customer Service Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning. It was taking the team 4.5 hours to watch the videos and complete the exercises as a group. The manager wondered if this was too much, or too little time.

My answer surprised him because I suggested he spend less time on training, not more.

Instead, I suggested he leverage a little-known concept called the 70-20-10 rule. It could easily cut the time spent on training by nearly 50 percent while generating better results.

Here's what it is and how you can use it.

What is the 70-20-10 rule?

The concept was first developed based on research from the Center for Creative Leadership that showed leaders developed their skills from a variety of sources:

• 70 percent of their skills came from challenging assignments.

• 20 percent were learned from a boss or mentor.

• 10 percent came from formal training.

Two big caveats here:

• The word "rule" implies it's hard and fast science, but it’s not. It's more of a guide.

• While originally derived from leadership training, it's a good model to follow for other training topics.

I've had tremendous success applying this concept to customer service training by acknowledging that we learn a lot more from our experiences and our boss than we do from a formal class.

The amount of time you spend training is a lot less relevant than whether you align all three parts of the 70-20-10 model so they send the same message.

"70 percent" = learning from daily work

Most of what we learn comes from experience. While the 70 percent in 70-20-10 is not a hard rule, it’s a good reminder that our experiences play an important role in the learning process.

Your smartphone is an example.

You figured out how to use it without ever attending a class. Perhaps you asked a friend for a quick tip or watched a YouTube video, but you directed all of your own learning.

That’s the power of experience.

One of my recommendations to the customer service leader was to break the formal class into small chunks so employees could spend more time practicing their skills.

For example, Customer Service Foundations contains a 3 minute and 17 second video that explains a technique to easily start conversations with customers. I suggested the manager follow this plan:

1. Have employees watch the video on their own.

2. Ask employees to practice the technique on the job for one day.

3. Gather the group for a team discussion about their experience.

That plan would dramatically re-allocate how training time was spent:

• Formal training: 3 minutes, 17 seconds to watch the training video

• Experience: One day of on-the-job practice and experimentation

• Boss or mentor: 10 minutes for a team discussion

"20 percent" = learning from a boss or mentor

A lot of what we learn comes from a boss, mentor, or some other influential person. They impart information, challenge us to grow, and in the case of a boss, hold us accountable.

A credit union sent all new tellers to the corporate office for the same formal training program. After attending the program, an audit revealed tellers in some branches were following the training while tellers in other branches had developed shortcuts that made their jobs easier, but resulted in poor customer service and less accuracy.

What caused the difference?

The tellers who excelled after training had managers who set clear expectations, gave regular feedback, and reinforced what was learned in the formal class. The tellers who struggled had managers who were more hands-off or actively coached the tellers to disregard what they learned in training.

One way to fix this is with a workshop planning tool.

It's a simple way to get training participants, their managers, and the trainer all on the same page before training ever happens. Here's a short video that explains how it works:

"10 percent" = formal training

Formal training includes classes, eLearning, and other highly structured learning events. It also includes training videos, such as the ones I've made with LinkedIn Learning.

This is often where new skills or concepts are introduced for the first time. For many organizations, formal training is a great way to ensure employees learn a consistent way of doing things.

That was the case at the credit union.

Every teller attended the same class, taught by the same trainer. The curriculum was standardized, so each subsequent class received the same information, completed the same activities, and had to demonstrate the same skills to pass.

Yet the performance of tellers attending the training was widely variable.

That's the lesson I shared with the customer service leader who contacted me. Formal training is important, but it's more important to align coaching and on-the-job experience with what people learning in training.

Conclusion

The best training aligns all three elements of the 70-20-10 rule.

1. Formal training: introduce a new concept

2. Manager/mentor: reinforce the concept

3. Experience: practice the concept

Here’s the overall plan I recommended to the manager:

1. Have employees watch the training videos on their own, assigning one ~five minute video at a time. (Total time = 1 hour, 22 minutes.)

2. Ask employees to practice the skills highlighted in each video on the job.

3. Gather the team to discuss their experiences (total time = 1 hour).

This would shave two hours from the original training plan. You can find a more detailed explanation of how to best use training videos here.

LinkedIn Learning subscribers can learn more about the 70-20-10 rule from this short video.

Incorporating the 70-20-10 rule into learning design from Instructional Design: Adult Learners by Jeff Toister

What skills do you need to be a customer service trainer?

Quite a few people have contacted me recently for advice on becoming a trainer.

I've mentored trainers for over 20 years, and there are six skills that are absolutely essential. And while my focus is on customer service training, these skills are universal.

Any trainer should have them.

This post highlights each of the skills. You'll also find some some additional resources, including links to some of my LinkedIn Learning courses, that can help you fill any gaps.

You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to view the courses, but a 30-day trial is available. The great thing is your subscription gets you access to the entire library, not just my courses.

As always, please leave a comment or contact me if you have any questions. I'm happy to help!

Skill #1: Customer service skills

Too obvious?

A trainer needs to know the content they're training. As simple as that might sound, it's not always the case.

Corporate trainers are routinely asked to train leadership skills, even though they've never led a team. They're asked to train sales teams, even though they don't sell. And they're asked to train customer service, even though they've never served a customer.

You can test the absurdity of trying to train something you don't know by picking a different topic. Would you...

• Take guitar lessons from someone who couldn't play guitar?

• Take dance lessons from someone who didn't know how to dance?

• Take driving lessons from someone who had never driven?

Of course not!

So the first step to being a customer service trainer is to make sure you're awesome at customer service.

One resource that can help you develop elite skills is my LinkedIn Learning course, Customer Service Foundations. Over 150,000 people have taken this course because it covers a broad spectrum of essential skills, including building rapport, exceeding expectations, and solving problems.

Skill #2: Perform a gap analysis

This skill can save you a lot of effort. It involves identifying the gap between where you want to be and where you are now, and then analyzing how to get there.

Many of the training requests I get are too vague. Here are some real examples:

• We want to improve customer service.

• We need help with upset customers.

• We need a refresher.

The trouble with these vague requests is it's impossible to know what training is needed, or whether any training is necessary at all.

Here's a different example that might help. Imagine I'm going to the hardware store. What tool should I buy?

That question doesn't make much sense without more context, does it? You'd probably want to know more about the project I'm working on, what tools I already have, and my general ability with tools.

A gap analysis helps you get more specific with training.

It takes a generic request for "customer service training" and transforms it into something specific by digging deeper. Here are the three steps to conducting a gap analysis:

1. Identify the goal.

2. Identify the present state.

3. Analyze the gap between the goal and the present state.

For example, if your customer service team has an 85 percent customer satisfaction goal, and the current average is 83 percent, you know the gap is two percentage points. Before doing any training, you'll want to know why the rating isn't already at 85.

That's where a gap analysis comes in handy. I've put together this guide to help you out.

Skill #3: Identify training issues

Not every workplace performance problem is a training issue. A good trainer should be able to tell the difference between a training problem and a non-training problem.

A client once contacted me for team building training. She wanted to send her entire team through a half-day workshop designed to improve their internal customer service skills.

When I asked her a few probing questions, she admitted the real problem was one employee who had an abrasive personality.

Training wouldn't have helped. It might even have made it worse, if employees resented having to attend training when the source of the problem was clear. What the leader really needed to do was address the issue with the abrasive member of her team.

You can only fix three problems with training. A gap in:

• Knowledge

• Skill

• Ability

Trainers often refer to these as KSAs for short.

Training won't solve problems caused by a lack of resources, conflicting priorities, defective products, belligerent coworkers, or inefficient procedures.

You can learn more about determining whether something is a training issue from this short video.

Is this a training issue? from How to Design and Deliver Training Programs by Jeff Toister

Skill #4: Create learning objectives

Imagine you're asked to train employees to respond to customer inquiries. What content would you share? How would you decide whether learners had been fully trained?

Trainers often write vague statements and call them learning objectives, but they aren't really. Take this one, for example:

Learn to respond to customer inquiries.

This statement isn't a true learning objective because it lacks specificity. What specific content needs to be trained? How can we tell if someone has developed the right KSAs?

The ABCD model can help you quickly transform vague learning statements into real objectives. It's an acronym that stands for:

• A = Audience: Who is being trained?

• B = Behavior: What behavior does the audience need to do?

• C = Condition: Under what conditions will the behavior be evaluated?

• D = Degree: To what degree of accuracy must the behavior be demonstrated?

Here's how that customer inquiry objective might look using the ABCD model:

Customer service representatives will provide a timely response to a customer inquiry during in-class simulations five times without error.

You can see the breakdown:

• A = Audience: Customer service representatives

• B = Behavior: provide a timely response to a customer inquiry

• C = Condition: during in-class simulations

• D = Degree: five times without error

There's still some wiggle-room in this objective, such as what constitutes a timely response, or what customer inquiries will be used. However, it's far more specific and can better focus the trainer and learners.

You can download an ABCD objectives worksheet to help set your own learning objectives. This short video will provide even more information.

Develop learning objectives from How to Design and Deliver Training Programs by Jeff Toister

Skill #5: Facilitate learning

There are lots of ways to deliver training, but sometimes the simplest approach works great. That's why I recommend the tell, show, do method to trainers.

Many trainers spend too much time telling. In technical terms, this is what’s referred to as the “boring lecture.” The tell, show, do method helps trainers correct this issue. 

For instance, let's say I want to train my contact center agents to deliver a great phone greeting. The tell, show, do method might go like this:

1. Tell: Explain how to deliver a great phone greeting.

2. Show: Demonstrate a great phone greeting.

3. Do: Ask participants to practice giving their best greeting.

This LinkedIn Learning video provides an example of what that lesson might look like.

Develop the perfect phone greeting from Phone-Based Customer Service by Jeff Toister

Skill #6: Evaluate learning

All that training has to result in something. A trainer must be able to evaluate whether learning has occurred.

The easiest way to evaluate learning is to go back to your learning objectives. Can the learner demonstrate that they are able to fulfill the objectives?

For example, imagine your objective is this:

Customer service representatives will provide a timely response to a customer inquiry during in-class simulations five times without error.

You’ll know someone is trained when respond to mock customer inquiries five times in a row without error. On the other hand, a learner who makes a few mistakes will need some additional practice until they can finally go error-free five times in a row.

This is where a more advanced technique is needed.

You might have heard about something called the "learning curve." There really is a curve, and it consists of four distinct stages. Assessing where someone is on the curve is a critical skills for trainers.

Here are the four stages:

1. Unconscious incompetence: you don't know what you don't know

2. Conscious incompetence: you know what you don't know

3. Conscious competence: you know what you know

4. Unconscious competence: you don't know what you know

Most learners are at stage 3, conscious competence, when they complete learning objectives. It means they can demonstrate the required performance, but they might be overly conscious about it. Think about when you took your driving test to get your license. That’s a perfect example of what conscious competence feels like (assuming you passed!)

Innate skills reside at the unconscious competence level. That's where learners can use skills correctly without even thinking about it. For example, you can probably drive a car today without even thinking about it.

This short blog post explains the progression of a new hire from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

Additional Resources

There are a few resources that can help you develop your skills as a trainer.

One is your local Association for Talent Development (ATD) chapter. Many chapters offer mentor programs that will pair you with an experienced trainer who can guide your development.

If I had to recommend just one book for new trainers, it would be Telling Ain't Training, by Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps. It covers the basics very nicely.

Finally, my How to Design and Deliver Training Programs course on LinkedIn Learning will walk you through all the basics. You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to view the entire course, but a 30-day trial is available.

Training programs that get results from How to Design and Deliver Training Programs by Jeff Toister

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When customer service training is the lazy way out

The assistant called on behalf of her boss.

Ashley (not her real name) had been instructed to round up some quotes for customer service training. She had dutifully performed an internet search for customer service trainers and discovered some of my courses on LinkedIn Learning.

The boss had given Ashley simple instructions. Find some trainers, learn about their standard training program, and find out how much the training costs.

I asked a few questions to learn more about the training request and what problem the company was trying to solve. It was quickly apparent that the biggest problem was Ashley's boss was being lazy.

He was falling short on one of his most fundamental responsibilities as a leader. The manager failed to provide a clear vision to Ashley. He had also failed to provide a clear vision to the employees he wanted trained. In fact, he wasn’t sure what he wanted—he just hoped that hiring a trainer would make it better.

Here's how I knew the manager was being lazy, and how you can avoid falling into the same trap.

Questions to ask before requesting training

There's a list of questions I like to ask potential clients who contact me for customer service training. Here are the questions I asked Ashley along with her answers.

Why is this project important?
"I don't really know. I think it's because some employees have lost focus. We recently rolled out a new accounting software program that's caused some internal challenges, so that might have something to do with it."

How will your boss evaluate success?
"I don't know. He just told me to get some quotes."

What do people need to do that they aren't doing now?
"We have some rules of conduct that some employees haven't acknowledged. I guess they should be following those."

Are there any factors besides training that might impact performance?
"I'm not sure."

Notice Ashley gave vague answers to all of these questions. It's not her fault—her boss gave her this assignment without giving her complete information.

Leaders need to provide clear direction, but clarity often takes time. Time to clarify what good performance looks like. Time to observe employees and talk to them. Time to identify the root cause of an issue. Time to articulate a clear vision.

Ashley’s boss was being lazy when he tried to skip all that.

Let's look at how another customer service leader answered those same questions. This particular leader clearly spent much more time getting clarity about what she wanted.

Why is this project important?
"Our team doesn't have the best reputation, and we're trying to change that. Frankly, my boss has given me a mandate to improve our survey scores and reduce customer complaints. We're working on a comprehensive initiative to improve service. This includes improving processes, upgrading our self-service technology, and giving our employees new skills to better serve customers."

How will you evaluate success?
"Two primary ways. One is by observing customer interactions with our employees to see if there's been a change in behavior. The second is from feedback shared on our customer service survey. My boss gave me a target score to achieve, and I'd like to achieve it."

What do people need to do that they aren't doing now?
"My team often gets flustered when there's a line of customers waiting, which often leads to more customer complaints. Our survey results indicate wait times are our biggest source of dissatisfaction. I'd like to give my team skills to help prevent customers from getting upset."

Are there any factors besides training that might impact performance?
"We're working on ways to reduce the lines, or get more staff when the line gets too long. We've also invested in new self-service technology that should help us serve customers faster. And we are implementing some new procedures to make our service more convenient for customers."

Notice how much more clarity this leader had about her team's training needs. And she's not leaning on training in isolation. Her training request was one aspect of a multi-pronged approach to improving service.

How do you know if employees need training?

Training is fundamentally about solving problems. Employees are given training to help them overcome a challenge so they can improve their job performance.

The trick is knowing whether or not training is the right solution.

Training can only fix gaps in knowledge, skills, or ability. This means an employee is lacking one or more of those things thats needed to get the job done.

• Knowledge: the information needed to do the job.

• Skills: the techniques needed to do the job.

• Abilities: the degree to which employees can use their skills.

A leader should clarify that the reason employees aren't performing is one or more gaps in knowledge, skills, or abilities, before requesting training. At minimum, the leader should engage a training professional to help identify the specific gap rather than prescribe a generic training program.

Here's more information on diagnosing when an employee needs training.

Ashley's boss hadn't yet determined what performance needed to improve, or why employees weren't already performing at the desired level. Without that information, it's difficult to know if training will have any impact, or just be a waste of time.

There have been many occasions in my career when I've been asked to conduct training, but the real problem turned out to be something else. It takes extra effort to find those answers, effort that lazy managers try to avoid.

Additional Resources

You can avoid being a lazy manager like Ashley’s boss by putting in the effort to achieve clarity for yourself and your team. Start by answering these questions the next time you are considering training.

1. Why is this project important?

2. How will we evaluate success?

3. What do employees need to do that they're not doing now?

4. What factors besides training might impact performance?

5. What are the gaps in knowledge, skills, or abilities?

Feel free to contact me if you get stuck. I'm happy to schedule a call and walk you through these questions.

You might discover that you need some training on how to find the answers to these questions. One option is my needs analysis course on LinkedIn Learning, which has been taken by more than 35,000 people. It can help you identify whether employees need training, and if they do, what training they need.

The course follows a training request from a senior leader and highlights various techniques for investigating the root cause of the problem. You'll see how an analysis can be done quickly, and how this upfront effort can save time and money.

The course is free with your LinkedIn Learning subscription. A 30-day trial is available if you’re not already a subscriber. Here's a preview of the course:

Welcome from Instructional Design: Needs Analysis by Jeff Toister

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Training Needs Analysis: What it is, and why you need it

Updated: July 2, 2024

Growth had created a problem for my client.

The company owned and managed apartment communities. Each community manager was responsible for training their team. They each did it their own way. Some were more effective than others.

The results were inconsistent.

My client was the vice president of operations. She asked me to design a training program for new apartment leasing managers.

The VP wanted to ensure every leasing manager received consistent training.

She was eager to get started right away. I convinced her a needs analysis was the fastest way to get results. In this article, I'll cover:

• What is a training needs analysis?

• Why is a training needs analysis important?

• How do you conduct a training needs analysis?

What is a training needs analysis?

A training needs analysis is the process of identifying the specific training that's needed to solve a business problem and the best way to deliver it.

Imagine you wanted to build a house. You wouldn’t just buy some building supplies and start banging boards together. You’d first decide on what type of house you wanted, and then hire an architect to design it.

A needs analysis is a similar process for training programs. It helps you decide exactly what you need.

A typical needs analysis consists of three broad stages:

1. Communicate with sponsors to clarify goals.

2. Gather and analyze data.

3. Present conclusions and make recommendations.

Why is a training needs analysis important?

A training needs analysis gives any training program a much higher chance of success.

There are a number of benefits:

• Save Time: Eliminate waste from the training process.

• Improve Performance: Focus on what's needed to succeed.

• Increase Consistency: Achieve more consistent results.

A needs analysis clarifies exactly what training is needed.

I helped one client reduce new hire training time for customer service reps by 50 percent. A needs analysis showed the old program spent too much time on knowledge employees rarely used, and not enough time helping new hires develop the skills they used every day.

Sometimes, training is only part of the solution.

One inbound call center added $1 million in annual revenue. The needs analysis identified that reps lacked product information about the products they sold. Providing product samples and guides in addition to sales training helped employees sell more confidently.

In some cases, training is unnecessary. 

The CEO of a company I worked for once asked me to conduct customer service training to save an important contract. My needs analysis revealed the problem wasn't related to training—so we implemented a different solution and saved the contract.

A training needs analysis does not need to take a long time.

Some projects can be done in just a few hours, while even more complicated initiatives can be completed in just a few weeks.

How do you conduct a training needs analysis?

A typical needs analysis consists of three broad stages:

1. Communicate with sponsors to clarify goals.

2. Gather and analyze data.

3. Present conclusions and make recommendations.

Here's what that needs analysis entailed for my client, the company that owned and managed apartment communities.

Communicate with sponsors to clarify goals

Start by clarifying the training project's goals with your sponsors. This focuses your efforts and makes it easier to measure the impact of the training later on.

I worked with the vice president to set a goal as part of the needs analysis process: new leasing managers would achieve a 20 percent lease closing ratio within their first 90 days.

Only half of new hires currently achieved that mark. The overall average was 19 percent. Here were the results from the previous eight new hires:

Gather and analyze data

This stage is a bit like being a detective. You have to look in various places to find data and information that will help you crack the case.

There are often surprising discoveries as you do your analysis.

Half of new leasing managers did achieve the 20 percent goal. There was something different about their training compared to the four who fell short of the goal.

I examined a number of data sources for the apartment community needs analysis:

• Interviewed new hires and managers from various locations.

• Reviewed existing training materials.

• Analyzed performance data from previous hires.

One discovery is that community managers were inconsistent in how they coached new leasing managers. Some were very hands on, while others spent very little time with their new employees.

The hands-on managers generally achieved much better performance.

Present conclusions and make recommendations

The needs analysis concludes when you present your findings to the project sponsor and make recommendations based on your conclusions. The goal is to gain agreement on the best way to develop the training.

The needs analysis for the apartment community made it clear that community managers needed to be more hands on. Helping them become better coaches wasn’t in the original scope of the project, but the vice president was able to make it a requirement for the new program.

That insight led to impressive results.

In our initial pilot, every new hire achieved the 20 percent goal within 90 days, and the overall average climbed 7 points, from 19 to 26 percent:

Needs Analysis Resources

My LinkedIn Learning course will help you conduct your own needs analysis.

• Resource: Sponsor interview questions

• Video: Instructional Design: Needs Analysis

The training video will walk you step-by-step through the process of conducting a training needs analysis, and it even provides you with complete sample project.

You'll need a LinkedIn Learning subscription to watch it. Here's a short preview of the video.

Welcome from Instructional Design: Needs Analysis by Jeff Toister

How to Get the Most Out of Training Videos

Training videos are increasing in popularity.

Platforms like LinkedIn Learning offer high-quality training from industry experts, and have become vital sources of content for learning job-related skills. There's good reason for this:

• Videos cost far less than hiring a trainer.

• It's a lot more convenient to learn on your own time.

• Video can be more effective than live training.

That last one is a bit of a surprise to most customer service leaders I talk to. And there's a giant caveat—you have to change the way you use video. 

Here are the techniques you can apply to get the most out of training videos.

Step One: Set Clear Learning Objectives

Let's say you want your employees to do a better job serving upset customers. 

I have a LinkedIn Learning course called Working with Upset Customers, but just asking employees to take the course creates a problem. "Take this course," sends a signal that the only objective is to complete the training.

That's not your goal. 

You send employees to training because you want them to learn something they can apply on the job that will help them improve performance. So before you assign a video, it's essential to set clear learning objectives.

By the way, this is exactly what you should do when you send yourself to training!

Back to the upset customers example. You might create an objective for this training by thinking about what specifically you want employees to do differently in situations where they serve an upset customer. 

For instance, you might decide to you want to focus on de-escalation skills to avoid complaints. You could set this as the learning objective: 

Customer service reps will demonstrate the ability to de-escalate an angry caller so the customer is feeling neutral or happy at the end of the interaction.

You’d be able to determine whether the training was complete by monitoring a phone call for each participant where the customer started out angry and determining whether the rep was able to successfully de-escalate the situation.

You can get more help with learning objectives from this guide.

Step Two: Assign Short Segments

The old way of consuming a training video is to sit back and watch the entire thing from start to finish. Learners don’t actively participate in the learning, but somehow hope for the best.

Customer service leaders cite this as the number one challenge with training videos. Employees push back because spending an hour watching an instructional video is no kind of fun. And it doesn't produce results.

The better way to do it is to watch a short segment at a time. My courses on LinkedIn Learning are split into short modules that are each three to five minutes long. Here's how it works:

1. Watch one 3-5 minute video.

2. Ask participants to complete the application exercise from the video.

3. Give feedback and discuss progress.

We can apply this right now to de-escalation training. The first skill is recognizing our own natural instinct to argue with an upset customer or try to get away from them. 

Start by watching this short video.

Understanding our natural instincts from Working with Upset Customers by Jeff Toister

Next, spend a day serving customers and recognize when you experience the same fight or flight instinct the barista in the training video experienced. Here are some common symptoms:

• Flushed face

• Increased heart rate

• Shortness of breath

• Muscle tension

• Sweating

• Tunnel vision

Finally, reflect on what you learned from recognizing the fight or flight instinct. Were you able to accept the challenge of helping an angry customer feel better?

This technique of watching just one short segment at a time is called microlearning. You can learn more from this guide.

Step Three: Blend Video with Other Mediums

Most training, including video and face-to-face, works best when you blend it with other training mediums. These include team meetings, one-on-one coaching conversations, self-paced activities, and on-the-job application.

LinkedIn Learning courses included a Q&A feature, where you can ask questions about the course and respond to posts from other participants. It’s a great way to deepen your knowledge and make the training interactive!

I often post discussion questions to my courses, and regularly respond to questions from learners.

Blending in other mediums doesn’t require a lot of work. Here's one way you might create a blended program for de-escalation training:

1. Team Meeting: Discuss specific situations where customers get angry.

2. Video: Assign this video on recognizing the fight or flight instinct.

3. On-the-Job: Ask employees to note when they experience the instinct.

4. One-on-One: Give each employee individual feedback.

5. Team Meeting: Discuss successes and challenges at the next team meeting.

There's a good chance you're already holding team and one-on-one meetings with your employees. And it also happens to be a highly effective way to build new skills.

Conclusion

To get the most out of training, we need to shift from a content consumption mindset to a performance improvement mindset.

I can help with that.

Here are facilitator’s guides for my most popular LinkedIn Learning courses. Use them to create a customized customer service training program.

• Customer Service Foundations

• Working with Upset Customers

Fix Your Training with This Simple Model

A training manager recently called me to talk about empowerment.

She explained employees often worked in silos, and didn't reach out to collaborate with other teams. When there was an issue that required inter-departmental work, employees would just dump it on their supervisor.

The training manager had been tasked with finding an external trainer to help. She found me after watching one of my training courses on Lynda.com.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered the team wasn't ready for training. This is really a common situation—leaders send their employees to training too early, and they don't get the results they want.

Here's how I determined that from a short conversation, and here's how it can be fixed.

Where Traditional Training Falls Short

You may have had a big bowl of candy once the dust settled on Halloween. 

It's a big temptation. You know you aren't supposed to eat the candy, but it's right there. Staring at you. Tempting you. I’m not going to lie—I ate way too much candy.

The knowledge that you shouldn't eat the candy can be gained by training. But it's your environment, i.e. the candy bowl in plain site, that tempts you to eat some anyway. The solution is to change the environment. Remove the candy bowl and you will eat less candy.

The customer service team in the training manager's company faced a similar environmental challenge. 

Whenever employees would bring a challenge to their supervisor, the supervisor would simply take on the challenge. She never spent time showing employees how to handle these issues. After awhile, employees embraced the inevitable and just dumped work on their supervisor whenever they could, knowing that's what would happen anyway.

I walked through this with the training manager. She laughed a bit and admitted the last time they had brought in an external trainer, the training had been well-received by it didn't stick. 

The supervisor had always been too busy to help her team develop their new skills.

Here's the takeaway that applies to all of us: if you want training to stick, you must first adjust the environment and get leaders fully plugged in.

The 70-20-10 Model

There's a model that can help you address this issue. 

It's called the 70-20-10 rule. The concept was first developed based on research from the Center for Creative Leadership that showed leaders developed their skills from a variety of sources:

• 70 percent of their skills came from challenging assignments

• 20 percent were learned from a boss or mentor

• 10 percent came from formal training.

Two caveats here:

• The word "rule" implies it's hard and fast science, but it's really more of a guide.

• While originally derived from leadership training, it's a good model to follow for other training topics.

So let's apply this to the customer service team that needs to collaborate with other departments:

Even if we sent them to a terrific training program, two factors would quickly override anything they learned. The boss (~20 percent of learning) would continue taking challenging assignments (~70 percent of learning) off their plate. Game over.

Now imagine what would happen if we could adjust the environment and got the supervisor to buy-in to some new behaviors. Here's how that might fit into the 70-20-10 model.

• 70 percent: Employees are asked to work through challenges.

• 20 percent: The supervisor coaches employees through challenges.

• 10 percent: Employees are given training on internal customer service.

In this scenario, the training and the environment (daily work + boss) are all aligned.

Take Action

Think about the areas where you want your employees to develop. Take a moment to consider how each aspect of the 70-20-10 model fits in:

• 70 percent: What challenges present learning opportunities?

• 20 percent: How can you guide them as their leader?

• 10 percent: What helpful skills can employees learn in training?

How to Know When Your Employees Need Training

Employee training has some big problems.

It's a big expense. There's the cost of hiring a trainer and developing the materials. You have to pay employees to attend. Many companies have to run overtime to backfill shifts while staff attends a class.

That investment might be worthwhile if the training worked. It often doesn't.

There are many reasons why training doesn't stick. Managers are often too busy to prepare employees for training or coach them through implementing new skills afterwards. The training itself may be poorly designed. Or employees may not be fully bought in.

Training is also overprescribed. 

There are many situations where another solution is more appropriate. My own analysis suggests that training only accounts for one percent of customer service employees' performance.

The best solution to all of this is to train employees when they need to be trained and not train them when training isn't an appropriate solution.

Here's how to know.

The Three Issues Training Can Fix

Training can only fix three types of issues:

• Knowledge: the employee lacks sufficient knowledge.

• Skill: the employee lacks sufficient skill.

• Ability: the employee lacks sufficient ability.

So the only time that training is an effective solution is when employees have gaps in one or more of these areas. 

Some people ask me about the distinction between skill and ability. Skill is the technique involved while ability is a combination of natural talent and skill.

Imagine a warehouse worker lifting products onto a shelf. Skill is the technique the worker uses to lift products safely. Ability is how much the worker can actually lift. The worker can lift heavier weights through training, though there's a limit to how high that weight can go due to the worker's natural ability. 

Here are some issues that can't be fixed by training:

• Lack of standard procedure or process

• Poor policies

• Broken procedures

• Insufficient equipment

• Poor attitude

Test Your Knowledge

Here are three training requests I have actually received. Read each request and determine whether you think training might be an appropriate solution. The answers are in the video below.

Scenario 1: A small department is having a hard time working together because two senior employees create an uncomfortable work environment. Will team building training fix the problem?

Scenario 2: Employees don’t know how to use the organization’s new computer system. Will computer training fix the problem?

Scenario 3: Employees can’t keep up with their workload due to a staffing shortage. Will time management training fix the problem?

Watch this short training video to learn the answers. You'll get to see a group of people from a live train-the-trainer class discussing each scenario before I finally reveal the answers.

Is this a training issue? from How to Design and Deliver Training Programs by Jeff Toister

More Resources

The short video was from my online course, How to Design and Deliver Training Programs. The course is available on LinkedIn Learning. You can get a 30-day trial here.

You may also want to explore alternatives to training. Here's a handy seven-step action plan.

Finally, check out one of the classic training books, Telling Ain't Training, by Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps. This book has been one of my go-to resources for many years.

Advertising disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

How to Make Time For Training

I'm a bit behind on listening to podcasts.

For instance, I've just finished episode 91 of Crack the Customer Code, a wonderful podcast hosted by Adam Toporek and Jeannie Walters. The current episode is #255.

Ironically, the title of episode 91 is "How to Find Time for Training."

One of the topics Adam and Jeannie discussed was restaurants and retailers like Chipotle and Starbucks that shut down the entire operation to conduct employee training. 

As Adam points out in the episode, "That's great for a reset," but shutting down the entire business for training is more of a statement than a long-term solution. And many smaller businesses may find it too economically difficult to close down completely.

Trying to train employees while the business continues to run can be an exercise in creative scheduling and challenging logistics.

It's difficult, but not impossible. Here's what you can do.

Step 1: Focus on What You Need

Many leaders mistakenly believe the challenge is figuring out how long the training should be, who should deliver the training, and when can it be scheduled.

This approach neglects one key decision: what training do you actually need?

My analysis suggests that training often addresses just one percent of the problem's root cause! Why worry about how long the training should be if it's such a small part of the issue?

Imagine you wanted to help your team do a better job of serving angry customers. Here are just a few contributing factors that have nothing to do with training:

• Can you use voice of customer feedback to improve common problems?

• Do customers have access to self-help solutions to simple issues?

• Are employees empowered to resolve typical complaints?

Training won't address any of those.

Now, imagine you first implemented some solutions. You reduced product defects, beefed up self-help, and empowered employees with better policies and procedures to serve their customers.

You might still need training, but now you'd need a lot less.

A client once asked me to conduct training to help its call center employees sound more friendly over the phone. I did some research and spent just a little time talking to the employees. It turned out the call center was severely understaffed several times during the week and wait times expanded up to 30 minutes.

The employees sounded curt because they were in a hurry to get to the next customer!

I was able to help the client solve the problem just be reconfiguring the schedule so staffing levels better matched call volume. This solution eliminated much of the wait time and employees were more relaxed.

The employees suddenly sounded a lot friendlier and we didn't do any training at all.

Step 2: Embrace the 70-20-10 Rule

When most people think of training, they imagine a formal class such as a live workshop or an e-learning program.

The 70-20-10 rule, based on research from the Center for Creative Leadership, tells us this just scratches the surface of how our employees learn.

• 70 percent of learning comes from challenging assignments

• 20 percent of learning comes from a boss or mentor

• 10 percent of learning comes from formal training

The rule was originally intended as a rough guideline for leadership training. It can easily be adapted to other training topics such as customer service.

Look at those percentages again. They tell us that generally speaking, roughly 90 percent of training (70: challenging assignments + 20: boss or mentor) is already happening to some degree. You just need a way to guide it.

For example:

70 percent: Challenging Assignments

• Engage employees to solve problems

• Have employees conduct self-reviews and peer-reviews

• Encourage employees to share best practice solutions to difficult issues

20 percent: Boss or Mentor

• Hold short, weekly team meetings (many use my weekly tips for agenda topics)

• Give employees one-on-one feedback

10 percent: Formal Training

You can save time by leveraging video in many cases. Here's one example where you can use video to reduce training time by 75 percent!

I've also assembled these simple training plans to help you blend experience, mentorship, and formal training into an effective training program takes less than one hour per week.

Conclusion

A lack of time isn't a great excuse for not training your employees.

You can make training work if you do it efficiently. Ditch the old content-heavy, classroom-only training model and adopt a new approach that puts the focus where it belongs: getting results!