How long should new hire training last for customer service employees?

New hire training is under pressure.

Executives want to shorten it. Training costs time and money. The faster new employees can get to work, the better.

New employees want it to be longer. They complain about not getting enough support. Some quickly leave.

I asked people on LinkedIn how long they thought new hire training should last, adding the caveat that I knew it was a trick question. There was a lot of discussion.

Responses generally fell into two categories.

Some felt new hire training is ongoing and should never end. While that's great in theory, try asking your CEO to fund unlimited training. (Spoiler alert: it won't go well.)

The second group offered an arbitrary number based on what they're doing in their company. "Our new hires get four weeks, so four weeks is ideal" was a common type of answer.

The arbitrariness is a problem. How do we know four weeks is the right amount? Especially when our CEO thinks it should be three, but our new hires are asking for five.

A few smarties knew the answer. New hire training should last for a finite amount of time, but how long exactly varies by company and position.

Here's how to find that number for your new hires.

What is new hire training?

Here's my preferred definition of new hire training:

The process of helping a new employee develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need to do their job independently at a minimally proficient level.

This definition illustrates why executives are eager to end training quickly. New hires can't work independently until they're trained, so someone else has to spend time helping them. That's costly.

When should new hire training end?

The definition of new hire training contains clues about when it should end:

• Independence: the employee can do the job on their own.

• Minimally proficient: they can do their job at or above the minimum standard.

There are a couple of things I’d like to point out here.

First, notice there’s no discussion of content. It doesn’t matter how much (or how little) content you cover in training. What matters most is performance. (More on why that matters in a moment.)

Second, keep in mind "minimally proficient" still leaves plenty of room for ongoing development. We hope and expect new hires to continue getting better at the job, but the new hire portion ends when they can meet the minimum job standards on their own.

So the key to fixing an end-point for new hire training is deciding what minimally proficient looks like.

That's fairly easy in some businesses. Contact centers have rigorous quality assurance processes they use to evaluate all their agents against existing standards. Those same standards can be used to evaluate whether a new hire is trained.

No such standards exist in other businesses, which speaks to a larger problem. How can you evaluate your employees without clear performance standards?

One solution is to create learning objectives using the ABCD model.

How do you decide how much training time you need?

New hire training should last for a specific amount of time. This number should not be arbitrary, so we need clear data that tells us how long we really need.

But first, clean up your training program.

New hire training should be focused on helping new employees do their job independently at a minimally proficient level. Check your existing program for two issues that need to be fixed:

1. Cut anything that's not helping you achieve the goal. (There’s probably a lot.)

2. Spend more time helping new hires build the skills they really need.

Next, run a test.

Time how long it takes new hires, on average, to become minimally proficient at their jobs. (That's when new hire training officially ends.)

Use this data to make the case for a specific amount of new hire training. It might help to keep a daily log on each participant, so you can document exactly what they learned and how long it took them to learn it.

There is some good news.

In my experience, new hire training often ends up much shorter after we clean it up. Focusing on achieving specific goals while eliminating unnecessary content often makes the training far more effective.

Finally, it's time to manage the program.

You'll likely have some outliers. Some people will catch on far faster than average, while others will need much more time, if they catch on at all.

It's okay for people to progress through training faster, as long as they can demonstrate the ability to meet the same standards as everyone else.

The slow ones might need more coaching. That's okay, too, as long as they can ultimately do their job with a reasonable amount of extra help. Hiring great people is difficult, and you want to protect your investment.

Take notes about what causes those people to succeed or struggle. You can use that data to provide personalized assistance and continuously improve your program.

Conclusion

There will always be pressure to improve efficiency in business. This approach can help you convince your CEO that’s exactly what you’re doing.

Clearly defining the new hire training period and documenting how long training actually takes can give you two important selling points:

1. You can improve the efficiency of your training program.

2. You'll have real data to justify your recommendations for training time.

How to Improve New Hire Training

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.

A customer service leader recently emailed me for some training advice.

Their onboarding program for new hires included three days of product training. The leader felt new hires were not engaged during the training and frequently failed to retain much of the content. 

He was hoping for a way to get people more excited about three days of product training, but that's not the advice I gave him. Three days of boring, irrelevant content was the problem.

So what should he do?

I interviewed JD Dillon, Chief Learning Officer at Axonify, a company that provides a platform to enable effective microlearning. Dillon gave some excellent suggestions, and I've added a few of my own.

The Interview

You can watch the video of the full 22-minute interview or scroll down to read the highlights.

Ways to Improve New Hire Training

Dillon and I tackled a number of issues in our conversation. Here are some of the top challenges that we discussed.

Why do companies fail to properly train new hires?

Dillon points out that many leaders feel pressed for time. 

They don't think they can spare the necessary moments to create a learning plan, spend time with new hires, evaluate their progress, and provide constructive feedback.

The alternative is a disaster.

Without proper training, employees make more mistakes, are slower to reach peak performance, and are more likely to quit. All of this takes far more of the manager's time than training people right in the first place.

What is the difference between onboarding and new hire training?

Both are important, but there's an essential difference.

Onboarding starts the day an employee is hired, and becomes an ongoing process. For practical purposes, I mark the end of onboarding as the point where an employee is fully trained to do their job. 

There's a lot of stuff that's included in onboarding:

• New hire paperwork

• Compliance stuff

• Tours and orientations

• Getting new hires set up with work tools

• Giving people access to buildings, networks, etc.

Training is also a part of onboarding, where new hires learn the specific knowledge and skills necessary to do their jobs. 

You can learn more from my LinkedIn Learning course, Running Company Onboarding.

What are some common flaws with new hire programs?

There are a number of common challenges that are easily fixed.

The first is creating clear learning objectives. Many new hire programs are content-focused, and the desired results are ill-defined. Once you identify exactly what a fully trained person should be able to do, you can work backwards to create more effective training. 

You can use this worksheet to create your learning objectives.

Another challenge is access to information. Dumping three days worth of product knowledge on a hapless group of new employees is a recipe for disaster. People quickly forget information they don't immediately use.

Dillon suggests finding easy ways to give employees just-in-time access to the information they need. At the 13:25 mark in our interview, he shares an example of a grocery store using the computerized scale in the deli to give employees quick access to how-to information.

A third flaw is a lack of assessment. You need a way to determine whether or not someone is trained.

How can you assess whether someone is trained?

The answer to this question relies on having clear learning objectives (see above). 

Once you clearly define what a fully trained employee should be able to do, you can assess whether they've been trained by observing them doing their jobs.

For example, when I've created new hire training programs for contact center agents, new agents were considered fully trained once they could meet basic quality standards while handling live contacts.

More Training Resources

I've gathered a list of resources that can make it easy for you to create effective new hire training programs.

Start by checking out Dillon's personal website, which has a lot of great insight on improving workplace learning.

If I could buy just one book on how to train, it would be Tellling Ain't Training by Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps. It provides clear and comprehensive information for building simple, yet highly effective training lessons.

Finally, my How to Design and Deliver Training Programs course on LinkedIn Learning can guide you step-by-step through quickly creating an effective training program.

Welcome from How to Design and Deliver Training Programs by

Report: New Hires Lack Customer Service Training

My orientation lasted 15 minutes.

I was a teenager, and this was my first day on my first job. It was a retail clothing store and I had miraculously been hired despite having no experience.

The supervisor spent 15 minutes giving me an orientation to the men's department before announcing she was going on break. She handed me the key to the dressing room and left me by myself.

Predictably, my first customer encounter ended in a service failure.

You can hear the full story if you have access to LinkedIn Learning, but the gist is I didn't yet know our products, policies, or procedures. My entire work history was just 15 minutes long, so I hadn’t even learned basic customer service skills.

That was nearly 30 years ago. According to a new report, this is still a problem today.

One of the biggest reasons we routinely get poor service from customer service employees is they've never been trained.

About the Report

The report was commissioned in June of 2019 by the microlearning company, Axonify, and a company called Ipsos provided the research.

The study surveyed 1,000 Americans who work full or part-time as frontline employees in a variety of industries including retail, contact centers, and insurance.

You can read the full report or skip to my analysis below.

New Hire Training Needs to Improve

The report called out several areas where new hire training can be improved. The first, and most obvious, is a lack of training.

Employees aren't being trained

The only formal training I received at the clothing store was a loss-prevention seminar I attended after having been on the job for about two months. Ironically, I learned that following shady-looking people around the store to prevent them from stealing was called “customer servicing.”

I never received any formal training on actual customer service or the products we sold. My boss once told me to greet everyone who came into my department, but that was about it. What I did learn came through experience.

According to the Axonify report, a lack of training is still a real problem:

• 31 percent of retail employees aren't trained

• 23 percent of contact center agents receive no training

A lack of training creates several big problems:

• Revenue decreases because employees can't sell effectively.

• Costs go up because untrained employees take longer to do their jobs.

• Turnover goes up because a lack of training makes the job less desirable.

Employees need training if they're going to do their jobs well.

It doesn't have to be long, expensive, or complicated. You can quickly create an effective training program with a simple checklist.

There’s no time for training

Many companies fail to train employees because leaders think that training takes too much time. They envision long, boring seminars that take employees away from their jobs.

According to the Axonify report, employees want short, practical training modules:

• 90 percent want to be able to connect with critical information anytime, anywhere.

• 72 percent want training they can complete in a few minutes at work.

The best training often combines short, focused lessons with on-the-job application.

That's why my LinkedIn Learning training videos are filmed in short segments that are each just 3-5 minutes long. Each segment contains a hands-on activity, so you can watch a short lesson and then immediately apply what you learned back on the job.

Called microlearning, this technique can help you train faster and better.

Training is wasted

Think of the last time you went to a formal training class. What percentage of the content did you apply on the job? 

It might have been just one or two techniques that made the class worthwhile. But this also means the rest of the class was wasted.

What if you could have learned the good stuff without having to sit through everything else?

The content we learn in a training class, but never apply on the job, is called scrap learning. Estimates of scrap learning in the typical training program range from 45 to 80 percent.

Training content often goes to waste when it's not personalized, relevant, or delivered effectively. Here are some more results from the Axonify report:

• 91 percent want training that's easy to complete and understand

• 89 percent want personalized and relevant training

• 87 percent want to apply training on the job

My Customer Service Tip of the Week email is an example of training that fits all these criteria. Here's how many customer service leaders use it:

1. Subscribers receive a weekly tip that's easy to read and understand.

2. Teams discuss the tip to make it personalized and relevant to their situation.

3. Employees immediately apply the tip on the job to sharpen their skills.

Take Action

Successful, customer-focused organizations succeed in part because they invest in training their employees. Training doesn't have to be long, complicated, or expensive. It just has to be effective.

I've compiled this list of free customer service training resources to make it easy for you to give your employees the training they need.