How To Make Sure Your Team Doesn’t Forget That Brilliant Training

Buying in training is a commitment, especially if you are a large, international company. There is so much to get right if the training is to be a success. You and your training supplier need to:

• Define the key learning outcomes.
• Involve key stakeholders across your various regions.
• Extrapolate client-specific examples and activities that will not only resonate with participants in all languages and countries but also enable them to practice and apply the skills and concepts they will be learning.
• Guarantee engagement and buy-in across the company.
• Make sure the trainers have a thorough understanding of your business, the context for the training and any particular local requirements.
• Ensure the training material navigates diverse cultural and international boundaries.
• Create an environment for delivering exceptional training.

All this is no mean feat!

But the biggest challenge – and the one that is most important – is sustainability.

You might have a wonderful training on the day – but the risk is that old habits return a few months later.

Consider the Kirkpatrick evaluation method.

At the planning stage, the Kirkpatrick four-level evaluation offers a powerful methodology to think through your training.
Your training provider should be able to work with you to deliver all four levels. If they can’t, it may be a red flag.

• Reaction. Did your team enjoy and value the training?
• Learning. Did they understand and take in what was taught?
• Behaviour. Are they applying the learning in their day to day work?
• Results. Is the training making a real difference in your business?

Or to paraphrase, “Did they like it? Did they learn it? Do they use it? Does it make a difference?”

Our recent experience.

In the large international training programme we recently delivered we were delighted with the wonderful reaction we had from the participants and trainers. But that was just the first step – the reaction. They liked it!

We wanted to help the company become self-sufficient by training them to continue the training internally, fostering the skills on an on-going basis. We addressed this in several ways.

We ran “train the trainer” workshops for nominated country champions to give them the skills to run regular mini-reinforcement sessions.

As part of National Customer Service Week we ran a series of workshops which included teaching the transformative power of using HBDI® thinking preferences in a customer service context.

Management support is crucial if a company wants to create sustainable change, so we ran a Coaching Programme, where we trained team leaders to coach their team members, giving them the tools to observe and listen to calls, spend conscious time catching their team succeeding, give recognition, celebrate their successes, as well as how to support and guide them when they need to adjust course.

We are happy to say all this reinforced the learning and ensured the behaviour across the business continued to change and improve.

But what were the results? Had our work made a difference?

Our key metric for evaluating results was improving the scores they were achieving with their customer satisfaction ratings.

We saw some very big increases – in some regions as high as 150%! We were all delighted to watch this score dramatically increase – and it continues to do so due to the ongoing focus on skills application.

Are you building sustainability into your training?

To get lasting value from any training, sustainability should be built into the programme from the very beginning. If you can evaluate your project at every level, you can ensure both immediate success and future sustainability.

If you would like to know more about how you could transform your customer service to a world class level, then book your free one hour consultation now.