USE CASE: FRONT DESK TRAINING

Worldwide, education budgets are getting slashed.

2017 saw major cuts to US training and education… with more scheduled in various industries in 2019.

In fact, according to Office of Management and Budget, 2019 may see as much as “$7.1 billion or 10.5-percent decrease from the 2017 enacted level”.

With no end in sight for budget cuts to education and training, instructional designers are placed in a difficult situation. How can we maximise our results amongst all these pressures?

This post is the start of a series to show you LearnBrite’s Learner Experience Platform from the inside out. To give you ideas of how you can quickly adapt these spaces and scenarios to:

• be engaging and entertaining,
• look great
• deliver great results, and
• avoid getting your budget slashed by showing a real ROI with your training materials.

Today’s scenario is “Eliminating Negative Habits” and we’re going to look into the how I made the scenario, why it’s a different/special experience, as well as what makes our platform better than other alternatives out there. Before reading, I’d recommend taking the scenario for a spin first.

Quick Introduction

As we all know, staff training has a range of benefits: that’s true regardless of sector.

Yang lists a range of benefits for different parts of organizations, focusing especially on hotels.

For employees, it improves job satisfaction, encourages self-development and develops problem solving skills.

For organizations, it improves profits and reduces both number of accidents and staff turnover.

Depending on the method of training delivery, there can also be extra benefits (which I’ll come back to later on!)

Like the starting the creation of any course, I started by scouring through training courses and articles from different levels and parts of the hospitality sector to understand what exists, what is needed and what we can do to help efficiently.

After getting a lay of the land, I homed in on information regarding front desk training (since this is the area we really wanted to target with this scenario).

From this vast field of information, I found two key points that would help make this training simulation efficient, on point and, above all, useful for employees:

(1) The value of experiences that build empathy for customers

Experiences that help build empathy are of key importance because your front desk staff are the first face of the company for the majority of clients. Having empathy can help front desk staff reach out to customers and provide an experience that goes a little further.

The evidence for the importance of empathy is evident in the number of articles that exist on the subject:

Taryn Oesch wrote an entire article about developing employee empathy and says that, “Empathetic employees are better at customer service, work better with each other and have better sales”

Rupesh lists empathy as the number 1 in “10 Traits of a Great Front Desk Agent”, saying, “Understanding how that guest is feeling and being empathetic can provide comfort to guests as an overall experience factor.”

Lisa Anderson also underlines its importance in training your employees to be great at customer service: “Remember that your customers are people too, and [know] that putting in the extra effort will come back to you ten-fold”

(2) Allowing employees to experience the service from the other side (that of the customer).

Getting employees to experience the customer’s side is invaluable because it lets them see things from a new perspective: letting staff understand the process through the client’s eyes, as well as finding potential problems that may have been overlooked.

Again, the number of articles based on this point show its importance:

Shoes for Crews Europe expresses this need in their tips for managers saying, “nothing beats the real thing, that’s where the true test lies”

Chris Mayler explains how to put your employees into their customers’ shoes: “If your employees understand the experience a customer has with your company, they’re better placed to know how to improve it”

Learning Curve lists experiencing the situation as one of the four main points in their look at front desk training suggesting that “It appears that putting the front desk staff in the guest’s shoes… was a great indicator that they had absorbed the valuable information that was found.”

So how did these two key points (empathy and experiencing the other side) grow into the unique scene you see now?

How Did We Make The Scene Unique?

Each LearnBrite scene can be made individual and captivating. There are 3 main features that made this scene stand out for me:

(1) The Return of Toni

In a previous scene (Effective Listening), Toni was introduced to the world. Her tone of voice is one of total apathy and I thought she would be the perfect host for our inn! Another upside was that I only had to tweak her outfit a little before adding her into the scene (saving a lot of time in character creation).

This gives the scene a strong personality to help bring the learning objectives to life!

(2) Making Toni as Bored as Possible!

Conversation is great but adding gestures can really take your scene to the next level. Characters move more naturally and make the interactions more attention grabbing.

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