What Should We Train or Coach Employees On?

This week I had five meetings and in every meeting we had a discussion about training and certainly coaching. The discussions seem to center around a variety of different aspects. Each firm had its own reason and justification for what they were doing. All of them tend to gravitate to what I call inside out thinking which is when we think from an internal perspective of what we need to do to satisfy or deliver or sell our products and services to the marketplace. This is not wrong but it is fairly consistent for companies to do.

Here are a few of the things that I learned that I found consistent across the company's:

• Companies using an LMS system found it fairly effective for on-boarding but struggled to get employees to use it afterward or even login for that matter.
• All of the companies stated they had extensive product training comprised of both online and in person training. Few of these companies could quantify how coaching was used to reinforce the product training when employees were leveraging the training in the real world.
• All of the companies were training on targeted areas such as sales or customer service.
• All of the companies stated that one of their goals for 2016 was to develop a more positive and / or engaging culture.

There were needless to say more than the above list but one of the funniest things that I found is only one company was using the voice of the customer as a tool to create a targeted approach of what was needed in the marketplace. This firm was doing it in a very casual and dare I say not as effective a way as they could. When we use feedback from customers as a basis to define training and coaching needs I refer to this as outside in thinking, meaning we are creating an approach based on outside data and influences. There is nothing better than to receive specific feedback from customers based on how they want to buy and/or receive service from companies.

What if we measured companies feedback on our ability to?:

• provide a friendly interaction
• deliver services on time
• demonstrate absolute command of product knowledge
• provide a friendly tone of voice on the phone
• delivered service that exceeded expectations
• presented a positive body language when interacting in person

Again, the above list is not one that encapsulates everything when it comes to customer service, but what if we use the voice of the customer and customer service metrics to drive targeted performance areas that needed improvement? We all too often hear "we did an assessment or survey but I'm not sure what happened with that data or how it was used".

Hypothetically, what if we did an assessment or survey and we found out three fundamental facts: 

1. Customer stated we could be friendlier.
2. We could be more responsive.
3. Front-line staff such as sales and customer service teams needed to be more knowledgeable on products in terms of how the customers could use them.

What if an organization took this information and mapped out a training and coaching strategy specific to how customers requested it as well as interacted with it in terms of the actual business interaction? Can you imagine what would happen to customer loyalty if we actually surveyed them, did something with what they told us, and communicated those changes based on their feedback? Wouldn't that provide a huge difference for an organization that did so?

If you are looking for training and coaching opportunities one of the most powerful things we can all do is to do it through the eyes of our customers!

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