When it comes to training your staff in customer service, do you sit them down for training once a year and expect superstars?
Most businesses do. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why. No one expects to pick up a guitar once and put it down with the ability to play like Jimi Hendrix! It’s a cliché but we do live in a world full of supposed quick rich schemes, overnight social media fame and an expectation for instant gratification. So I guess it’s understandable that business owners would expect a single shot of high-quality customer service training to do the trick.
The thing is: it doesn’t. No matter how good the training, or how experienced the trainer, it’s never going to work. Why? I’ll let Zig Ziglar take this one:
“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.”
Annual training days and once-off customer service seminars do little to ensure continued and consistent customer service excellence. Human brains are simply not wired like that.
The education industry has come to realise this and mass amounts of research has now proven that for effective learning to take place, repetition of content is absolutely vital. Sean H K Kang details as much in his article published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2016) that “spacing out repeated encounters with material over time produces superior long-term learning”. Kang continues to explain how all aspects of performance – from memory to problem solving and independent discretion – all improve when subjects are exposed to repeated learning.
Repetition, as explained by C.J. Weibell in entitled Principles of learning: 7 principles to guide personalized, student-centered learning in the technology-enhanced, blended learning environment (2011), is not about “redundant drill and practice”. It’s about ensuring the absorption of knowledge and skills. Creating a pattern of repeated learning ensures an improved response over time – beyond mere memorisation of abstract, discrete facts.
Learning strategies provide the framework for this sort of training to be implemented. Effective customer service training relies on the development of a learning strategy – a fact of which 47% of companies are now aware. (Brandon Hall Group, 2016) For effective training, a consistent, repeated learning program is unavoidable.
That’s all well and good for a school classroom, where teachers have the luxury of repeated access to students over the course of a year (or many). In business, it’s a lot harder. It’s estimated that employees generally have about 1% of their work week available for training. (Bersin by Deloitte, 2015) Work it out and you get approximately 5 minutes a day. No one can afford, either in terms of money or time, to do training seminars on customer service monthly (let alone daily or weekly).
Until now. Until Canity.
The primary goal behind Canity’s customer service training platform development was to provide businesses with a way to ensure their staff can improve their skills in the most effective way possible. Consistency is one of the primary benefits of online/virtual learning. (Virtual Communications, 2015)
That’s why our online customer service training videos vary in length, between 2 and 5 minutes. Watch one a day and you’re utilising your 1% of the work week pretty darn well! Watch one a day consistently over a long period of time and then repeat the process and you’ll experience an unprecedented level of success in your staff’s training.
Repetition learning is the key to successful customer service training and Canity offers that precise hassle-free, cost-effective training solution.
