Right Course, Right Time: How Training Evaluation Benefits Customer Service

Customer service delivery is one of the most important components for a successful and reputable business to master. One of the best ways to achieve this is to ensure employees are trained up with the skills they need to perform to the highest standard for clients. Here we look at how bringing top quality customer service starts with the education and training of staff.

A business thrives on having a team who are knowledgeable about the business they work for; from the products and services on offer to the company's ethos and message as a whole. The business's approach to customer service is crucial and something that staff need to learn and receive training on, the effect of which needs to be evaluated in order to maintain the high levels customers expect – a key finding from the recent CIPD L&D show.

Dangers of Improperly Trained Staff
In the current climate, consumers are able to voice their opinions about a company on a macro and micro level, from the products and services on offer through to the customer service they receive. With social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter allowing immediate vocalisation of both pleasure and displeasure, companies are in the line of fire in more ways than previous years, meaning the lack of knowledge or training of staff can become painfully obvious very quickly.

Good Evaluation of Customer Service Staff Training Practices Means…

The Right Staff Go On The Right Courses
Ensuring the right choice of course for staff from previous evaluation can lead to benefits in customer satisfaction; if your staff learn the correct skills from their training to perform optimally this transfers directly to how they deal with the customer. It can also help with morale, getting rid of that “they just stuck me on this course to tick a box” feeling we’ve all felt.

From a business finance point of view, sending the right staff on the correct courses means employees spend less time out of the office too and managers are safe in the knowledge that the course is relevant to that person's specific job, making sure the course – and the cost - is not a waste of time. Customers benefit from more staff being on the job and not away on courses while businesses benefit financially.

The Right People Have The Right Skills
Evaluating the training process using feedback from managerial and frontline staff and translating this to give an easy-to-interpret numerical value can avoid a lot of unnecessary training. It’s unavoidable at times but having front-of-house staff equipped with the right skills for their particular job creates a favourable impression for customers, something – let’s be honest – all customers expect at a minimum!

The Right People Have The Right Attitude
People are different, they have different skill sets and wildly different attributes. Tick-boxing with staff training can negatively effect morale as we mentioned above, morphing attitudes for the worse – something that will most definitely show in pressured situations, more harmfully if a customer is present.

The Right People Have The Right Resilience
Some jobs require a lot of personal resilience, others less. But for whatever level you need, conflict resolution and other training courses can help. Again, evaluation of these with regards to the resilience requirements of a job role can prevent feeling under-valued and wasted training budget.

www.TrainingEvaluation.com are one company that calculate the ROI of learning and development courses to measure all the above. Owner Russell Thackeray stresses the importance of course evaluation and staff training and has seen the improvement of training evaluation deliver up to an 85% increase in revenue.

Conclusions
Evaluating ROI of previous training initiatives before additional money is spent on future ones can help companies calculate more specifically how much money needs to be set aside for training…and what staff need which training to deliver first class customer service.

Developing a framework to measure the efficacy and ROI of the courses on offer also allows businesses to develop their plans both financially and methodically in order to adapt to ever-changing client needs.