You are in : Training > Training Categories > Sales Training

Learn to Lead

Creative training can make the customer king again

Mon, 19 May 2008 15:52

By Fiona Ross

Demand for customer service training globally is on the increase, with all types of organisations focusing now on how they can improve interaction with the public.

This is particularly relevant to South Africa, as the country gears up for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

A recent study by US consultancy Novations Group confirms this trend, revealing that demand for customer relations training is growing, with 64% of HR managers questioned in the US reporting a rise.

According to Martyn Sloman, Training, Learning and Development Adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the United Kingdom's leading professional body for those involved in the management and development, customer service skills are now a bottom-line issue that can define a company against its competition.

"Generally, all the evidence points to a service-led, knowledge economy with organisations competing on the level of service offered to customers.

Success here is almost entirely dependent on the deployment of staff,” he said in a special feature on PersonnelToday.com last November.

While the demand for training is on the rise, the focus is also shifting to the effectiveness of training for the challenges of meeting the needs of today’s diversity of consumers. Generic training schemes are not always the best way to develop customer services.

The creative arts and power of today’s multimedia technology are emerging as new tools for achieving training success - the methods are proving more engaging and immediate, and make a bigger impression than powerpoint presentations and didactic training methods.

According to PersonnelToday.com, organisations are exploring these new ways to engage people and deliver learning.

In the UK for example, they cite training firm Steps Drama as an example – the firm uses professional actors to help get the message across to staff.

But one does not have to look to the UK to find these interesting new methods being implemented to great effect.

In South Africa, Cape Town – as the major hub for the Arts and creative industries – has taken the lead in integrating these new modes of training to the benefit of local organisations.

A number of prominent organisations, such as Allan Gray, have teamed up with organisations like experiential training company Learn to Lead, to implement interesting customer service training programmes.

Allan Gray brought in these new training techniques in their Service Centre division. The objective was to improve their client service by improving the understanding of the investors that phone in.

“Offering something new and experiential gets people’s attention and gets them interested.

The result is that they open up more, lower their barriers and take in more. The ultimate outcome is the retention of knowledge,” he says.

Jakoet says that Allan Gray have been running their service center for about two years and at the time of the intervention required a deeper level of interaction with clients.

They realised they have different clients with different needs and that client service consultants needed a formal intervention to ensure each type of client’s needs were identified and satisfied.

“The key aspect of the innovative training involved role-play with professional actors taking part and our staff playing the roles of caller, call receiver, and observer, and alternating between these positions over the course of the intervention.

Contributing to the effectiveness was that staff taught each other at peer level – offering perspectives from the ‘observer’ seat on the interactions between ‘callers’ and ‘receivers’.

“It also offered a unique forum for constructive feedback – it turned what could be negative criticism into positive knowledge, and the structure was team based and had a competition element built in which also generated interest and high attention levels over the course of the intervention,” explains Jakoet.

He adds that Allan Gray’s investment in cutting edge training, from technical asset/investment knowledge through to the customer service intervention, has allowed the company to consistently improving client satisfaction over the two years since its call centre’s inception.

This rising attention to training to meet each customer’s unique needs, as shown by the Allan Gray case, is a global phenomenon.

Richard Leech, head of learning at global training firm Grass Roots, says it’s about making sure staff appreciate all the nuances that can arise when dealing with customers.

"Different types of customers want to be treated in different ways, so making assumptions about how people want to be treated is very dangerous.

Employees need to be trained to recognise these subtleties and ask the right questions," he says on PersonnelToday.com.

This is a valuable lesson not just for all South African businesses with regards to their diverse clientele, but on a broader scale as South Africa prepares for the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the influx of thousands upon thousands of visitors to the country.

Customer service is the key to unlocking long-term benefits from 2010 – the World Cup promises to be a bonanza for tourism and related industries in South Africa, but the real challenge is going to be making sure that visitors who arrive for the soccer enjoy their experience enough to keep coming back.

According to Dr Nikolaus Eberl, author of BrandOvation - How Germany won the World Cup of Nation Branding and a partner in the Izicwe Academy, Germany prior to 2006 trained over 100 000 “service ambassadors” in five months and it worked, making Germany a warm and welcoming place for visitors – 90% of people who visited Germany left as brand advocates.

Engaging new, effective training methods that can easily be replicated across all industries may offer the key to achieving the state of readiness needed to deliver the spectacular customer service that will dazzle the world.

Fiona Ross is a Director of Learn to Lead, an experiential training organisation specialising in customised training through collaborating with the creative industries.

For more information on Learn To Lead Click Here