Many good training and development initiatives get lost in the noise of competing priorities and information overload. The way to avoid this is to ensure you deliver the right information, in the right amount to the right people.
For example, imagine that your customer retention is falling, and the most common reason cited is poor customer service. Among your company’s responses to this may be to conduct a training intervention, but to ensure the solution fits the issue, there are a few questions you should answer first:
Question 1 - Why Training is Needed
It may seem obvious but clearly defining why a training intervention is needed helps drive the solution. The best way is to first verify your assumptions, in this case, that poor customer service is the reason for customer attrition, then tie the training to a measurable business goal.
For this example, the goal might be to improve overall customer satisfaction by:
- Increasing the positive customer satisfaction score to 85 percent
- Increasing first contact resolution (FCR) of issues to 80 percent
- Increasing Customer Effort (CES) by 10 percent
- Reducing the escalation rate by 15 percent
Question 2 – Who requires the training?
Not all learners may require the same depth of knowledge on a particular subject. In this case, you may determine that everyone needs to know something about the company’s customer service strategy, but for certain groups, a higher level of competency is needed.
At MaxLearn we have categorized the depth of knowledge required into four learning levels:
- Awareness – Can recognize and recall the information.
- Explanatory – Can classify, interpret, and explain the information (elevator speech).
- Practitioner – Can apply the information to different situations.
- Mastery – Can analyze, evaluate, improve, and create.
For the instructional designer among us, these roughly correspond to Bloom’s Taxonomy; for the rest of us this is a simple method to determine the types of behaviors per job function or role, that different types of learners should exhibit after training.
Putting it all together
In the table below we have correlated our business goal with the different audiences. We have identified the learning level required per audience, and the behaviors the learners should exhibit after training.
| Business Goals | Audience | Learning level | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|---|
Income overall customer satisfaction by:
| All | Awareness |
|
| Sales Person | Explanatory |
| |
| Customer Service Representative (CSR) | Practioner |
| |
| CSR Management | Mastery |
|
What’s next?
We have defined why training is needed and tied it to a measurable business goal. We have determined who should get the training and what behaviors they should exhibit as a result.
The next step, in which we will discuss our, next article gets to the heart of instructional design: how to break down information into more easily digestable learning bites.
