Training Activity for customer service

ENERGIZER Coutresy Trainer Bubble

Bad Customer Service - Energiser

Duration: 15 minutes

  Objective:

This energiser focuses on communication with customers and knowing not only, what TO say, but also what NOT to say. The aim is to ensure participants know how to alter and adapt their language to suit customer situations and provide an exceptional customer experience.

Instructions:

1. Place participants in a semi-circle, with you, the trainer, in the middle.

2. Explain that you are going to work in a circle going from person to person.

3. The first participant is going to come up with a phrase that they could say to a customer that would NOT be right and should never be said to a customer.

4. The next participant in the circle then has to re-phrase the statement from the previous person, this time stating it in a positive way. (Give them only a short time to re-phrase the question and if they fail, ask someone else to).

5. The same person should then come up with a negative statement and the person next to them should re-phrase it and so on until you have moved around the complete circle.

6. Once complete, review the energiser using the questions below.

Review Questions:

• Have you used any of the phrases when working in customer services? What about the good ones?!

• What do you think the effect of these negative statements are on customers? 

• Did you struggle to come up with a re-phrased positive statement in the short amount of time you had? What about the negative one? 

• Which phrase was easier to come up with under pressure? How do you think this affects how we perform customer service?

• What key piece of learning will you take away from this activity?

• How will you apply it in the workplace?

Uses:

This energiser is great for ensuring effective communication and helping participants understand how they should be communicating with customers.

#Tr

4 types of Game Players in a Training session - 4 different objectives

Different types of game players. According to Richard Bartle, four types of players want different things from games.Achievers want to earn high scores and win. Explorers want to find out as much as possible about the game environment.Socializers want to establish relationships with other players. Killers want to defeat the others. It is possible for the same game to meet different needs.

How to make compliance training - more interesting ! How to you INSPIRE ?

How to make compliance trainings - interesting ? 

When it comes to compliance training, says Rients, could anything be more boring? Too often, the training is a matter of “Do this, don’t do that.”
So, the most important thing when it comes to compliance training, says Rients, is to give trainees the “Why.” Refresher training is there because we forget (and also, it’s required). Complacency happens. If instructors aren’t fun and don’t address the purpose of training, they will be dead in the water.
Rients asked the audience, have you ever been in a horrible training session? Well, what made it so bad? Some of their responses included:
“Reading PowerPoint® slides.”
“Too much information.”
“This is irrelevant to me.”
Rients agreed. “You need to focus on one or two key things, otherwise you’re going to lose them,” he says, and “if they can’t figure out what’s in it for me, it’s going to fail.”

Compliance Doesn’t Make Money ! 

Rients admits that compliance doesn’t “make money”—but you can lose money if you ignore it. “Good enough” isn’t good enough, attention to detail is paramount, and every employee plays a role. If you don’t take care of the little things, will the customer (or inspector) wonder what else is going on?
With so much at stake, it’s important to replace bad habits in compliance training with good ones. Rients says the following actions must be taken by trainers:
Engage. Greet trainees with music or videos right off the bat to get their attention.
Inform. This doesn’t have to be dry and boring. Games can inform more than reading off of slides.
Interact. Build a simulator for compliance-related situations, let trainees practice, and show them the worst case scenario for noncompliance.
Inspire. Show trainees an alternate outcome to the worst case scenario, and ask them to do something great.a
That last point is important—you need to call people to action, says Rients.

Experience: The Hard Teacher

Yes, Compliance is boring stuff…Until it isn’t ! 

Whether it is a competitor or other bad actor trying to breach your security or a compliance watchdog ready to pounce, Rients warns that entities exist whose goal it is for us to fail!

Complacency is more common and more dangerous than maliciousness, says Rients, and compliance training isn’t just following the rules or “do this, do that.” It’s of vital importance, and “vital” means life.

Bite sized learning ; need of the day

Problem : Learners' Attention span is shorter. It's between 7 mins to 18 mins . How should trainers & facilitators reduce information over load ? 

Fixing the Problem
So, how can trainers take this information and use it to help boost the impact of their sessions or classes? Muller and Murdoch present some suggestions:

(1) Reduce cognitive load. 
George Miller introduced the “magic number 7” in his Information Process Theory, which led to Cognitive Load Theory. How to you keep from overloading someone’s brain? The goal is efficiency in learning—not overloading, but still teaching.

(2)Focus attention—don’t split it. 
For example, putting a figure or model on the back of a page that describes it splits attention as the learner is constantly referencing back and forth. Visuals, like words, need to be focused.

(3)Weed your training. 
While storytelling can help presentations, don’t add a story that doesn’t relate. Get trainees a concept, solution, or point ASAP.

(4)Provide external memory support. 
Cheat sheets or toolkits can help trainees remember things later that they couldn’t keep in working memory during the session.

Thiagi on Simulation design in training

Bases of Simulations

Misconception: Simulations reflect reality.

Reality: Simulations reflect someone's model of reality. There is an important difference between reality and a model of reality. This difference has critical implications for the design and use of training simulations.

Let's assume that you want to simulate the quality-improvement process in a service organization. Exactly what features and processes you select for the simulation will depend on your professional discipline and personal preferences. For example, if you are a behaviorist, you may interpret the process in terms of stimuli from customers, responses from employees, and reinforcers from managers. If you are a humanist, you may look at the customer-service process in terms of customer expectation, employee empowerment, and manager motivation. If you are a sociologist, you may focus on organizational norms and individual roles. If you are a lawyer, you may emphasize contractual obligations, legal violations, and policy issues. If you are an accountant, you may compare the costs of providing different levels of service with the short- and long-term payoffs of satisfying a customer.

In addition to these professional filters, your model of reality depends on your personal preferences and personality characteristics. If you are an optimist, you may directly correlate better services with profitable bottom lines. If you are a pessimist, you may introduce such random variables as policy changes, governmental regulations, customer vacillations, and environmentalist agitations.

These concepts of multiple realities and of selective emphasis have important implications in the design of a simulation. You have to explicitly document what variables and relationships are included in your model and why you choose to include them (and to exclude others).

deny a story if defines u

Thiagi debrief techniques

Flow

1. Pair-up participants. Ask each pair to stand back-to-back. If there is an extra person, they can form a group of three.
2. Ask a debriefing question. Some debriefing questions you may want to consider are:
   • What do you think was the most important point in today's session?
   • What do you think will be the most challenging idea to implement when you go back to the workplace?
   • What do you think will be the easiest idea to implement when you go back to the workplace?
   • Which idea do you think will receive the most resistance?
   • Which idea will you implement first?
   • What questions do you still have about this topic?
3. Reflect on the question. Ask each student to reflect on the question and prepare a response.
4. Blow the whistle. Ask each participant to turn around and face their partner.
5. Identify who will start the conversation. Use this selection process as an opportunity for the participants to learn a little known fact about each other. For example you might say:
   • The person whose birthday is next in the calendar year will share first.
   • The person who travels the furthest to work will share first.
   • The person who has the most, (oldest, youngest) children (pets, car) will share first.
6. Identify time limitations. Tell the participants they each have about 30 seconds to share.
7. Blow the whistle. After about one minute, blow the whistle and ask the participants to find a new partner and stand back to back.
8. Ask a new question. Continue as above. If time allows, ask three to five questions.