Is your front line organization trained to deliver persuasive messages that are "on brand" at every key point of customer contact? Are they equipped to exceed customer expectations every time?

Probably not, huh?

The best that can be said about most corporate training programs is that they give people the sensation of a coma without all the worry and inconvenience.¹ Fortunately, a new playbook for field learning and communication is making smart use of emerging electronic technologies like podcasting, smartphones, blogs, computer-based simulations, and massively multiplayer environments like Second Life, all of which are changing the face of workplace learning. The result: information and service workers now have a chance to learn the skills they need in a context that's actually energizing.

Take Second Life, for instance, an open-ended 3-D virtual world created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. It represents an extremely promising locus of professional learning, and it's begun attracting the attention of innovative training managers in a variety of industries. One of the forum's greatest strengths is its "we'll pretend not to teach if you'll pretend not to learn" ethic.

Most corporate training organizations have been slow to adapt to such new learning apps. Their complete failure to enable sales and service reps to do their job is evident everywhere:

• Salespeople retain only 10% of what they learn in sales training, according to industry studies, and they use only 10% of the marketing sales support material developed for them. ²
  
• Senior executives from 96 of the world's top sales organizations across 17 industries were asked in a recent survey to grade their sales force performance. The average grade was a C-minus.³
• According to our own mystery shopping surveys, 80% of retail reps in electronics stores don't ask a single qualifying question of customers.⁴
• Variability between high- and low-performing sales and service reps is greater than 50% in most organizations.
• The American Customer Satisfaction Index is stuck at a lower level than in 1994.

Meanwhile, a completely new breed of game-savvy and socially networked employees is entering the workforce. They want to be engaged, in control, and a part of the storyline. They have little patience for marketing or corporate training BS:

• Video game playing is surpassing television viewing; young men spend 12.5 hours on video games per week vs. 9.8 hours of television.⁵
• Video gamers are getting older; the median age of a video game player is 29.
• Women gamers far outnumber men in the 25-34 age group, largely because of the popularity of casual PC games.⁶
• Sixty percent of trendsetters and 33% of mainstream 14-34 year-olds have a social networking page^.7
• One in four Americans spends an average of 40 minutes a day reading blogs.⁸
• No fewer than 68% rate "a person just like yourself or your peer" as the most credible corporate spokesperson and that number has tripled since 2003.⁹

While employees are resisting the top-down, command/control style training, senior leadership is setting higher standards for their training functions. The operational mantra in many organizations is that employees can't afford to stop working to learn.

A new generation of learning tools are emerging that are (or can be) embedded in work processes. Let's look at how they are rewriting the playbook for sales and service training by tapping into Web 2.0.

Podcasts

At computer storage giant EMC, podcasting is becoming a mainstay of the sales communication and training missions. The car ride to a client meeting may be the only time many of their reps have in a busy day to catch up on company news. With five or six audiocasts produced every week, EMC aggressively defies much of the conventional wisdom about "mobile learning." Rather than seeing these activities as supplemental, the company understands that podcasting is one of its main communication channels with many of its key reps. EMC managers appreciate the versatility of the channel, too. Instead of having to chunk the learning up into short modules, they can tailor podcast lengths to what they know about average car commute times.

Predictably, numerous training and corporate communication organizations are subverting the inherent power of mobile learning by reducing it to a time-shifted lecture format. They're learning the hard way that their one-way model, which never worked very well in the classroom setting for which it was originally created, has disastrous results when transferred to the iPod, BlackBerry or other mobile device.¹⁰ Just because you can port quizzes to the BlackBerry and offer seven-minute videos on "conflict resolution" on the iPod doesn't mean that you should. Instead, successful companies focus on the killer apps that leverage the field reps' mobile work style. Audio podcasts take advantage of down time in the car. Video podcasts are used when you truly need mobile video. When Xerox developed training for its service engineers on its largest copy machine, for instance, it offered video instruction on the iPod so the engineers wouldn't have to run back and forth the between their laptops and the copy machines they were working on.

Performance support on the smart phone

Other successful M-learning strategies include performance and decision support systems on the BlackBerry and other "smart phones." A sales rep who can access qualifying questions and value propositions targeted to a particular client on the curbside experiences a "teachable moment" when this newly acquired knowledge is put into play during the subsequent client meeting. "Nano" learning moments delivered to the rep with a just-in-time support system is in some ways the antithesis of the highly produced "edutainment" of the podcast, proving that with M-learning, one size doesn't fit all.

The new playbook for field training transforms boring car rides into energized learning sessions with training that emulates fast-paced radio shows and helps the rep rehearse customer conversations with searchable bite-sized talking points. Whether it's learning disguised as entertainment or learning disguised as a performance support system, these popular, must-own mobile appliances can help make front line workers more productive without taking them off the job.

Blogs

The most successful internal podcasts are transmitted via a company's blog site. The blogs we've set up for clients have proven to be tremendously effective forums for free-flowing conversations and are flexible engines for sharing experiences from the front lines across the field organization. Employees can read the musings, rants, raves, insights and opinions of their peers and weigh in on conversations about pressing issues in ways that can help them better serve customers and deliver the brand promise.

But you can already hear the excuses echoing through the hallways of communication and training departments around the world: "What if corporate executive bloggers misconstrue the corporate message?" "What if disgruntled employees blow off steam on an internal blog?" "Our IT system is not set up for that!" "Our lawyers are scared of blogs!"

Recall that in the 1970s IT mainframe admins didn't want employees to use PCs, either, and the "missing-the-boat" factor in this case is on a par with that famous lapse in foresight. Sure, there need to be guidelines for employee bloggers, but they don't have to be longer than a sentence or two. Disgruntled employees have never needed a blog in order to cause trouble, and a truly functional blog environment can even capture and address points of concern before they boil over. Microsoft's blogging policy is two words: "Be smart."

Simulations

Talk is good, but simulations are where skills are put into practice. A new generation of compelling, highly immersive virtual simulations are saving sales and service training from the "Death by PowerPoint" doldrums. Instead of reading and memorization, these simulations are all about helping front line workers solve real world problems. The solution sales simulations we've developed for clients like Ericsson, Prentice Hall and Avaya, for instance, are the last scrimmage before the big game. They put reps in real life situations, dramatized with video, avatars or 360º virtual QuickTime tours, and challenge them to make the right moves in client-defined interaction scenarios. The simulations teach reps how to deliver the value prop in the customer's vernacular, how get into listening mode rather than the pronouncement mode, how to transform the client business instead of taking orders and selling boxes, and how to sell to the C-suite instead of wasting time at the minion level. Simulations can do all this and then some with humor and insight.

The goal of all simulation-based training is to create an environment that's as close to the real thing as possible. If workers have trained for their jobs in a simulated environment, they have already faced situations that might otherwise take months of practice, coaching, trial and error, and learning by failure to master - and this all happens before they leave the training environment and begin the revenue-draining process of using real customers as guinea pigs. Employees are no longer asked to memorize abstract concepts and formulate their own conclusions as to how to apply those concepts. They learn by doing. In the process, they get to demonstrate their performance while learning. Instead of learning first, applying later, assessment and learning are integrated into one coherent, seamless process.

Second Life and the "metaverse"

The next generation of simulations are being created in the emerging worlds of Second Life, a new virtual "metaverse" that takes interaction and collaboration to unprecedented levels. We could try to explain what this exciting intersection between 3D world design and socially networked data means, but the best way to learn about it is to experience it. So find a few minutes to visit www.SecondLife.com and join the 1.1 million+ users by opening a free account. Create your avatar and wander around, buy land, build a virtual home, launch a business, make friend, gamble, party, exchange ideas or attend a live Suzanne Vega concert, all online.

Universities have been faster than corporate training departments to catch on to the promise of Second Life:

• A Bradley University professor holds an ethnography class in Second Life where they do all field research in the virtual environment.
• A University of California professor teaches a class about schizophrenia in a Second Life clinic that looks just like a real one in Sacramento; here students get to experience powerful (virtual) hallucinations, a process that helps them understand the disorder in ways reading the text simply can't.
• Harvard Law School has made this interesting promotional video for its first course in Second life.

Marketers and trainers are now racing to explore the frontiers of this metaverse for corporate training.

Trainers and communicators who are falling back on their tired old playbook, packaging and delivering an unending stream of numb monologues, deserve every tomato thrown their way by an unforgiving new workforce. Companies that innovate and rewrite their playbooks for front line learning and communication, on the other hand, will be pioneering the way to a sustainable competitive advantage.

That's bad news for their competitors.
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1 OK, we stole this. It's a loose adaptation of Bill Bryson's famous quote about Norwegian television.
2 According to Customer Message Management (CMM) Forum
3 "Finding the Weak Links," Tom Atkinson and Ron Koprowski, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2006
4 http://commons.iabc.com/branding/2006/03/12/why-can%e2%80%99t-retailers-sell-the-brand/
5 MediaLife January 2006
6 According to a study by the Consumer Electronics Association http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=12424
7 TrendCentral, May 2006
8 AdAge, WHAT BLOGS COST AMERICAN BUSINESS, In 2005, employees Will Waste 551,000 Years reading Them, By Bradley Johnson, October 24, 2005
9 Edelman Trust Barometer, http://www.edelman.com/news/ShowOne.asp?ID=102
10 Actually, this may not be completely accurate. Some organizations are learning the lesson, but a lot are plowing ahead without any awareness of their own failures…