Learning by doing

Anders Gronstedt, Ph.D.
Sam Smith, Ph.D.

A lot is being said in this issue of FOCUS about the importance of training the front line to be effective brand ambassadors. But how, exactly, is the best way to accomplish this critical goal? Brand training is a very different animal from the basic skills training we associate with most customer-interface jobs, and it also poses a series of cost and logistical challenges even for the most progressive and innovative organizations.

The good news is that there are powerful and proven techniques for helping your work force cultivate "soft skills" like brand ambassadorship. Better yet, simulation-based e-learning can be surprisingly friendly to the bottom line.

Wrong: Death by CBT

First off, the computer environment can't emulate the classroom effectively because it's unable to reproduce the personal, one-to-one mentoring dynamic that is the traditional paradigm's greatest strength. Ask people to describe the most valuable learning experiences in their educational backgrounds, and you'll usually hear stories that emphasize close interaction with a teacher; the same holds true for professional and corporate education, where there's really no technique that's as effective as one-to-one, on the job training under the tutelage of an expert. Unfortunately, while this is the best method, it also exerts a massive drain on the productivity of the company's workers, and is almost never cost-effective.

Instead, almost all CBT programs wind up mimicking the worst of the 1000-year old university model's tactics, reproducing slides, lectures and quizzes on a flat screen, with predictably abysmal results.

Second, there's no evidence anywhere to suggest that you should attempt to apply the classroom lecture model to a professional skills training environment. The university model can be quite useful in an academic humanities setting, for example, but even the secondary and post-secondary establishment understands the value of problem-based learning-by-doing for skills education. When you think about it, most corporate training goals have more in common with shop, auto mechanics, piano or TV production classes, and these are subjects that even your local high school understands are best handled by hands-on training.

So why do so many companies build their training programs around misconceived CBT models? There are probably a number of answers, but cost is at the top of the list. But if we look past the sticker price of a training program and focus on long-term ROI, we find that CBT fails even on cost criteria, because while conventional CBT might be less expensive, it's rarely effective. And if it's ineffective, then a rising outlay-to-results ratio renders the program worse than useless. After all, if initial cost is all that matters, then no training at all is the most efficient model.

This lesson is lost on too many companies today. In an era of ever-shrinking budgets, cost-conscious managers are hard put to see past the next quarter, and are frequently seduced by short-term savings. Longer-term efficacy and return issues aren't seriously evaluated, and when the failure of a training program begins manifesting a couple quarters down the road, the resulting shortfalls in return feed right back into the shrinking budget problem, and vicious cycle begins again.

The bottom line: most of what passes for "e-learning" today - boring learners to death with the facts of a situation and then quizzing them on it - is a poor substitute for actually experiencing the situation. The best way to learn how to sell is by selling, and the best way to learn how to serve customers is by serving customers.

Right: e-Learning by Doing

That's why we've become such big fans of learning programs that put people "in the cockpit," letting them practice the tasks they'll be executing in their daily work. In particular, we strongly advocate digital role-play applications built around actual customer-engagement scenarios to our clients. Every phase of the application can be customized to the real-world circumstances a front line employee might encounter - the company's brand message, typical and atypical customer cases, product and service sets, sales methodologies, technological infrastructure, major corporate initiatives, even the minute cultural quirks each company seems to have.

Applications can be developed around pretty much any set of client-defined learning objectives, and can be integrated with any number of other key corporate initiatives. Our work for computer storage manufacturer StorageTek (read case) provides a solid illustration. This series of interactive applications for the sales force were tailored not only around the factors noted above, but also accounted for rapidly shifting market and competitive landscapes and an emerging brand refocus on addressing client business and technical needs. A dedicated customization model allowed for development of sales training that was actually a great deal more than sales training - it was also integrated brand training that required sales reps to execute the promise of the brand in order to effectively address the requirements of the fictitious customer.

These kinds of precision-targeted training applications can be developed for a host of employee audiences, and can be crafted to address nearly any identifiable behavioral goal that affects the company's ROI position. So the next time your call center specialists, sales reps or field techs encounter a customer, instead of engaging in costly trial-and-error they can comfortably put what they already know to be effective into play.

And you'll be another happy customer closer to every one of your service, sales and loyalty targets.