How to Develop an Effective Training Program

Learning has become a part of today’s culture — from personal development to a professional career. People always enroll in some courses or activities to boost their skills or just to enjoy their time with colleagues. 

While some companies consider the L&D function mainly an investment without a return, it can help achieve business goals if applied wisely. 

To make sure both employees and a business benefit from the L&D function in general or a specific educational course in particular, the approach should be transformed from reactive to proactive. Whether it’s reaching the FRT SLA, maintaining quality at a high level, or even an increase in sales, transforming the learning strategy can lead to results some businesses would never expect. 

Define the Goals

Before starting to design any training, it’s important to ensure it will bring the maximum possible benefit both to a company and its target audience. To do that, learning and development consultants should know the business goals and what the company focuses on short- and long-term. This would help us determine the goal of a particular education course.

The easiest way to do this is by asking the key question, “Why?”. “Why do we develop training?”, “What are we trying to achieve with its help?” So, the creation process should never begin with a search for new things to learn, but rather with the definition of the training goal. 

A business that develops a training should reply to the following questions: 

• Why is the training needed?
• What goals should be set for a team?
• What is its ultimate goal? 

For this, a business needs to think globally and set strategic and tactical goals, so that the target audience has motivation to join the course. 

If it is difficult to decide on the training goal, a business may also want to investigate what KPI is the most important for or what has been the most difficult task for its team so far.

For example, one of the most important KPIs for any product or service company is the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), with a particular percentage being a strategic goal.

The following strategic goal of the training may be set: “Maintaining the CSAT at the level of >95%”. Since it aligns with the company’s strategy in this example, setting such a training goal will justify investments in the L&D function for the business. The training goal we set for the target audience should be slightly different because it has to divide the strategy into digestible chunks and motivate teammates to join sessions. In this case, we may assume the tactical goal would be the following: “Getting the skills to keep CSAT at 95%”, “Gaining confidence with Customer Satisfaction”, or “Using an efficient tone of voice to gain >95% of CSAT”. Hence, the tactical goal always comes from the strategic one and has to be more ‘tangible’ for the target audience.  

Just like leaning upon the company’s values when making business-changing decisions, having the strategic goals in mind helps L&D develop a clear vision of what courses should be created. 

Develop the Course

Based on the defined training goals, we can more easily develop relevant topics for education courses. 

When creating each new training, it is necessary to keep in mind whether this particular webinar or course could help achieve a strategic goal we’ve defined earlier. 

For example, if a strategic training goal is “To maintain the CSAT at the level of >95%”, when creating a new course, a business should ask, “Could this training potentially improve and maintain the CSAT score?” or “Could this course enhance the quality of services?” 

If a strategic goal relates to Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), analyzing what causes customers’ dissatisfaction will bring valuable insights in what a training course should be about — either it’s a professional root cause analysis or a simple survey. For example, it’s no secret that Customer Satisfaction is often influenced not by what is said, but how it is said and what alternatives are brought to the table. The phrase “We don’t have this feature.” causes a polar reaction, depending on whether a support consultant has been sympathetic and provided alternative solutions or replied with the mentioned phrase as-is. This is achieved by learning and practicing soft skills. 

A proper analysis can definitely show more unexpected causes for customer dissatisfaction (for example, the level of CSAT who received help over the phone is higher than the one over chat), so respective training courses should be developed to rectify the discovered dissatisfaction causes. 

Practice-Practice-Practice

Similarly to the previous step, one of the most efficient ways to determine the training methods for the given topic is to base them on the goal of the training and the topic itself. 

Whether it’s instructor-led or self-paced, simulators or roleplaying, case studies or coaching — we should consider all available training resources, material complexity, and participants’ preferences before implementing the method of our choice. 

Based on SupportYourApp’s experience, it’s important to combine the training methods and formats. For example, we may consider self-paced video training for general and less complicated topics, each of which should not exceed 30 minutes to keep the focus. Instructor-based live webinars should not exceed 1.5 hours — even if the training lasts for the whole day, sessions should be properly divided into blocks. 

It’s also important to keep the balance between theory and practice. We choose the approach that will keep our team’s attention and increase engagement. As a rule of thumb, each theoretical part should be supported with a practice task. 

Previously, I took soft skills as an example of a training topic that meets the strategic goal of “Maintaining the CSAT at the level of >95%.” Following this logic, when conducting such training, we should discuss each soft skill that could help the team maintain the CSAT score, adding up interactions after each theoretical part. Those interactions may include analyzing customer support call recordings, solving given cases, roleplaying conversations between a user and a consultant, and many more. At the end of a live session, participants could also receive cheat sheets with phrases conveying soft skills to use in their daily workflow.

So, we determined the training goal, the topic (that supports the goal), and the training methods. What’s coming next? Is our job done? 

We should always discuss our next steps with participants, since it’s never just about a live session if we aim to achieve our business goals with the help of training. It could be homework or a quiz to take. As homework after the soft skills training, participants could choose a few recordings of the calls they answered before the training and analyze them to define their own mistakes now that they’ve gone through the training, etc. Monitoring if the learned soft skills are applied in practice later on, and the increase of the CSAT score, in the long run, could be a great indicator of successful training. 

While numbers could show us whether the chosen training meets all business goals, feedback from participants could indicate if the applied methods have helped the target audience gain confidence in supporting customers. Gathering feedback could also ensure that participants not only find the training useful and engaging, but also enjoy their learning path. 

In the end, we get the training that not only increases people’s engagement in the L&D activities but also helps the business achieve its ambitious goals and contribute to its continuous improvement process. 

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