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The face of your business includes many things – your logo and branding, your products or service, your reputation and ethos, but most importantly, your frontline staff. The customer-facing members of your team uphold all the elements as mentioned earlier to the face of your business. They wear the logo on their shirts, promote your brand, your products and your services. They are the keepers of your reputation.
For this reason, frontline training stands as the most crucial element to any training your business rolls out. The cliché, ‘first impressions last,’ very much applies to the way you do business. In some cases, you may only get one shot at securing new business. Make the wrong impression, and the business can walk out of your proverbial (or actual) door, never to return. The same rules apply if your business operates online and has staff operating phones or chat apps. Your customer service and how it is delivered will ultimately be responsible for how your company is perceived.
One of the main reasons for failure at the frontline is a lack of knowledge or proper customer service training. Making sure your frontline staff are up to date, up to speed and up to the challenge, falls to you. Spending that little extra to ensure they properly represent your business, your product, and themselves is as important as opening the (proverbial) door in the morning.
For the larger enterprises, in particular, the major disruptions to delivering frontline training are geographical locations. Delivering training to multiple locations, sometimes just for one or two staff, can prove costly. This is more so when you consider the time lost in work hours to keep staff away from the shop floor. Customer service training typically means taking away valuable floor time.
However, consistent training is critical for ensuring stellar customer service. When businesses fail to see through with frontline training, the losses can prove to be incalculable. A lack of training leads to a loss in new business, and can also lead to high staff turn-over. Without the knowledge and confidence to perform their job well, your frontline staff can begin to feel disengaged and ultimately quit their job. This begins the cycle of hiring and rehiring. A simple solution would be to invest in a smart frontline training strategy that works, saving time, energy and money.
A popular solution for combatting the customer service training challenges is to use an LMS (Learning Management Systems). In the modern world, technology has greatly assisted the development and progress of the LMS. With high-speed internet, the wide use of computers, tablets and even mobile phones, access to learning management systems has become easier than ever before.
From a frontline training perspective, this technology can prove invaluable. The ability to connect with employees through even their own phones means training can be delivered and undertaken with very little disruption. It can be accessed in the staff members own time, to their own schedule, significantly reducing the risk of overwhelming them—that or delivering important information at a point where their brain has all but switched off.
At Biz Group, we partnered with Axonify – a mobile-based app that can deliver tailored training directly to your employee’s phone. The benefits of delivering training in this way go above and beyond anything seen before.
With Axonify, the training is carried out on the individual learner’s phone. This nullifies the need to splash out on expensive hardware to satisfy the LMS needs in your business. With pretty much the whole planet now using smartphones, Axonify can be downloaded in just a few clicks on any browser-based device.
Delivering bite-sized courses each day that generally last between 3-5 minutes, your frontline employees need not take time away from their work to complete the training.
Axonify can analyse and adapt to your employee’s behaviour, performance, and knowledge through AI and machine learning. This enables the app to deliver more personalised learning programs, further tailoring the delivery to best suit the employee’s individual needs.
Over time, as training can be delivered throughout a career, Axonify can work to ensure everyone is up to date. As the courses are adaptable, new material can be added, delivered, and completed from a central dashboard. Likewise, old or outdated material can be removed, replaced or updated. An ability to keep staff old and new up to date with the latest processes, product knowledge or company standards means everyone is on the same page.
The training is on-demand, adaptive and tracked. Management, HR or training supervisors can switch the programs, adapting them to suit various job roles or learning styles. Offering live updates on your learner’s progression is a great tool for monitoring how well your employees learn and their learning style.
Training can be monitored beyond completion and feeding back the test scores and results. Axonify can also measure the impact that the training has on your business. With visual representations of the training’s success and where it best benefits your business, you can further tweak courses to push for even better results.
By keeping your employees engaged through training programs, you keep their minds active and on the job. The service industry witnesses one of the highest employee turnover rates. Keeping employees engaged with ongoing training can help you positively impact staff retention.
We have all worked in that job where the time drags on as slowly as the business. Axonify offers a solution to dragging days by providing fun, job-related challenges that will keep your staff active and happy. As the courses are delivered through handheld devices, your staff can remain where they need to be, on high alert, in front of the house and not tucked away in a training room for hours on end.
Delivering frontline training remotely and continuously through an active LMS such as Axonify is paramount to successful business practices. When your frontline staff are properly trained, their ability and knowledge will shine.
From a customer service perspective, staff who are confident and comfortable in their positions can better meet customer demands. Having all the knowledge and experience to deal with customer requests leaves more time to focus on the personal elements of the job. It is easier to smile and connect with people when you are not faced with the dilemma of not fully understanding a request.
Using an LMS for frontline training such as Axonify presents an opportunity for you to understand better your staff, their strengths and weaknesses, and how your training impacts your business.
Feel free to get in touch with us to find out more about our Frontline training solution.
