The Satisfaction Formula – Educate

In this section of The Satisfaction Formula, authors Dave Sweet and Jayna Sweet explore the benefit EDUCATION adds to the customer experience.

There are three people groups we think you should always strive to help educate:

• You
• Your employees
• Your customers

While we could think of many reasons for education, the main argument for it here relates to the needs of your employees. So many businesses have no formal training program – let alone any kind of continuing education or development. Someone is hired, shadows someone else for a few days, and is then thrown into the fire, expected to perform and execute.

How is that even possible when they haven’t really been taught what to do or how to do it? What will they be confronted with? What will they have to deal with? You need to invest in good education for your employees!

Education, training, and development are extremely important steps toward providing great customer service. They give employees a sense of comfort and ease, while empowering them to do what they need to do, since they know exactly what is expected of them (and how to execute those expectations). And this doesn’t just apply to those employees who will have direct contact with customers. Obviously, they need to be trained in specific ways. But every employee should be trained for the purpose of improving customer service. Shep Hyken touches on this in an article for Forbes by providing an astute example: “…the people who aren’t trained are often the people who could have the greatest impact on the customer. As an example, the warehouse team member who improperly packs a box will create a problem for the customer when the package arrives and the contents are damaged or a part is missing. Sure, that warehouse employee never talks to the customer, but what he or she does every day… has a big impact on the customer.” 

You need to be educating your employees on roles, responsibilities, and policies – just like we talked about in “spell things out.” If you want your employees to do the best possible job and take the best possible care of your customers, you must give every employee every advantage you possibly can.

If you’re not learning, you’re not growing. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. So, if you’re not learning, you’re not living. And who wants THAT?

When you think about the education that you’ve had, or any of the training you’ve sat through, what did it look like? In other words, what kinds of things come to mind when you think of training or classroom or school? At least for a lot of people, it looks like somebody standing in the front of the room, maybe using a PowerPoint, flipchart, or chalkboard, talking at you as opposed to encouraging you to participate in the education experience.

If you look at the Learning Pyramid, you’ll see that lecture-based training is the absolute worst at making learning stick. If you take that and carry it out in terms of sermons in a church, people don’t remember what they hear. If you look at teachers in school, typically people don’t remember what they hear. If you think about a “keynote speaker,” people don’t remember what was said.

KEY POINT: We remember what we say and do.

automätik, as an organization, created a professional development class called MeetingMastery: Maximizing Participant Engagement. It’s based on the premise of adult learning theory and the research that’s associated with it.

No matter where you look, what’s really important is that people are involved in the educational process. That they don’t sit passively. They do things. We develop activities to help people discover what they need to be learning, and we create experiences where they are part of the design and the solution – where they are even tasked with being able to teach a portion of the content. The best learning happens when the teacher and the student are the same person. When you have to teach it, that means you know it. And when you know it, you’re able to do something with it.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

Thanks for that, Confucius.