Last month, we took a quick look at a great article based off an interview with marketing futurist, Brian Solis, and discussed some of the real world tactics required to make the most of the advice he provided regarding Customer Experience (CX) marketing.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the original article, take a look at it here, and take a few moments to review last month’s blog post too, if you’d like.
This week, though, we’re going to look at the same principles in a completely different way:
Applying CX Marketing Principles to Employee Training
In our business we equate the customer’s experience with your employee’s learning experience, especially since they are our customers. . After all, if your employee’s learning experience is less than stellar, they’re going to be less satisfied up front, and less effective in their job in the long term. The end result is going to be bad for the company.
Likewise, as discussed last week, a great customer experience is crucial to the effective marketing efforts of any company these days. Whether you’re marketing directly to consumers or in a B2B setting, customers want, need, and fully expect, an excellent customer experience when they do business with you. If they don’t get it, they’re going to be initially dissatisfied, and will likely go elsewhere for their business moving forward.
So, let’s dive a little deeper into the employee learning experience.
Why focus on the employee learning experience?
Training is fundamental to improving performance and – by extension – growth and profitability. Obviously, doing so more effectively creates an environment in which employees want to learn, and are in a better position to apply the training. This leads to ongoing training efforts being retained and put into practice.
So, improving the employee learning experience has a direct impact on employee satisfaction, employee competence, and eventually, the bottom line. That’s why it needs to be a focus of any growth-centered company.
What control do you have over the employee learning experience?
Quality training is not just dropping a ton of information on your employees and sending them off to figure it out. It’s about helping them learn, helping them apply the knowledge they gain, and helping them understand and buy in to why the training is important in the first place.
So, in considering the training experience, you need to think about different training methods and tools, and make strategic decisions about what is going to be the best combination of resources and tactics to help each individual student do the very best they can with the training available.
Employee Training Methods
Modern employee training can be handled in any of a number of ways, or a combination thereof:
- In-person classroom training
- In-person project-based learning (PBL) groups
- In-person interactive group training
- Self-paced online courses
- Interactive webinars
- Pre-recorded seminars
- Peer groups
- Centers of excellence
- …and many more.
Each of these methods has its own list of pros and cons that range from accessibility to cost, so these must factor into your decision making. But don’t fail to incorporate an understanding of various learning styles that your employees may prefer, and ensure that training is available in multiple formats to accommodate those differences.
Choosing the best methods for the needed training and providing a variety of formats to accommodate multiple learning styles enhances the learning experience for employees, improving the quality and value of the training provided.
Understanding Employee Training Touch Points
Just as the customer experience involves how the customer interacts with your company across multiple touch points, the employee learning experience does the same.
In this case, examples of these touch points could be:
- Initial orientation or training materials provided upon hiring
- An online training or resource program open to employee access
- Internal expert help provided on an ad hoc or formalized basis
- Scheduled classes or seminars provided internally
- External training at industry events or via third party training consultants
To create the best learning experience for your employees, identify and examine every one of these touch points as it applies to your unique organization and the training needs exhibited.
Are all the touch points unified in tone, voice, methodology, and quality? Are all of them continually updated or do one or more of the training touch points tend to be neglected? Are the individuals responsible for providing training across all these touch points in communication with each other regularly to discuss best practices and keep things consistent?
If you identify areas of improvement across touch points, don’t hesitate to invest what’s needed to bring them up to standard with the entire employee training program. This will dramatically improve the employee learning experience and provide a much higher return on your training investment going forward.
If you’d like to discuss further improving your employee training experience, contact us to consider your options.
