How to easily create a knowledgable team of product experts
How to easily create a knowledgable team of product experts. There is nothing customers love more than a knowledgeable employee. It makes them feel more connected to your brand, comfortable that they are in good hands and it makes them feel like they haven’t wasted their time travelling to a store. So why do so many companies get this wrong?
The difficulties of training your customer-facing teams
Too much information – The number one difficulty is that employees have a LOT of stock which they need to learn about in a very short amount of time. It can seem like an impossible task trying to keep everyone’s knowledge up to scratch. Just imagine if you work in a store like Argos with thousands of different products. There is no way that staff are going to be able to remember all the information about everything.
No downtime – Because your staff are customer-facing they have hardly any downtime to revise new information. They are usually very rushed which makes them less likely to learn about new products.
They are distracted – Your customer-facing teams have a LOT of tasks to juggle and a lot of people to keep happy. It’s not just a case of getting on with their work, they face different customer scenarios every single day. The last thing on their mind is taking a training course to learn about new products.
You can’t predict every customer query – It is incredibly hard to predict what questions customers are going to ask you. One day a customer could ask you how to keep a sofa clean and ensure they get the most wear out of it. The next day you could be asked what the returns policy is for faulty rugs. You just can’t tell.
How to fix these problems
A lot of businesses have tried to fix these issues with company Whatsapp groups, booklets, emails and company meetings. But these methods just don’t cut it anymore.
‘Just in time’ learning is the easiest and most practical way to up-skill your employees and ensure that they are always knowledgeable enough to give the best service to your customers.
How does it work?
There has been a shift in the way we learn information. Gone are the days of revising a big chunk of information to try and put it into practice later on. We now have access to answers whenever we need them. If you need to know the latest phone deals you can just Google them on your phone. Just in time learning works by allowing staff to learn and retain new information at the point of need. This makes employees more engaged with their learning and helps them memorise the information better.
For example, a customer comes into your store and wants to know what laptops have the best battery life. If you have a digital knowledgebase you could have pre-written articles which have the most FAQ’s so that employees can quickly look up the question and find the answers. So you could have an article written about which of your laptops have the best battery life. Your staff will immediately learn the new information as they need it at that time and they will appear incredibly knowledgable to your customers.
Just in time learning also means delivering the right information at the right time to employees. If you have an employee training app such as Oplift you can send speedy notifications and updates to your staff letting them know about any product launches or changes. By sending them the information directly in real-time, they’ll be more likely to make use of the information. You can also create short two-minute learning courses about any topic. For example, if your employee needs to learn how to carry out refunds they can go through a few microlearning questions to brush up on their skills.
By having a digital knowledgebase you create an area like Google for your business. With the right care and attention given to the content on the knowledgebase. This area makes it easy and simple for your employees to find anything and everything they need to know in a matter of seconds. This is essential for good customer service.
How to keep the database useful and relevant
Make it someone’s job to keep the content updated. Every time there is an update, special offer or event they should be adding this to your product directory.
Have a place where employees can write down customers questions so that you can add the answers to the knowledgebase. The more you do this the more extensive your learning resource will be.
Have a comments section on your knowledgebase so that employees can comment on the articles if they can’t find the answer they want or if the information is missing.
Keep the microlearning questions on the articles up to date and ensure that every article has added questions so that employees can revise the information if they want to.
Want to unlock the performance of your frontline teams?
Ocasta Engage unlocks the performance of your frontline teams through comms, microlearning and knowledge. Customers include Next, Virgin Media O2, Burgertory and Tesco Mobile, who have achieved desirable results, including;
98% engagement rates
3.75x more recognition amongst their teams
94% of all comms being read.
