Choose Your Own Training Adventure
I was an only child until 13 years old; my favorite companions were my dog, Snoopy, and my treasured cache of Choose Your Own Adventure® books. These were the books where the reader was the protagonist, and each little vignette in the story led to a decision, the results of which you would be directed to by the page numbers which corresponded to each choice.
This blog post is your own Choose Your Own Adventure Story. Let’s call it Mystery of the Call Center, because that’s where our story unfolds. As you read this post, think about what you would do as the main character. More importantly, think about what you would ask. Hopefully, you’ll do better than I did, when I lived this story. At the end, I’ll tell you what I learned since, and how you can have a happier ending next time.
Teaching Call Center Service Reps to be Friendly
You’ve been put in charge of your largest training to date: traveling the country to do live customer service and features, applications, and benefits (FAB) training on a new product with over 1000 call center representatives. The project sponsor tells you that their reps need to be friendlier and less scripted with customers. You, of course, say: “Great!” It’s good paying work and using improv for this need is a no-brainer. Less scripted is literally what we do! Why wouldn’t you be perfect for this?
So you build your training; you deliver it. The customer service team seems a little dejected at first, but you put on your improviser song and dance, rub a little schmaltz on their wounds, and everybody gets to play Ad Game at end. So the frowns turn to belly laughs, and they practically dance out of the training rooms. Solid 9s and 10s on the training evaluations. They LOVED it. You walk out of the bomb shelter-gray building in Oklahoma (or wherever) feeling like a million bucks.
Confident in your success, you call the client thirty days later to see how things are going and to ask for some internal referrals or a LinkedIn recommendation. The client seems rushed, a little frosty. You ask how the customer service team is doing and they say, “well, everyone really enjoyed your training….”
There’s a pause. A long pause.
Dead End. Start Over.
“But…” And now the client seems almost apologetic. “The customer feedback scores of the reps we had you train are the same as before! They improved the first week a little, but now it’s as if we didn’t do anything.”
You stammer out some kind of half-apology. You offer to come in again; maybe you even offer to come in for free just to salvage the relationship. The answer is a polite, “no.” “We’re just so busy right now. But everyone really enjoyed it.”
News Flash: Unless you were hired to perform for the Holiday Party, the employees loving the training is not the top priority.
The top priority of training is contributing to the achievement of the Desired Performance Outcome to the degree that the training function committed to if not more.
Are the trained employees now doing what they are expected to do in the way they are expected to do it? And, in the case of our example, that’s a big no.
In Choose Your Own Adventure books, this is a dead end. We have to start over and try not to make the same mistake. But what was our mistake, exactly? What went wrong?
What You (and I) Did Right: Course Development
You didn’t think your design was the problem. You built your design to address the missing soft skills: “friendlier, less scripted.” You put a lot of thought into using games and exercises that would help learners practice speaking in a way that was both “friendlier” and “less scripted.”
You also were thoughtful about sequence. You purposely addressed the “be less scripted” objective first, because it required the most restructuring of how learners stored and used content. Reps had to master thinking of key selling points out of the normal order they were used to. Only then could they recall those points organically in response to customer questions and objections. That required the most brain power. Then, once that ability was developed, the tonal tricks and relaxation techniques you taught to address “friendlier” could easily work on top of that talk track. This sense of layering learning priorities will be vital to you as you expand your Improv-Based Training practice to more complex opportunities:
When your training requires complex content learning (such as what to say) and soft skills learning (like how to say it), make sure learners feel secure in the content learning first.
Back to our example, you know you developed a good course. You also know that you were prepared, managed your room well, and used the kind of warmth and humor that makes improvisers natural trainers. So you also know you implemented the training well. Furthermore, the evaluations indicate that the learners reacted well to the training, and to you as their instructor.
So if all that went right, what went wrong?
What You (and I) Missed: Performance-Focused Analysis and Design
To figure this out, you would have to go back to the analysis or discovery phase. You knew what the client thought they wanted, but how much else did you know?
How much did you know about life as a call center-based customer service representative?
How much did you know about how they were already doing their jobs and why? What did you understand about the larger performance environment beyond the immediate need?
One of the most important questions I ask:
“Why do you think they aren’t naturally performing the way you want? What’s in their way?”
This the hardest thing to figure out, especially when working with an unfamiliar population, industry, and client: What is so obvious and engrained in these people’s lives and culture that they don’t even think to mention it to me as an outsider?
The Missing Clue
Here’s what you didn’t know: not one member of that team actually believed they would be able to try anything you trained them to do.
Sure, they gave you high scores on the session evaluations because you were fun! The games were fun! And, of course they wished they lived in a world where they could be friendlier, more engaging, more improvisational. But, what no one told you was: the reps didn’t think they had time to be friendly.
These reps were already pushing the upper limits of something called AHT, Average Handle Time. See, Call Center reps have a certain length of time that, on average, their calls are supposed to last. When their AHT runs long, that means they aren’t getting to customers fast enough, customers are on hold longer, and customers get angrier.
Yes, these reps’ customer feedback scores were below average, but those scores were “okay.” Translation: no one was about to get fired for low customer feedback scores. However, the reps deeply believed that Handle Time was non-negotiable and they would be written up or worse for high AHT.
The training was doomed from the start because the Desired Performance Outcome wasn’t fully articulated by the client, and the order-taking trainer didn’t ask enough questions about what good performance truly looked like.
Your Training. Your Fault.
Now, if you are in the “improv saves the world” / intrinsic good crowd, you may be saying to yourself, “well no big deal. Those customer service reps still got to try improv. At least I made their day a little brighter.” Sure you did. But what about the next day?
Ignore your client’s performance needs, and you’ll never work for their company again, no matter how fun your trainings are.
No client in the history of training has ever told their boss, “the training we brought that expensive contractor in for didn’t go very well. It was probably my fault for not giving them an accurate picture of the need.”
It is always going to be your fault, and there aren’t enough clients out there for you to be unconcerned by that fact. If you don’t improve your client’s bottom line, or at least deliver the value they were expecting, then they won’t hire you again, won’t refer you, and won’t give you a recommendation. In some cases, they may even ask for some money back. So tell yourself:
“Their bottom line is my bottom line.”
To look on the more improv side of things, it’s our job to Yes And our clients, to have their back. If someone on your team started a scene badly, would you let them flounder? Would you hang back and hope someone else saves the scene? Would you enter reluctantly and then spend the scene standing off to the side and commenting?
Hopefully, you would jump in with both feet and bail water with them. You’d make the best of the scene you could, but you’d make sure to make your partner look good, even if they didn’t seem to be doing much to help themselves. You’re either on your client’s team or you’re not; be on their team. Have their back.
In our call center example, I could have had my client’s back by conducting more in-depth questioning, to help me make sure I truly understood the need. No, not the stated need, but the deeper, often more nuanced, actual need. By slipping on your Learning Consultant hat, you could have gotten out of the order-taker role and into the trusted advisor role, as discussed in Part 2 of this series.
Choosing the Best Ending to Your Adventure
As much as the habit of asking questions gets a bad rap in improv, it’s essential to our training lives. Most Improv-Based Trainers are brought in to just “do our thing.” I’ve worked with doctors, scientists, pharmaceutical sales reps, customer service reps, consultants, managers, a C-level team, and even a group of pastors. That doesn’t mean I understand them. I keep asking the dumb questions, hoping they will solidify enough foundation underneath me that I can start building up to the smart ones.