FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
March 29, 2005
Do Fries Go with That Shake?
I just met with Tom Wilson, the President of Allstate Protection. He had a lot of interesting things to say about how he's trying to transform the culture of his organization. We started talking about what it means to educate one's employees, and he told me a funny anecdote that, in my mind, summed up perfectly the difference bewteen education and training.
A customer goes into a McDonald's and orders a milkshake and an apple pie. The cashier says "Do you want dessert with that?"
That, people, is the downside of training. Education, by contrast, requires actual thinking and reacting to what the customer has actually said. Anyone else have insights on how to go beyond training to education?
Posted by Jennifer Reingold at March 29, 2005 4:27 PM | Category: learning, training, + development |
5 Comments
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I train and coach in effective communication and customer service. In effective communications,people must learn to hear first then respond. Coaching takes the listening skills further and individualizes the process.
I call coaching customized professional development.
The first step in good customer service is hearing, not reacting, to what the customer has said.
Pat anwswers and cardboard replies don't cut it. What does work is human connection and that begins with effective listening.
One of the things that we ask employees to do when attending training is to bring back their favorite session and repeat it for a Lunch and Learn for the rest of the team. This requires the employee to not only understand the information that was presented but be able to place it into context of their work environment.
this is really about learning via memorization vs learning via comprehension - which is something the public schools in the US are lagging very far behind in.
when i was devising troubleshooting training for a major software company's support team i set it up so that the trainees were first messing with the operating system, challenging them to strip it as far down as they could and still have basic functionality. while i got a lot of heat from above for that - obviously it isn't something we'd want them to do with customers - it was very useful in getting the techs to understand the parts of the system and how they worked together.
*then* i went into context and application. how once you determine the level of the problem (document, application, system or network) you could utilize the same principles to analyze the parts of that level.
it was very successful, resolutions skyrocketed and the techs reported a higher sense of efficacy in their roles. no one trashed a customer's computer.
then the market crashed....
when i was devising troubleshooting training for a major software company's support team i set it up so that the trainees were first messing with the operating system, challenging them to strip it as far down as they could and still have basic functionality. while i got a lot of heat from above for that - obviously it isn't something we'd want them to do with customers - it was very useful in getting the techs to understand the parts of the system and how they worked together.
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IN training we frequently remove the cognitive process of comprehension. To memick actions without an understanding of the dynamics of Why.
It is easy to train an individual in functions and processes, yet with out a context it is impossible for that individual to move beyond the limited scope they have been given.
So the unexpected becomes the new barrier that can not be traversed by the individual.
To educate an individual is to empower them to understand the dynamics of why they are doing this and not that, therefore the individual can handle the unexpected change that is inevitable.