Category

Adaptive Learning

Sep 12
0

The Power of Practice: Why Sales Reps Need to Practice Conversations Fifty Times

By | Adaptive Learning, call center, sales training

coaching employeesIn the dynamic world of sales, the ability to engage in effective conversations is paramount. Whether you’re pitching a product, negotiating a deal, or building relationships with clients, your communication skills can make or break your success. One key principle that many successful salespeople swear by is the idea of practicing conversations at least fifty times to become proficient. But why is this so important?

1. **Confidence Building**: Practice instills confidence. When you’ve rehearsed a conversation multiple times, you’ll feel more self-assured when facing real clients or prospects. Confidence is contagious and can significantly impact the way potential clients perceive you and your product.

2. **Refinement of Pitch**: Repetition allows you to fine-tune your pitch. Each practice round enables you to identify what works and what doesn’t. You can adjust your tone, language, and key points to create a compelling and persuasive message.

3. **Adaptability**: Through practice, you become more adaptable. You’ll learn to adjust your approach depending on the person you’re speaking to. This flexibility is crucial when dealing with a diverse range of clients, each with their own unique needs and preferences.

4. **Overcoming Objections**: Sales conversations often involve objections and pushback. By practicing these scenarios repeatedly, you can develop effective strategies to handle objections with finesse, turning potential obstacles into opportunities.

5. **Memorization**: Repeated practice helps you internalize key information and details about your product or service. This means you can speak confidently and authoritatively without relying on scripts or notes.

6. **Improved Listening Skills**: Effective communication is a two-way street. Practicing conversations allows you to develop your listening skills, helping you better understand client needs and tailor your responses accordingly.

7. **Consistency**: Consistency in your messaging is vital for brand integrity. Practicing conversations ensures that your team conveys a consistent and coherent message, reinforcing your brand’s identity.

In conclusion, the adage “practice makes perfect” holds true for sales reps. Repetition is a powerful tool that can transform a good salesperson into a great one. By practicing conversations at least fifty times, sales reps can build confidence, refine their pitch, become more adaptable, and consistently deliver outstanding results. In the competitive world of sales, mastering this art can be the key to achieving and surpassing your targets.

Dec 20
0

Simulations Speed time to Proficiency

By | Adaptive Learning, AI, bots, call center, contact Center, simulations

It’s a well-known fact that many call centers are challenged with getting agents up to speed as quickly as possible with a high degree of proficiency. The chart below shows the average time it takes for agents to become proficient. But we want to encourage you to start using simulations – like our ACES simulator

 

When we work with our customer’s call centers the #1 reason they use us is to get their agents up to speed faster.

Click here to see some examples

Oct 19
0

Correlation of Smart Phone Use and the Dumbing Down of Our Workforce

By | Adaptive Learning, AI

There are some pretty strong arguments that the use of Smart Phones has reduced our attention spans.  In fact, I bet some of you won’t be able to read this entire article without checking your phone or toggling over to check your email.

Publications like “Are Smartphones Making Us Dumber” and “Is Your Smartphone Making You Fat and Lazy” provide evidence that smartphones are creating a negative impact on our cognitive abilities.

For example, how many people under the age of 30 could use a map to navigate their way to some unknown destination? Don’t get me wrong, I have a very close affection for my GPS “lady” in helping navigate my way through some tricky destinations. But, she has led me astray on occasion to a route that seems to pass by a lot of Dunkin Donut Shops.

This leads me to think about the amount of time allowed for a single training program has gone from an average of 1 hour down to 15 minutes. Is this because we know the end-user attention span is short or is this the only amount of time the organization will allow the learner to be pulled away from their job?

Knowing that a training unit seems to be 15 minutes or less, it’s surprising to find that from 2017 to 2020, large corporations have dedicated more than twice as much time into total hours of training

(Chart from this article)

So, if companies are allowing for more training time per employee but less time for each training activity what was the catalyst that caused this dramatic leap?

My hypothesis is that more content is being digitized and accessible via online courseware/video content and knowledge management but are the employees becoming more skilled just because their employer is providing more content and easier access?

According to a study conducted by Professor Mark Williams University of Sydney Australia, shows that something that is read on a screen will be retained 10-30 percent less than something read on paper.

He also states “Our brains can’t multi-task, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another “

How many apps on your phone send an audible or buzzing signal to you throughout the day? These disruptions take our focus away each time we hear them.

I think we are fooling ourselves that by providing more resources to our employees they will automatically consume them to increase their capacity to do their job. I think organizations are taking the “just Google it” approach to providing resources and information to employees. Why not —  I can’t tell you how many things I’ve Googled to bring knowledge to me in the moment I need it.

Does that mean I’ve had become an expert on this –no but it got the job done. I think this has become the attitude of many organizations, by providing enough access to on-demand knowledge, we are doing our jobs.

I hope some of you reading this (if you got this far) can prove me wrong. Time, money and chaos are always going to be a driving force in building an educated workforce. Wouldn’t it be great if your company could bring an industry expert to the table when trying to acquire a new client or present the best trouble-shooting team when malicious hackers break into your network. Companies can have this type of human capital without paying higher prices to recruit top talent from the start.

In closing, it would be great to see examples of companies that spend time on training beyond the 15-minute chunks or treat training as a one-time event. It takes time, practice and feedback to gain long-term knowledge and expertise. I’m a huge fan of technology and the benefits it can provide but let’s find ways to leverage technology in a way that enable employees to build long-term knowledge and build internal experts to become more competitive and more “Smart” without relying on our mobile devices.

Aug 25
0

Five Best Reasons To Use Simulations for Remote Training

By | Adaptive Learning, bots, simulations

How Simulations Can Ensure Remote Workers Are Job Ready

Well, it’s now August and many of us optimistically thought in March that Covid-19 would be a fading memory. How naive we were. But here we are and every company is trying to figure out what the “long-game” is in regard to changing the way business is done.

Two years ago when I launched Verbal Transactions our small team was able to quickly land some well-known clients who saw the value of using our simulator as a way to augment their existing training programs. One key reason was that it gave them the reassurance that employees would get more “hands-on” practice.

Now with the majority of employees working remotely, tools like ours are even more imperative. Why you ask? Here are the top 5 reasons.

  1. Simulation training has been proven to produce better results compared to instructor-led, video, or eLearning. By giving users the ability to practice in realistic situations exposes them to a more tactile and true-life experience.simulations
  2. Due to the fact employees are not sitting in a classroom or placed in a pod to where they can tap someone on the shoulder to answer quick questions, using our built-in “bot” simulations can be built to allow for users to verbally interact with the simulator to feel they have a guide or mentor to help them along the way
  3. A well-built simulation will allow users to make mistakes with some form of immediate feedback. We all learn from our mistakes. Using simulations to allow you to fail in a safe environment allows you to actually succeed faster.
  4. Because managers can’t physically observe employees doing their job,  using analytics like that built into our ACES software removes any mystery around how well the employee can perform their job. Each behavior you want the simulator to observe can be tied into the scoring and reporting functionality.  No need to watch a video or listen to a recording of the user completing this task, the real-time reporting gives you complete transparency to how well they did.
  5. Most importantly, users appreciate more hands-on practice and feel more confident about how to do their job. Many employees have a variety of anxiety in these uncertain times. Losing their job is one of them. By arming them with tools to ensure you are helping them to learn how to do their job well, ensures, you want them to succeed and to ensure they are well equipped to contribute to helping the company do their best.

 

Jul 22
0

ACES Simulations vs. Storyline “simulations”

By | Adaptive Learning

Recently one of our clients asked us to build an technical support simulation. In this simulation, the engineers would be responding to the customer via a series of emails. Their developers were used to using Articulate’s Storyline for building on-line training. In this case, they decided to build both versions – ACES™ and Storyline.

For those of you not familiar with our simulation platform ACES™, has the ability to recognize key-words, conduct complex and multiple randomized branching, and uses speech recognition for verbal responses.

The primary differences in both designs were as follows:

  1. ACES™ set up randomized branching as to not “game” the system, the Storyline version did not have randomized paths
  2. The Storyline vs. presented multiple-choice options as which response to the customer was best vs. ACES™ allowed the user to actually compose the email. We did provide a hint but if a hint was used, their points were deducted.
  3. There were three initial branches for both options, due to the fact we also included randomization, we were able to build in Six scoring options vs. the one scoring option supplied by Storyline.
  4. When the results were presented, the user could review their composed emails with the instructor if they questioned their results. This was not an option in the Storyline version.
  5. Based upon which path the user chose at the beginning and which keywords they selected, we provided a breakdown of their score into for clearly defined behaviors they have defined as departmental skills they choose to reinforce. The users were able to see how well they scored for each of these behaviors. Storyline was not able to do this.

Don’t get me wrong there are benefits to both tools but in my 30 years of building and delivering enterprise training solutions, one thing I know for sure is, the more active vs. passive the training is, the better results you will get. This is why I am a proponent of non-SCORM based tools as we have grown beyond this capability to track and measure more behaviors and skills vs. simply measuring completions.

If you have read this far, share with me what tools you feel should be highlighted that may fall into the non-SCORM camp as well.

 

Feb 01
0

More Metrics vs. More Completions

By | Adaptive Learning, bots, empathy, simulations

Better Training Metrics to Measure Business Impact

I was one of the first people to evangelize the use of Learning Management Systems (LMS) twenty years ago. Now I’m singing a new tune — find a way to measure skill readiness vs. “completions”.

Initially, the LMS systems served a great purpose. But as time went on, companies began adding more and more features to it to help manage various learning activities. I worked with a client who had very robust features for managing classrooms, assessments, catalogs etc. But the bi-product of this was arming trainers with data on the consumption of activities. I could tell you how many people passed an assessment but couldn’t tell you if these same people knew how to really conduct a proper “lock-out tag-out” procedure.

In a recent survey conducted by Donald H Taylor Learning Analytics made the top spot in what the learning

Web analytics concept

the community has a priority interest in 2020. In previous years personalization and adaptive learning held these top spots.

This is great news for Verbal Transactions — as I have been preaching the benefits of more data for the last four years. In our simulator ACES™ (accelerated contact engagement system) we can pinpoint key behaviors that will truly prepare employees for how to do their job well. We are supplying the “system” to measure these behaviors because the standard LMS can’t do this.

For example: In a standard online training program to teach customer service skills, the manager only knows the following:

  1. When the student started and completed the course
  2. What their score on the final assessment or knowledge checks were

In most instances, this course wouldn’t allow the student to complete the course without successfully reaching the passing score.

If you were to build a similar course in ACES™, you would know the following:

  1. When the student started and completed the course
  2. Did they great the customer properly – and how many times it took them to do this according to best practice
  3. Did they properly express the right level of empathy if the customer expressed dissatisfaction?
  4. How well they demonstrated accuracy when keying in information on a screen or recommend proper items to the customer
  5. Did they ask an open-ended question to properly help the customer uncover their needs
  6. Did they paraphrase their understanding of the customer’s requests or needs properly
  7. Were they able to handle the transaction within a reasonable amount of time
  8. Did the offer any cross-selling items at the appropriate time

Anyway, you get the point. With the new digital transformation taking place, organizations can bring this power of more information to them to help trouble-shoot employee performance problems before they impact the customer experience.

If you’d like to see the simulator in action, just click this link.

Jan 20
0

How Active Listening Benefits Your Company

By | Adaptive Learning, call center, contact Center, empathy, simulations

Responding Authentically Drives Customer Retention

There is a lot of talk around replacing contact center agents with bots or some form of self-service options. But according to research conducted by NewVoiceMedia, 75% of customers still prefer a live agent (voice or chat) to help them solve their issues.

Successful companies know how to create a culture that allows agents to not only express empathy but express the Right level of empathy for the customer’s situation. Here is an example.

A customer who is calling to get roadside assistance because they have a flat tire.

Agent#1 “I apologize for your situation.”

Agent#2 “I’m sure that’s really frustrating for you.”

Agent #2 does a better job of expressing empathy that expresses what the customer must be feeling. They recognize what is going on in the customer’s world. This would be perceived as “more authentic” vs. canned and routine.

You can teach agents how to use the skill of active listening, here are 8 steps created by David Grosman that are right on target with how we teach this skill in our simulator

  1. Approach each dialogue with the goal to learn something. …
  2. Stop talking and focus closely on the speaker. …
  3. Open and guide the conversation. …
  4. Drill down to the details. …
  5. Summarize what you hear and ask questions to check your understanding. …
  6. Encourage with positive feedback.
  7. Listen for total meaning
  8. Pay attention to your responses

I’ve highlighted number 5 as this step is really critical step.  It demonstrates to the customer that you truly understand their situation and can accurately paraphrase what is going on.

When the customer senses you are truly trying to get to the heart of their issue or how to help them out. This builds a level of trust. This connection is priceless and should not be taken lightly. When customers feel you are trustworthy they are more likely to continue doing business with you.

 

Jan 14
0

Seat Time vs. Skill Readiness

By | Adaptive Learning, bots, simulations

How to Get the CEO to Notice

Did you know that only 8% of CEOs see a direct correlation to the money they spend on training and business impact? This is one of the reasons why training is the first thing to get cut from a budget when tightening the purse strings.

Why is this?

I’ve been in the corporate training space for almost 30 years now (yikes!). I was lucky enough to follow the evolution of how technology has impacted the delivery and access to corporate training but I have also seen it become a detriment as well.

When electronic delivery or eLearning was first introduced companies proclaimed “Now you can cost-effectively train employees on hundreds of topics.” This never happened, even though the vendors successfully sold libraries of 100’s of courses to their clients, only a handful were really useful to the organization at any given time.

Once the evolution of LMS’s (learning management systems) came about it was the holy grail of managing and delivering training. At first, this was great. As companies grew comfortable with LMSs they began to turn them into something beyond their original intent.

evolution LMS

Evolution LMS

As this image shows, LMS and digital delivery of training have evolved from one to many to agile. But the fact of the matter is, managers and executives have no solid information to tell them if the employee can actually perform the task the training was intended to teach them.

Technology — that is not necessarily new- AR/VR and simulations have a better approach at measuring skill readiness. In the past, these learning platforms were too cost-prohibitive. The digital demand has driven the costs of these solutions down allowing for increased access. I still see a lot of organizations trying to fit these delivery mechanisms into the same SCORM world but it just doesn’t work.

We need to explore how an organization will benefit from exploring learning solutions that truly measure skill readiness vs. just seat time or completion stats. With the availability of AI/ RPA and big data and predictive analytics, we can build and deliver training that helps employees learn new skills faster and more competently. This translates into a direct tie to business impact.

If you’re at all curious to see an example of AI/predictive analytics and simulation learning visit our video page.Videos

 

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