INTRODUCTION
A large retail clothing store sensed the need to improve its customer service in order to become more competent in the industry. Today customer usually prefer those stores for shopping, which provides excellent set of customer services to their customers,this had raised an intense competition among retailers to improve their customer services. A good customer service is where employee welcome customers in stores with cheery greetings and sales staff must have good communication and good interpersonal skills in order to help customers by providing them a friendly atmosphere, quick response and polite attitude. To improve customer service skills of their staff, the large retail clothing store decided to throw a training program for them. The training program was designed considering ways to greet customers, offer assistance, and help them find what they are looking for, sort out their complaints politely, and provide courteous friendly and helpful services.
The training session was arranged in-house and was delivered by the company’s staff. The training session was based on lectures defining and explaining the importance of customer services followed by videos showing scenarios of good and bad customer services. The company used traditional training methods of lectures and discussions to learn and understand the contents of the training. At the end of the training session, the feedback of trainees was asked and many of them had answered very well and impressive manner, which was assumed as a success of the training program. Trainees were awarded with certificates upon the completion of the program, however, back on the work, employees faced lots of difficulties interacting and communicating with customers because during their training session they didn’t learnt practically and therefore they do not know, how to deal with customers practically. Only one month after the training session, four of the sales staff who had attended the training session had quitted the jobs,while;there was no improvement in sales and customer satisfaction. This had questioned the effectiveness of the training program and the management was confused to understand the reason for such results.
ANALYSIS OF SERVICE TRAINING PROGRAM
The management of the large retail clothing store became conscious about the on goingeffectiveness of the training session that whether they should wait a little more to see the effect of the training program or should assume it as a failure of the training program. In order to understand the real problem and to find a good solution, SW analysis (Appendix 1) of the training session is conducted.
Strengths:The trainers were very experienced and had full information about the company’s performance and the weaknesses of sales staff because the training session was arranged in-house and was delivered by the company’s staff. The trainers were friendly and were aware about the common issues that were faced by the sales staff in the field. The way of providing information was effective, simple and easy to understand. In the training real scenarios were presented via videos showing the difference between good and bad customer services. With the help of these scenarios, trainers tried to help employees in understanding the nature of different types of behaviors and attitudes of the customers. Ithad been taught that in many cases customers were wrong, but being a good sales person, it would be the responsibility of the employees to deal their customers decently. The session had good communication qualities through which trainers had engaged the trainees in order to ensure better learning.The training session was cost effective and output oriented for which trainers conducted a test to understand the level of understanding of trainee to the contents of the program. This helped the employees to evaluate themselves in finding out whether they are good sales persons or bad sales persons for their customers. To encourage employees, certificates were assigned at the end of the training session showing that these trainees had performed well throughout the session, which automatically increased the self-esteem and morale of the employees.
Weaknesses: One of the biggest weaknesses of the training session was its methodology. The company had used a traditional off the job method of training in which the entire focus was on lectures and videos instead of providing them opportunities to practice the things that trainees had learnt. The session lacked practical workshops, which had limited the employees to learn the practical applications of the knowledge they had learnt there. Immediately after the completion of the training program, trainees were sent back to their work without having access to their trainers as well as they didn’t have support from their executives and trainers to cope with real world customers. Only a few videos, scenarios are presented to the trainees which gave them a limited exposure to the various types of issues and complaints that the customers could have in a retail clothing shop. The video scenarios were general.....................
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