Customer Service (CS) Champs
Overview
Customer Service Training (Etiquette) – eLearning
A mobile-friendly Articulate Rise concept course designed to help ABC Corp employees improve customer service outcomes. This course implements Action Mapping, Adult Learning Theory, and Gagne’s 9 Events of Learning to deliver short scenarios, interactive concept checks, and multimedia.
Audience – adult sales and customer-facing employees at ABC Corp,
Responsibilities – instructional design, eLearning design, script writing, scenario scriptwriting, evaluations, and assessments
Tools used – Articulate Rise, Adobe Creative Cloud, Powerpoint, Mindmeister, Vegas Movie Studio, Camtasia
Problem
ABC Corp has steadily lost market share as their chief competitor, XYZ Corp is innovating its customer service focus. SME research data reveals that on all customer service metrics, XYZ continually outperforms ABC in terms of empathy.
Consultations with the data team have confirmed the correlation between these metrics and recent trends in lost sales and market share at ABC. A needs analysis has revealed that better training would address the issue most effectively.
Solution
I designed and developed this 15-20 minute interactive eLearning course to allow learners to practice the behaviors needed to see improved customer service feedback and sales results for the company. As such, it is based on adult learning theory and includes elements of ACTION MAPPING in its scenario implementation. As a mobile-friendly Rise course, it is lightweight and accessible to audiences in a variety of learning environments.
Process
The course design took place over a 3-month period in my graduate program in Instructional Technology. As such, it incorporates a strong theoretical and design foundation, particularly ADDIE and Gagne’s 9 events of learning.
The course also prioritizes assessments and evaluations, both formative and summative. Articulate Rise is somewhat modest in its power and depth, but its strength lies in its straightforward accessibility and ease of modification.
This course is a concept course on which I plan to continue building and adding elements to more fully address the learning objectives (“business problem” in this case).
Having graduate course requirements to adhere to obligated me to be meticulous and intentional with my module content and design, while exploring the functionality and UI of Rise in the context of this learning context.
Action Map
Text-Based Storyboard
Outcomes
Six months post-training, analysis was done on three data points:
A. change in customer complaints (individual), B. change in customer positive ratings (individual), C. change in group sales figures (region), and D. change in relative ranking between XYZ and ABC in CS Magazines quarterly rankings (nationwide).
Results Summary
A.
88% of the learners showed a significant reduction in customer complaints. The average reduction was 43.3% below previous.
10% showed no change
2% had no data
B.
63% of the learners showed an increase in positive feedback ratings. The average increase was 17% over previous.
36% showed no significant change
1% had no data.
C.
Sales figures for the region in the research period showed a significant jump, correlating to the customer service positive feedback improvement when other factors were eliminated. The sales figures of the group were 8.5 % above comparatives by month, and 11% by quarter.
D.
The latest comparative rankings of ABC to XYZ in Customer Service Magazine’s quarterly leaderboard, has ABC surpassing XYZ for the first time in two categories: “customer empathy” and “customer problem-solving”. This is the first time in ABC’s history to achieve such a mark.
Takeaways
Although this is a concept course, the idea and the topic have been with me for a long time. An American who has lived and worked in Japan for a number of years, I have lived firsthand the wide disparity between customer service as it’s delivered in Japan (pretty much amazing) and in the U.S. (hit-and-miss to be generous).
I’ve always been bewildered by how stores in Japan are so religiously focused on customer satisfaction, comfort, and convenience in almost any kind of environment you could imagine.
In convenience stores, employees trot up to the counter if more than two customers are waiting in line. They have almost no tolerance for upsetting the customer, much less being rude to them.
Contrast this to the epic tensions, snark, disrespect, or just neglect between staff and customers in too many environments in the U.S., and even as a customer I wanted the U.S. to do better.
I always thought the potential is there for U.S. companies to start delivering the type of customer service in the movies or back in the old days before things became so contentious in too many public spaces. So the idea for this course comes from a hope that American companies can do better for their customers. Many, in fact, seem to be getting the message.
I hope a course like this will be part of the solution, for the benefit of companies’ bottom lines and customers as well.