We have received the photographs of the Snr. Management team recently taken for the website. We were on the set for approx. 2 hours.

During that time one would expect to find a good set of photos to use…

No - not the case, on the group shots someone was always laughing or looking in the wrong direction.

It highlighted how everyone is different and that is exactly what it is like when we train. No two people are the same so when we design and deliver a programme we always ensure it reflects the different learning styles.

Here is a brief explanation of the four Honey and Mumford learning styles:

Activist - They like to learn by doing things so we engage them during the course with activities.

Pragmatist - They also like to learn by being involved but only if the activities reflect techniques that they can use and put into practice and has a clear reference to what they are learning.

Reflector - Enjoys observing others and reflecting on ideas and new information. Videos are great tools for training this group of people.

Theorist - Need to understand the theory behind actions and concepts. They like to find solutions in a step by step manner and learn from any opportunity to question.

If people are not the same as this brief explanation of learning styles demonstrates, we can conclude that we need to be stimulated in different ways if we are to learn effectively and that is what we do well at Beyond The Box.

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For successful brand promotion, you need passionate staff who will promote the brand consistently and achieve sales and loyalty for the client.

Building a strong relationship with retail stores and sorting issues out will also help achieve confidence in selling the brand.

It’s important to put the right people in the right job, and to have good communication processes in place.

It’s also vital to have comprehensive training about the brand and product line. Your product line may not be suggested by a customer advisor because they don’t know enough about it.

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• Awareness - The most important part of the Product Training role is to make sure staff are aware of any new and existing product. If they don’t know the product is there - they can’t possibly sell it.

• Confidence - If sales staff have had training on a product they will feel more confident in selling it to the customer. By letting staff try, touch and feel the product it also gives them more confidence to sell.

• Knowledge - Training staff on features and benefits help them to understand the products and helps them to find the best possible product for the customer. Customers will be much more satisfied if they received informed advice from an advisor, and this is particularly important in retail for technical purchases such as computers, mobile phones, washing machines and vacuum cleaners where the average customer knows what they need it for but not what specification.

• Up-Selling - Training staff on the differences between product can also achieve best possible sales for the client and store and sell top of the range products instead of entry range products. This helps the sales person to sell up the range.

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Training staff on new and current products is a must to maximise sales. But to enable the trainer and customer advisor to demonstrate products in store, stock must be checked before hand.

If the product is not on display we check the system in store and request that it is placed out asap. We also make a note of this and input this information onto our pda so that the client has a record of missing stock within store.

Stores miss sales opportunities when stock is not on display, so along with allowing product trainers to get on with their work, checking stock levels when first in store also helps avoid missing sales.

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Merchandising acts as a silent sales man.  So if there are no sales staff around, the merchandise explains about the features and benefits of the product.

Retail merchandising staff make sure that the products looks clean, it is in the right place and the correct sales tickets are on the correct products.

They may also put out promotional material such as leaflets, stands and shelf wobblers to draw attention.

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We had a really lovely email through from Bob Gregitis, the Sales Operations Manager at DSGI. It was to thank us for the work we produced for Currys recent communications launch. They have entered the contract mobile phone market with some fantastic offers and Currys approached us to help them train the store staff in readiness.

The training was in two stages and the final pack was posted to each store a few weeks ago. We beat our best lead times with this project because the research, plus the design of the training programme and artwork for the package was all turned round in about a 2 week period! A few candles were burnt at midnight as you can imagine, but we met the deadline!

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I was running a communication training course last week and interestingly, the e mails section is always a firm favourite with the delegates. Email is a useful tool but can lead to misunderstandings and you need to remember that e-mails can be surprisingly permanent. Here are a couple of things which may be useful:

• Words make up only a small part of the communication process. With e-mail, we don’t have the luxury of being able to analyse the meaning of the words by tone of voice or the body language being used, so it’s very easy for the content of e-mail to be misunderstood. It’s a good idea to read e-mails over a few of times before sending.
• We often respond quickly to emails without really thinking about our response and its effects. It’s a good idea, especially where emotions are involved, to write your response, wait a while, and then re read before sending, this way you have a chance to respond in a calm and rational way rather than create the wrong impression or make things worse.
• Punctuation is vital to making messages clear and readily understood. All professional e-mails should be properly punctuated and spelling checked.
• It’s good to recognise when email is appropriate or when it would be better to pick up the phone or walk over to talk to someone.

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There are many companies who offering specialised training to call centres throughout the UK but very few of these will carry out any research before starting a job. Beyond The Box was commissioned by the Co-operative Bank to identify the training needs and requirements of 100 inbound telephone sales staff. The overall objective of this exercise was to deliver increased levels of sales and customer service by providing the right training course for the right staff.Christine Knott, Director of Beyond The Box, undertook extensive research in order to meet this objective. The purpose of the research was to establish whether the department had a suitable foundation on which it could reach its desired goals. This included looking at whether the current method and times of training delivery was suitable and gauging the response of the advisors towards the training they received.

“It is vital when designing bespoke training courses for companies to ascertain what the current level of understanding is at all levels within the company. If individual objectives have been set then these need to be compared with the overall objective of the training. To do a training job properly you have to get under the skin of an organisation and understand how it works so that the course that you design will actually work from the ground level up,” said Christine.

The research used several methods including interviewing staff at all levels including those in the front line, dealing with the calls, through to staff at managerial level. Beyond The Box also prepared an analysis of current call standards and attended team meetings to assess communication levels within the department.

The Co-operative Bank also had objectives for each member of staff and Beyond The Box looked into all of these objectives and how these linked into the departments’ overall objectives.

The results of the research indicated that certain measures needed to be taken before any training delivery would be beneficial. Julie Marsh, Customer Service Manager at the Co-operative Bank comments, “Following Christine’s recommendations and guidance, we have carried out some extensive groundwork and any training delivered will be far more successful as a result.

“The research undertaken by Beyond The Box was, in my experience, far more detailed than any other company I have worked with and it exceeded my expectations. More importantly it was undertaken in a professional and non- threatening manner. Positive feedback about Christine’s approach and style were made by all members of staff who came into contact with her. It is refreshing to see a forward thinking company who are keen to see real results rather than just delivering empty training solutions for financial gain.”

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I delivered a communications skills training course recently with one of our clients, and it went very well. Communication is cited as being a key issue in the work place.

We have all heard the comment ‘no one tells us anything’, so the ideas we included in the programme were received very positively. Delegates said that their new communication skills would be highly beneficial, not only in the workplace but in social environments too.

They were keen to put them straight into practice and see how they could change things. They were really confident that they were now in a position to improve communication within their teams and remove the negativity that poor communication can create.

The client was delighted with the feedback comments and the scores. Various sections appear on the score sheet including course and trainer evaluation. All are scored out of a maximum of 5. I suppose I should be delighted because I scored all 5’s across the board with the exception of three 4’s. Being the competitive person I am though, those three 4’s have bugged me!

I’m looking forward to the training that we have booked with the same client next month and I will be aiming for 5’s across the board on the feedback!

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Today has been hectic updating a training data base we bought a few weeks ago. I know we buy data expecting it to be clean but there is always movement in a company and they are never quite up to date. Most of it is complete now so the mail out is well under way. We are contacting call centres at the moment about our training services and introducing them to some of our ideas that have worked really well with our current call centre clients. We know that customer loyalty and succession planning is important to call centres so these are areas of interest at the moment.

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