This post is the second in a series that will identify 10 different obstacles that have emerged from my analysis of customer satisfaction data. Maybe you will have encountered one or more of these obstacles in your own business? The second obstacle is insufficient employee training.

Recently a large family entertainment complex, Celebrity Lanes, had its grand opening. It boasts 40 spacious bowling lanes, VIP suites, an arcade, and a 40-beer tap house.

I attended the grand opening with my family earlier this month. At a kiosk near the arcade, I purchased a set of cards that were loaded with $10 each worth of game tokens. Not long into playing, my oldest son had a problem with his card.

When I approached one of the arcade employees standing behind the counter, she pointed to another employee outside the arcade and said, “I’m not in charge of those. Talk to the woman in the pink shirt.”

Well, the woman in the pink shirt had a line of customers in front of her and a line had also formed at the lone kiosk in the arcade. So I asked the employee, “Can I just buy a replacement card from you and sort the problem out (with the woman in the pink shirt) later?”

She replied, “I haven’t been trained on the cash register.”

Interestingly, I had met a Celebrity Lanes employee at a social event prior to my visit and asked her what she thought of the pre-opening training. Her response: “What training?”

She went on to describe how her orientation and training consisted of an icebreaker activity, Two Truths and a Lie, and group bowling.

Unless one of my children is invited to a Celebrity Lanes birthday party, we have no plans to return. There are just too many family entertainment options available that don’t leave me with a feeling of buyer’s remorse.

So, what can we learn from this experience? Here are several clues that may indicate your new-hire employee training is insufficient:

• When an employee is approached about a common problem that directly pertains to her job role, she responds: “I’m not in charge of those. Talk to the woman in the pink shirt.”
• When a counter employee in a retail environment is asked to ring up a sale, she responds: “I haven’t been trained on the cash register.”
• In response to questions about the quality of her pre-opening training, an employee responds: “What training?”
• Your pre-opening training consists of an icebreaker activity and bowling.

The remedy for inadequately trained employees is simple: Offer effective job-related training.

Many employers neglect training because they feel that it is too costly. This shortsighted perspective tends to focus on the operating statement over the next 30 days and does not take into account what happens in the months thereafter.

If you have failed to rehearse customer service scenarios in advance through formalized job-related training, then you are practicing on customers. This is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

Every single customer is irreplaceable.

Recognize that when one of your customers defects because of a poorly trained employee, that customer is irreplaceable. And his or her lifetime contribution to your business—including future spending, feedback, and referrals—can never be replaced. Ever.

So even if Celebrity Lanes manages to attract another customer to replace me, I am gone forever. And forever is a long time.

Who should you service first?  The customer who’s phoning or the one standing right in front of you?  There’s a real double standard here among customers.  When you’re the one calling, you expect the employee to answer promptly and assist you right away without being put on hold.  However, when you’re the one standing in line waiting to be served you may expect that you should take priority over callers.

There’s a take and bake pizza store in my neighborhood that receives lots of phone orders.  Customers then arrive at the store and wait in a line to pick up the pizza order they phoned in.  Eventually they make their way to the front of the line where the employee working the register finally acknowledges them.  At this point customers are at the mercy of the phone.  If it rings, as it often does, they will have to wait another couple of minutes for the employee to take a phone order or two before their pizza is rung up.

On a Wednesday afternoon, it’s not so bad but on a Friday night?  The line of customers waiting to pay coupled with the volume of customers calling in their pizza orders creates tension.  I mean, really, you can sense it when you enter the store and can see it clearly in the body language of customers and employees alike.

Once, after waiting an inordinately long time to pay for my order, I actually considered using my cell phone to call the store and when they answered, saying something like, “Hello.  Hey, do you see that guy standing in front of the register holding a $20 bill?  Uh huh, right—the guy on the cell phone.  That’s me.  And I’d appreciate it if you’d stop answering the phone and ring up my pizza so I can get out of here.”

I’m sure the frontline hourly employee who faces this dilemma likely feels frustrated himself.  Chances are he hasn’t been trained in how to properly handle such situations.  Sadly, this fosters an adversarial relationship with customers who are then viewed by employees as impatient and unreasonable—as opposed to the source of their livelihoods.

As a trainer or presenter, you are likely accustomed to receiving feedback from your audiences. There are always a couple of pieces of conflicting feedback I can count on: temperature of room (too hot for some, too cold for others); and length of session (too long for some, too short for others).

Other times, there are constructive pieces of feedback that make a lot of sense (e.g., “the discussion following the simulation seemed to drag,” or “I couldn’t see the screen clearly from where I was seated”). The idea is to use this constructive feedback to improve. For instance, during my next presentation I’ll make sure to watch the time and group’s body language during the discussion following the simulation. I’ll also be more attuned to the room set-up to ensure that everyone can clearly see the screen.

So far, so good but have you ever received – from multiple sources – feedback that truly left you perplexed? I recently received feedback from a training session that “more examples” would have been helpful. While I agree that examples are vital to assist participants in transferring theory to application, I was surprised to receive the feedback because (by my count) I had included 62 separate examples over the course of a two hour presentation – that’s an example every two minutes!

I later met with the group contact and shared my confusion with this particular piece of feedback. He reassured me by saying that it only represented the views of a couple attendees out of an auditorium full of people. Still, it’s important to recognize the legitimacy of every single perspective in the room.

That got me thinking about individual and unique learning styles. They’re referred to differently depending on the source you’re citing but generally they distinguish between a learner’s preference for theory or practice, fast or slow, people or things, etc. We all have our own set of highly-evolved, nuanced preferences and tend to operate out of these preferences by default – especially when stressed (as in speaking before a large group…).

My take away: This was a great reminder to me that, while I had prepared 62 examples in advance, every participant would filter these examples differently based on his or her own unique background and set of preferences (e.g., job role, learning style preference, etc.).

Many of the examples were contained in the PowerPoint presentation or workbook. Perhaps I could share more of them orally in the future? Most of the examples were prepared in advance. Maybe I could be more spontaneous next time? The great majority of examples were my own. It might be more effective to solicit the majority of examples from the group during my next presentation.

How about you? Do you have any examples (no pun intended) of perplexing feedback from your own presentations?