You can never stress the importance of continuity in business enough. This is especially the case with customer relationships, where long-term customerships are preferred.
The other hand, customers appreciate that they are treated with respect and this is reached when you know the needs and wants of your customer and the reasons behind their behaviour. The customers need to be treated correctly regardless of the point of interaction, respect and professionalism is equally important when dealing with them either directly over the counter, or on-line. Well qualified sales or service professionals are always in demand to treat customers in the best way. Keeping up the skills of your frontline personnel requires first objective measurement of the skills and correct forecasting about the acceptability of the time value of the skills.
The training of the personnel has to be continuous, because the employees need to be always qualified. The results of the training have to be objectively measured. You need these elements for the improvement of the results. This way you can let your employees shine. Those, who struggle and need help, will be thankful for the assistance and remain loyal to the company. The old truth, that you can´t improve anything, unless you can measure it.
The training requirements for the employees vary from business to business. In some industries, the educational background of the personnel can be rather modest and the need for work related training can be relatively high. Here, on job learning by doing is never good enough. When you want your personnel to be proud of what they are doing and they do not feel, that they are just filling job vacancies, you have to provide systematic training and skills transfer for them. Additionally, these companies operate in the service businesses, where you have to provide services with a constantly good quality and the conformance of services has to be continuously according to the service agreements. This sets high requirements for the HR department and the smooth operation of the training processes.
The Skills Map service is designed to help in this kind of situations. With the help of the Boudin Skills Pool concept, skills targets for qualified employees can be set and easily kept. You can easily include unique customer specific service promises into your contracts. With the monitoring software, it is easy to keep your promises and to keep the agreed service levels.
Additionally, individuals with designated, measured skills can be included as reserves into skills pools as back up personnel to be used in cases of emergency.The Skills Map makes a beautiful visualisation of available current skills and you can get estimates about how much of the demanded skills can be pulled from the skills pools in the future and how much additional training is needed for keeping the service promises. The skills pools and the individual insights and views can be easily tailored into the visuals of the software to meet your customer specific demands.
Written by Kari Hartikainen, Sales, Boudin Oy