There is something to be said about putting the best trained employees on the frontline, but then how will those with less experience learn? They will learn from those who train them and hopefully from any mistakes that they make. Training is one thing that is never done, there are always changes in the workplace and each and every employee needs to have the benefit of proper training in order to be able to serve the customers 100%. But what can happen when there is not enough training before an employee is put on the frontline? Disaster is what can happen, for the company and for the poor employee who was not ready to fulfill the duties they were assigned to. This exact thing happened to a physician that I know who last year purchased a new billing and charting software for his office. Recently he needed help from an IT person at the company because he was trying to implement a new process in his software and needed some help in doing so. He made a phone call and the IT person not only tried to fix the issue he was asking about, but then told him that he needed to do a database update on his software, and proceeded to do so. Now this physician kind of felt that this IT person was in a little over his head because he had to ask a supervisor for some help several times, but he believe in the company and really thought that this service rep knew what he was doing. The next day when his staff began work with their computer program they found outrageous errors were happening with multiple normal everyday functions and they had to stop all work and call the software company. When all was said and done what had happened was this IT person did NOT know what he was doing, not even in the slightest way and he had multiplied the information in the clients database by thousands, to where it could not function. Thank goodness the company was able to restore everything back to normal (with their first thoughts being that they might not be able to) after some downtime for the physician’s office, and they were able to get back to functioning in a couple of days.
What was amazing and kept going through my head was “how did that software company allow someone who did not have the training to get on the phone to help a customer? Not only did they allow them to get on the phone, but this person thought they knew what they were doing and the company apologized saying that this tech did not know what he was doing and should never have done what he did. Wow…what happened? This physician told me that he was so taken back by this and that he has lost trust in the support staff. Not only had he lost trust, but he had referred multiple other physicians to this company and now had second thoughts about where the company was heading because of growth and lack of training the companies employees were receiving.
This story is just reinforcement to the question above “is employee training ever done?” Training is an ongoing thing and it is never done as things are always changing. Investment in employee training is essential for the company to move forward, but what is even more essential is to make sure each employee has had the proper training and can complete all applications that are expected of them before going “live” with the companies customers.
Excellent employee training goes hand-and-hand with the companies reputation with it’s customers and without a great reputation what do you have?
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