If your training manager has run a series of courses on improving customer service for all the employees in the company how would you go about evaluating the success of this training?

Answer 1

You might look to Six Sigma to evaluate the success of the program. You would want to start BEFORE the training. First, define what your goal is for training. Are you trying to make happier customers? Quicker responses? More accurate responses? Are you trying to keep people from calling back? Define success. If you can't define success, then you shouldn't have done any training. Then, you need to measure where you were before the training. If you've already trained everyone, is there a way to go back and figure out what it was like before? If you're looking for happier customers, do you have any surveys? If you're trying to keep people from calling back, do you have call records? If you don't have a way to measure, then you will have no objective way of knowing that you improved. Then, measure where you are against your goals AFTER the training. Use the same survey or same data collection system. Do a statistical analysis to see if the training made any real difference. You can look at various six sigma or stats sites to see how to do this, but it's based on the type of test, the type of data that you have. IF you have no way of measuring the "before training" state, then I would suggest that you come up with a measurement system internally. If you wanted to, you could compare "trained" people with "untrained" people (there are always untrained people... new employees, missed people, etc). and see if there is a statistical difference.