This post was originally published on lessonly.com.
People are traveling once again and our world is slowly but surely opening up- yippy! Inbound calls are increasing, so teams are eagerly hiring new employees, scheduling them on 90-day onboarding plans, and sending them off to provide the best sales and service to your customers.
That’s all that’s needed for success, riiiiight?
Wrong! Top training programs for employees don’t just build themselves. When your employees are tasked with understanding 25 destinations over four brands, the specific product lines offered there, the extras to enhance the net booking total, booking airfare in Amadeus/Sabre, all while providing personalized customer service from first enquiry to departure, that’s A LOT to juggle, all while never abandoning an incoming call. With complicated training comes a glaring area of opportunity for quality training methods and techniques. Now, throw in rigid health-safety COVID restrictions from individual countries, flight carriers, travel partners, and you have someone 100% overwhelmed from Day 1…
International travel brands that beat their sales goals year after year offer employee training that includes a combination of on the-job training programs such as 4-day workshops on how to book flights, off-the-job training methods such as familiarization or ‘FAM Trips’ in their top destinations, and a learning management system that reinforces continuous training led by the learner themselves.
Why get an LMS if the team I have is making it work?
40% of employees in the U.S. leave their jobs within the first year because of poor training. Source: EJ4 Blog (2017)
Too often employee training and development post-onboarding becomes reliant on the employees creating their own homegrown enablement with go-to resources spread across the company website, travel partner websites, saved internal powerpoint presentations, Word docs, the travel guide/brochure, and various saved emails. The danger is this curated wealth of information will become siloed by your best employees, leaving the team in a bind should your heavy hitters leave for their next opportunity.
For each employee lost, the cost to the company could be 50%–250% of his/her annual salary. Source: (SHRM)
The best way to overcome the knowledge burden involved in a new hire travel specialist role is to have one place where they can access everything essential they need to reference and answer live questions in a pinch.
For example…
Say a call comes in, and the client wants to know what a 10-day itinerary looks like sailing from the British Virgin Islands to St. Martin. Your rep only memorized what a 7-day itinerary was like in the BVI. No worries – your rep can pull the information from the Lessonly One-Way Sail Learning Path and chat about the itinerary in great detail by following the notes. Once the conversation has closed, your rep can copy and paste the map of the itinerary with the day-to-day itinerary breakdown in a quick follow-up email and send a separate price quote on what that trip might look like. Your customer is satisfied, and your brand new rep looks like a star! It’s out with on-the-job training methods, and in with next-level preparedness.
True memorization of all the key information will come with time. Having learning software with tried and true training methods for employees where they can practice calls/emails, hone in their skills, and quickly locate need-to-know information will not only keep them engaged but set them up for success.
Modern training methods for a modern world
Great training helps teams save money and drive revenue. Lessonly is a sales enablement tool that provides powerfully simple onboarding, training, and the ability to practice in between. Sales leaders train their reps 62% faster with Lessonly and watch them hit full performance goals within their first three months. Enablement professionals have also used Lessonly to deliver a Practice campaign on discounting and estimate their savings at $8K just after one session.
Think Lessonly could help your team, too? Click here for a quick look at what we do.
