Internal Training Academy

Make your dream come true: exited customers because your sales or service engineer has delighted them with an unprecedented service, creating customer loyalty and advocacy. Your staff being inspired to apply learned and well polished competencies gained at the internal academy. You are in control of how you want customers to be treated, how you want your employees to be inspired and motivated to create the best customer experience, beating your competitors! Growing your business through setting up your own academy, its worthwhile as of approx. 50 employees. Here is the business case....

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Why start an internal academy?
The main reason is to ensure your products are professionally presented to customers. Service is delivered unprecedented, so customers remember. The total performance of the front line employees, supported by highly skilled back-office staff, is what makes your organisation, your staff and your products stand out. This is the ultimate differentiation in the market. Its all based on creating the experience for the customer.

Why internal?
Sure, you can send your people to an external training company, pay substantial fees for a benefit you can only influence a little. On top, your competitors might just use the same or an even better development centre. You need competencies but you need them to be the best, to stand out of the rest.
Take this in consideration:

• You know your customers and their requirements best
• You know your staff/colleagues best, background, weaknesses, strengths, etc.
• You know your products/services best
• You have a clear idea on how-what-when you want delivered to your customers

Try explaining all this in detail to the external training company ... Think of it, you will have created not only the outline, but most of the course content already. The only next step you would need to take is appoint and develop a trainer. In short: make one of your best pro's a trainer and coach.

Setting-up your internal academy
You would need a professional, somebody who knows your business inside-out and who has a natural understanding of learning processes. You will be surprised, many people love explaining what they are good at! So the only external training company you need will be to train your pro to become a skilled trainer and coach. Believe me, and I will explain later, a very profitable investment. Once you have put this into motion, start thinking of this:

• Basic training materials (incl. your sales brochures, website, etc.)
• Training moments that best fit your business
• Training situations you can create or simulate
• Collecting best practices from the team
• Gather training materials from earlier programmes your staff attended (externally)
• On-the-job coaching and training
• The ideal training path and some quick wins
  

Develop your training curricullum
Developing your own curricullum through creating a the base plan. I suggest you start with making an inventory of the best customer experiences created in the recent past. This is best done by a team brainstorm and making sure most if not all contribute with their greatest success to date. By analyzing the key components of what made this such a great success, you quickly create a template your internal trainer will be able to transform into a learning path. What you need to ensure is a great level of variety, short sessions and interventions, sharing experiences often - but also keep this short.

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The key benefits
Once you have setup the basics for your internal academy, you start tapping in to some of the real benefits:

• The time spend on training by your staff will be reduced significantly, often up-to 75% less as you can now utilize the low-activities moments of your business.
• Often training takes place on the job, based on real experiences, still being productive, and far more learningfull than any other learning intervention.
• The expertice level of your staff and in particular of your trainer will ensure you can tap into the sometimes very small sweet spots that make the difference for your customers.

• You will make use of your own facilities, saving all the overhead costs of  external training programmes.
• Your trainer will be able to differentiate the learning process to each individual, having the advantage of knowing them very well and if needed join them during their daily work. There is no better way to make people learn then really involving their work in great detail.
• Other knowledge and skill elements can be involved easily. Teamwork, problem solving, handling difficult situations, etc. Many elements that an external training can not zoom into, or at least can never get that close to the real situations your internal academy can realize.
• You will get career development, employee engagement and satisfaction and at the end "'loyalty" in your own hands and control.
• You will have an inside coach which can spread his/her wings to any component of learning & development, for any person in your company.
• In the end, you can create cross-functional training modules, something external training companies will not be able to do unless you throw big money at it. Supporting fuctions, after sales, maintenance engineers, you fill in whatever is suitable for your business. The point is, you can integrate your buisness processes into the internal academy, train related functions together. Even this can be done on-the-job. No time lost, real situations involved, ....  I think you get the drill.....
• Last but not least, you will save on staff development costs, increase service, boost customer experience, get more revenu from existing customers, gain more new customers because of the lip-service your customers are sharing.

The business case - the hard benefits
Let assume the following: your pro will cost you $100,000 per year, you will spend another $10,000 for his/her education to become trainer/coach. It takes 6 months to have all preparations done. However, sales will be boosted with 5% more over the year for each trained person and you'll save 50% of the number of training days (in terms of lost productivity).
Normally in the case of external training, on average you would spend 8 days training per person a year at the cost of $700 per day.
If you have a team of 25 persons, you will have one less in case of internal training.

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Conclusions

Although the business case looks somewhat artificial, we did build it on experiences in 5 different countries (Netherlands, Denmark, South Africa, Singapore and United States). Return on Sales increased substantially and already returned the investment in the first year. We only measured 2 years and extrapolated the data based on this. The changing circumstances make ongoing measurement unreliable in terms of corrolation to the internal academy.

Some of the key "other" benefits we measured during these projects (all measuerements are done through web-based questionnaires, bi-monthly):

• Customer engagement increases overall with 10%
• Customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy increases respectively with 10%, 7.8% and 8.3%. There is no significant difference between countries.
• Employee satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy increases with respectively 12%, 9.5% and 8.1%
• Return on Investment within 1 year.
• The trainer/coach is still involved with sales, in fact is taking care of the strategically important customers, together with some of his colleagues.

Make your own business case for the set-up of an internal training academy.

We are happy to share more of our experiences, e.g. the business case Excel template to assess costs and benefits.

Use the form on the right, contact us at [email protected] or goto our contact page.

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