How to Maximize Business Impact Through Employee Training 

L&D: A Long-Term Play for Big Wins

L&D is not a quick fix. Unfortunately, one training day or session will not crack the nut. Behavior change takes time, and effective training requires consistent reinforcement. And as Søren reminds us, “We’re talking about behavioral changes here, and those changes won’t happen overnight.”

For those restless people out there, we’re sorry, but even the research shows that it can take between between 18-254 days to change behavior and habits.

New behaviors need consistent reminders and reinforcement to become ingrained to produce those tangible results you’re looking for. So don’t give up if you don’t see any results right after you implement your training.

Importance of Tracking Your
Training Initiatives

“We are a retail healthcare business, and because of that – failing is not an option! Untrained employees would lead to bad sales numbers, people would complain, and we would get a bad reputation. And those are all reasons why we need to get our employees trained as fast as possible.”

But how do you know that the training you create for your employees actually gives the impact that you are looking for? Well, by tracking it and looking at how it performs. 

“Tracking progress is crucial to ensure behavior change and optimize the impact of training.” And the possibility of getting good data and analytics directly from the platform is one of the reasons why Specsavers chose Learningbank. Søren continues:

“With Learningbank, we get what we need. We can see completion rates & ratings of trainings and we can make the training personal. Both are vital things to be able to see the impact with training. Plus, it’s easy to use, we easily get the data from the analytics part in the platform.“

Take a quick tour of the Analytics feature in the platform that Specsavers are using to find the data they need. 👇

“We need to make training so good that our employees want to take it. That’s when it has the best outcomes”

Søren says and continues, “Currently our aim is 85-90% of completion rate for our onboarding for example, which we believe is good.” He explains that if people complete their training, they are more likely to see a change in behavior aligned with their goals. And to keep an eye on this you need to track your training!

With Learningbank, Specsavers track their training, and to make the comparison easier, they connect it to Power BI, making it easier to compare and see the impact of their L&D and how it relates to their Sales KPIs and Customer Satisfaction.

Connecting The Dots From a Retail Perspective

“For us as a business, we have a strong focus on customer loyalty. We look at the volume of loyal customers rather than a huge AVC.” (AVC= The average variable cost.)

So how do you translate the business metric of customer loyalty into L&D? Well, Specsavers provide their staff with training to deliver exceptional service and product expertise to reach and improve customer loyalty.

“We need to train our employees to ensure our business metrics. We need to train our employees well so they know how to treat our customers, how to use the machines and have good knowledge of our products. That way we reduce unsatisfied customers, reduce customers returning purchases etc.”

In other words, this is where to align your learning strategy with your business goals.

Product Training for Customer Loyalty

One vital training to support customer loyalty for Specsavers’ store employees is product training. To ensure employees know how to fit lenses correctly to the individual customer, they get specific product training in how to use the advanced measuring tools.

This is important because if not handled correctly, it will have a huge impact on how customers perceive the service. But with proper training, they ensure that customers receive the right help and products, minimizing returns and complaints and instead: increasing customer loyalty.