The True Cost of Bad Training

by CoSo

May 31, 2017

The other day I walked into a car dealership. I wasn’t quite ready to buy but I wanted to see some of the vehicles that I’ve been checking out online.

After talking to the salesperson for a few minutes, he said, “On a hunch, I’d like to show you something that just came in. It’s a used 2015 model, mint condition, less than 10,000 miles.” Now I’m not one who usually lets anyone talk me into anything—pretty much a salesperson’s worst nightmare. But I’ll admit I was curious.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”

A few minutes later, the car rolled up, and I’ll admit he might’ve had me on the hook for a minute or two there. But as he started walking me through the features and specs, it was pretty clear he didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. When I asked whether it came with satellite radio, he couldn’t tell me (but asked for my patience while he fiddled with the dash to try to figure it out). When I asked him to show me how I would stow the back seats, once again, he couldn’t do it (and I suspect he may have also broken something in his attempt).

In the end, I left the lot without a set of new keys, and the salesperson wasted 20 minutes that could’ve been spent selling someone a car.  And I have no doubt he would’ve been successful had it been a 2017 model—something I’m sure he had been trained to sell. But I thought about my experience on the way home and how often subpar training must impact the revenue of all kinds of customer-facing organizations. Would I think twice before returning to that dealer?

Sure enough, according to a recent NewVoiceMedia survey, businesses could be losing as much as $62 billion per year to bad customer service. And of the 2,000 people surveyed, 49% report switching businesses as a result of bad service. How much of them did so after having to deal with poorly trained service reps who couldn’t answer certain questions? A sizeable 27%.

Granted, a rep’s inability to answer certain questions can’t always be attributed to subpar training. Sometimes it’s the script the reps have to work with. Sometimes it’s simply the reps themselves. But often the problem isn’t when a rep can’t answer a question. It’s when a rep can’t inform you of this inability in an appropriate way. And this more often than not stems from a simple case of… poor training.

If my dealer rep had admitted that he hadn’t been trained on the vehicle due to its recent arrival—or if he had waited to try selling it until after he had—he wouldn’t have wasted either of our time. My faith in the dealership would still be intact, and he might have sold a car.

The moral of the story for customer-facing organizations? Train your reps, but train them well. Otherwise, you won’t just be among the organizations losing billions to bad customer service. You’ll also be among those wasting more billions on training programs that weren’t properly planned or executed.

Interestingly, our client General Motors was able to implement a global training program for their franchise salespeople and mechanics, in which they must complete training before they’re certified to sell a new model.  Read more about it.