Customer Training versus Customer Experience

What your customers ask you says a lot about what your training tells them.

From a recent Insider, I read a post called You Don’t Understand Your Users, (by Justin Etheredge, November 6, 2020). It’s a 5-7 minute read. I relate to this article, because I help develop training where my experts are software developers, electrical engineers, project managers, even a few former nuclear submarine operators. Oh, and I don’t have or plan to have a watch of any kind.

I love working with motivated people doing interesting work. Have you ever heard someone answer a yes or no question using calculus with unfaked excitement in their voice? I have. It’s beautiful and terrible. But sometimes, it can be a warning flag that they may not be applying a relatable perspective for our participants or operators.

The other day, I had a subject matter expert tell me that I needed to make our training longer, because users kept putting data in the wrong place. Something didn’t add up, though. I set up a recorded interview and asked the person to walk me through the steps using a real example. But first, I asked my SME to imagine that they worked for a customer, and their boss asks them to get this form completed before they leave work, five minutes before the end of the day… and imagine they had happy hour plans.

The reply? The architect, the expert, the instructor said: “I’ve never actually used the software before. I have never tried to fill out the form.” It turns out, users weren’t filling in the correct field because of a typo on the form. Rather than training, it required a tiny improvement to the interface. Meanwhile, now we have all kinds of over-explanation of one field that feels a little clunky in training. More importantly, our interview after that went great, with many mentions of how to get to happy hour on time.

If only every situation were that simple to fix, right?

With that said, it’s a little awkward to have someone assume I’m a technophobe because I’m not glued to my phone. It’s equally awkward when someone asks me to teach them about their smartphone* and somehow VBA and iOS apps are synonymous.

[* My smartphone answer works almost every time: “Try search”.]

It’s not that they don’t care about customers. It’s just that it takes practice to step back from the expert roles that they know so well. So, whether you’re a SME or an instructional designer, remember to pause and reflect on a few things:

• Customers, employees, and users of all kinds usually just want to complete the tasks they are paid to do. Be understanding when a user does not want to know more.
• Try to find a relationship (like happy hour) with your audience that most will share, and avoid what most will find to be intimidating (like calculus). Making it emotionally driven (5 minutes before work ends) will help SMEs separate the fluff from the real content.
• If you feel you need to cover your butt, do not lengthen your content to do it. It will just drown out the most important messages. Instead, use an up-front disclaimer that is not part of your content. Avoid citing lengthy rules or laws in the training. Add it to the end as references.
• User guides are for users, not for content providers. Build them to solve immediate user issues fast. Carve out a permanent budget to keep them updated.
• If everyone is making “the same stupid mistake”, it’s most likely either a result of poor training/communication or poor software interface. Or both.

Sure, on the flip side blinders can be frustrating, and we can’t walk people through everything. But if we want our noobs to become proficient at a task or to become knowledgeable of a topic, it starts with patience, good steps, and practice time.

So, if you take away nothing else, remember this: I don’t like watches.