As we continue our focus on development, we’re spotlighting another example of how one of our teams has been focusing on their own development journey.
Introducing our P&O Cruises Contact Centre team…
Learning and development across our team has always been key to ensuring success, delivering performance, but also motivating, encouraging and inspiring individuals to progress, pursue their own development and create a sense of self-worth. Whether this is from our initial training or the ongoing learning and support offered to Personal Contact Advisor’s and Team Leaders throughout their career with us.
Here are some of our key successes from the past year…
- We’ve tailored weekly team leader meetings into sessions that focus on learning and development.
We’ve covered many topics during these sessions including policy and procedures, network processes, and even leadership styles. We’ve also invited speakers to deliver content relevant to our day-to-day roles to help enhance our knowledge as managers and in turn support our teams.
Josh, Team Leader said:
Although I’ve done very similar sessions in the past, it’s been really insightful to see everyone else’s leadership style. The sessions really give you a chance to sit back and reflect on what it is you do, and how we can both celebrate and learn from each other.
- We’ve introduced external sales training for our inbound contact centre based around Challenging Conversations, delivered by Future Proof Learning.
This training was introduced as part of a half day interactive workshop followed by regular weekly sessions to help individuals overcome objections and encourage the conversion of calls into sales, inspiring a seamless customer journey for our guests.
Cheryl from the Personal Cruise Advisor Sales Team said:
I think we all tend to do our calls differently, but it helps to have this background information to help us build a more purposeful conversation. I found the ‘tell me, explain to me and describe to me’ (TED technique) really useful to build into my conversation to help get information. This session made me feel more confident with the sales process and to have more confidence in myself, thanks to the Future Proof Learning team.”
- Providing all employees with the same access to learning and development
We’ve invited key speakers to attend various team meetings to help upskill our team’s knowledge in all our relevant policies and procedures.
We also created a survey to truly understand the development needs across our management team and implemented a project planner for Team Leaders to follow each week with presentations and talks from senior leadership members as well as other team leaders and departments.
Our top tips for learning and development…
- Create the time – It’s very easy in our busy day to day roles, to push training and development to one side, however taking the time to re-purpose meetings and planning ahead to deliver short skill sessions into existing meetings helps to create immediate impact.
- Talk about it – Using 1-2-1’s and team meetings to continuously recognise success, to encourage progression and development, to highlight achievements and to set goals to truly understand the needs of your team and colleagues.
- Get some feedback – Understanding how sessions have developed an individual is key to ensure the right information gets to the right people, creating surveys and talking about their experiences allow us to tailor and develop the right level of training required.
- Recognise – Celebrating each other’s achievements empower’s a team and encourages personal progression. Using weekly meetings to recognise individuals successes and development have been a huge success in motivating and inspiring each other to achieve results.
- Peer to peer learning – Recognising strengths within a team has been key to developing a one team approach, supporting each other to utilise skills and share knowledge and always encouraging team members to speak up and learn from each other.
Thanks for sharing team!
As the team mentions, seeking out time for development is key and can be done effectively by thinking outside the box and bringing in learning and development opportunities into team meetings.
We know it can be a challenge to come up with the types of activities that will help you get ahead. So why not try training materials tailored to our own Cultural Essentials, The Cove, GLADIS E-learning, Power Hour workshops and external training opportunities too.