Course Outcomes

This train-the-trainer course for healthcare trainers will:

  • Explain where training fits in the cycle of customer care and patient satisfaction.
  • Review adult learning principles, classroom-management techniques, and skills for adding enthusiasm and energy to a curriculum.
  • Offer a range of proven customer service training activities designed specifically for a healthcare setting.

Course Overview

Customer care and patient satisfaction training is a process, not an event. For people to regularly demonstrate on-brand service skills, those behaviors must be valued, modeled, taught, measured, coached, and celebrated. This hands-on program for trainers focuses on the teaching step of that process. It introduces interactive activities for training on a variety of customer care skills: demonstrating courtesy, showing empathy, listening, demonstrating compassion, easing uncertainty and anxiety, maintaining patient dignity, and other essential behaviors that impact patient care and satisfaction. These exercises can work as standalone skill-building activities or as part of a larger customer-care training program.

* Note: If you have an existing patient-care curriculum, we will incorporate it into the session. If not, we can recommend an off-the-shelf participant guide as a starting point.

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Explain how customer service training fits into the cycle of care.
  • Describe what customer care training can and cannot do in a healthcare facility.
  • Outline the importance of participant-centered training.
  • Adhere to best practices for facilitating adult learning.
  • Facilitate activities provided in this curriculum.
  • Design their own activities to support facility-specific learning objectives.
  • Deliver a participant-focused workshop.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Why Your Training Doesn’t Work: Understanding the Service Ecosystem

You trained them, they demonstrated the skills you taught, then they went back to the floor and did business the way they always did it. Huh? They seemed as if they’d bought in. What the heck happened? Nothing, that’s what. Nobody held people accountable for demonstrating the skills you introduced. This workshop begins with a frank discussion about what training can and can’t do on its own. We’ll explore the service ecosystem and the components that must exist for measurable and large-scale behavior change to occur. Following that discussion, we will discuss ways service educators can position their training and engage stakeholders who can affect other parts of the process.

Charting Activities: What Makes Good Training

“I’ve got training today. Hooray.” When workshops are well-run, people look forward to learning new skills and collaborating with colleagues. When they’re not, continuing education is often a dreaded activity and earns itself the reputation of being a waste of time. This seminar segment looks at good versus not-so-good training and the factors that move a session from one category to another.

Roll Up Your Sleeves: Examining the Tools

The next portion of this course focuses on choosing and using training activities that engage learners and make learning stickier. First, participants will brainstorm the topics, concepts, and skills they typically introduce during customer service course facilitation. Next, we’ll talk about what makes some activities better than others, the importance of linking classroom experiences to work on the floor, and how to generate buy-in and energy with a range of participant groups.

Getting Off to a Good Start: Using Participant-Focused Starts

“Hi, my name is __________, and I’ve been with XYZ for ABC years. I went to 123 school, and I have a long list of credentials, and I’m very important…. There are 30 of you in the room. Let’s all take a minute or two to introduce ourselves!” Can you see the eyes rolling? The facilitator blew it. Rather than getting people on their feet and engaged, that person wasted about 30 minutes playing “I’m important, and let’s do a lot of listening.” While credibility is important and introductions certainly matter, there are better ways to connect participants and kick off a training session. In this part of the program, we will look at five ways to start a session, all of which honor people’s experience and what they already know about a topic.

Hear, See, Do: What’s Practiced is Better Remembered

For people who are on the move all day, sitting in a seat and listening to a lecture is a less-than-exciting prospect. This course component looks at a hierarchy of learning and quick and easy fixes for making lecture-based content interactive. Working with various patient-care topics, participants will determine different ways of engaging participants using the same information. For example, we will look at the importance of telling patients and their families what to expect. Next, we will use our existing knowledge of training to brainstorm activities to communicate customer care skills around that topic.

Let’s Look at the Library: Proven Activities

Once the group has had a chance to try its hand at a free-form design activity, we’ll dive into the Business Training Works’ activity bag and explore proven exercises for teaching customer care in a healthcare setting: the importance of on-brand behavior, emotional energy and how it differs from person to person, the look and sound of courtesy, empathy versus sympathy, on-stage versus off-stage activities, rapport and why it matters in service, service body language, dignity and the importance of maintaining a patient’s sense of it, telephone etiquette, email etiquette, and other topics related to customer care.

Viva Variety: Adapting, Adjusting, and Making Content Your Own

“Same” is not a good thing in good instructional design. When training gets predictable, participants check out. In this part of the course, participants will revisit their existing training material. Working with familiar content, they will determine which of the activities discussed in the previous module could work at various points in their program. Then, they will identify at least two activity options for each place in the curriculum where they have planned an exercise.

Practice Makes Perfect: Show What You Know

In this part of the workshop, participants will work in pairs and prepare a 30-minute training program. Next, they will deliver their mini-courses for evaluation and feedback. Upon request, we will video the session for the participants’ review at a later date.

Implementation Plans: Driving the Process from the Middle

This final portion of the course circles back to its beginning. During this seminar segment, we will revisit what training can and can’t do and the organizational functions that must exist for widespread change to occur. Working together, the group will craft a communication plan to inform other areas of the organization of what they need in order for their training to result in lasting change.

By the end of this train-the-trainer workshop for healthcare trainers, participants should have a range of tools at their disposal for creating and delivering participant-centered service training. They should also understand where training fits in the patient-satisfaction process and have a communication plan for letting owners of critical processes know what they can do to increase the effectiveness of the facility’s patient satisfaction training efforts.