Slippery Learning

speakerI have often thought that training without reinforcement is little more than entertainment.

How many fascinating workshops have you attended where you walked away thinking, “Wow! That speaker was great! The content was great and I learned so much!”  Probably quite a few because, though terrible speakers exist, there are many excellent speakers out there, and generally they get invited to speak repeatedly.  So chances are good you have attended some really great sessions.

But, how long did those newly-learned lessons last?  If you are like most people, you forgot 65% of what you learned the very next day.  Within a week, you have probably forgotten 80% and by the time a month passes, 84% is gone.

The adult human brain, though truly amazing, is not very good at remembering.  It is much better at forgetting.

You might disagree with me because you know all the words to the latest Katy Perry song, “Roar”, and if the adult human brain is so forgetful, how have you learned that (forgive me, Katy) useless information?  It’s called repetition.  In a relatively short period of time, after hearing the song the first time, you have probably heard it over and over (and over and over again a few more times), then started singing along with it and so your brain has picked up on it and can easily retrieve the lyrics whenever needed (or not!).

Repetition reduces the forgetting curve.  Unfortunately, singing the seven key steps to better selling, or the four parts to any complaint handling conversation is not always practical, so as a training organization, we have been challenged with finding new and creative ways to introduce repetition.  Signature’s Brand Promise is that we deliver training that sticks and so we needed to come up with a way to continue to deliver on that promise.

When we first began with our reservations training program, the Transient Edge®, we learned that telephone mystery shopping calls were a great way to make training stick.  We posted our magic formula by every phone, we recorded and scored our mystery shopping calls, and we provided a Coaching on Demand™ department to allow for even more practice and repetition.  We were trying to make a better selling process easier for employees to retrieve from their memories.  That is all that real learning is – being able to retrieve the information to use it in some manner.

But what about when we deliver training that can’t be shopped?  Through the years we have been pretty creative in finding ongoing reinforcement ideas – post-training role plays, coaching calls, onsite mystery shopping but we knew with all this new technology, there must be something new that could help us make training stick.  And we found it!

<Signature Cue-TipsSignature is proud to introduce a new reinforcement program called Cue-Tips™, powered by Count5®.  We have partnered with Count5 to use the technology they created to push out snippets of information – repetition of our training – on a frequent basis to our clients.

Once you have completed a training session with us, we will immediately start sending you these Cue-Tips.  Some cues are in the form of a question – and asking questions around training has been shown to be invaluable in the adult learning process.  Some cues are in the form of pure tips – explaining the “why’s” behind what you learned.  Each cue only takes a few minutes to complete, and we push them out to you several times a week.

They don’t arrive via email because emails are too easy to ignore.  Instead, they show up as a push notification on your PC – or on your tablet or smart phone.  You just click on the notification and it takes you to your Cue-Tip.  By completing the Cue-Tip, you are reinforcing the training your received so it will become as much a part of you as Katy Perry’s “Roar” (or Queen’s “We Will Rock You” or Elvis’ “Heartbreak Hotel”, depending on your age bracket).

We couldn’t be more excited about this new reinforcement program and we hope you will contact us to find out how you can add Signature Cue-Tips to your training program.  If you want to try it out, click blog to sign up for 3 weeks of Free Cue-Tips™.

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