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By Diane Sidwell Jones

The road to effective telephone sales training is paved with good intentions. Dana, the protagonist in Playback Media's Sales Skills for Call Centers online course, travels this road with the guidance of both angelic and devilishly fun characters. The objectives of the program start on the right path. However, the content strays off course and misses its final destination.

The journey looks promising at the start. Playback Media recruited an expert on employee motivation for the course. The program credits Anne Bruce as a primary resource for the content. Bruce is the author of the business bestseller, Motivating Employees, ans she's also a credible source on the service industry because she contributed to the book, Best Practices in Customer Service.

The program first addresses the key areas of motivation for any sales employee: overcoming call reluctance and the fear of rejection. Dana is young and eager to succeed. She acknowledges her desire to stay motivated and perform well. Although Dana gives herself a pep talk before taking her first call, she quickly becomes discouraged. Her swift turn from willingness to dismay is believable. On average, the first 15 seconds of an outbound sales call is crucial in capturing the customer's interest. However, Dana is taking inbound calls, and their challenge realistically falls in the middle of the call, not the beginning. Therefore, the training program overlooks a crucial sales skill: overcoming objections to a product recommendation.

The video's answer to negative energy is a groovy 1960's vintage angel of positive vibes. This psychedelic guardian angel appears as a thought balloon over Dana's left shoulder. On her right shoulder is a present-day dude named Zool who represents the devil of negativity. Unfortunately, the program seems more interested in the banter between these two playful forces than in practical advice on self-motivation.

The angel starts with tips on positive self-talk. Then, rather than exploring this approach further, the conversation veers off course. I expected motivational content such as ideas on reviewing previous successes, setting specific goals to ensure success, and asking for feedback from peers or supervisors. Instead, the program continues with tips on professional telephone courtesy and establishing rapport with customers. Although this is helpful information, it doesn't achieve the objective of learning how to overcome call reluctance and customer objections.

The program does steer back to selling techniques at the end. The angel of telephone courtesy is transformed into the angel of closing the sale. The video adds helpful examples at this point, such as an assumptive close approach. Cross selling hints are then covered too quickly. For a 17-minute video, it took too long to reach the destination of sales techniques.

Sales Skills for Call Centers Holds user interest ** Production quality ** Ease of navigation *** Interactivity *** Value of content *½ Instructional value *½ Value for the money *½ Overall rating **

Let's not forget that the video program is delivered over the Internet. The video doesn't jerk and stutter, and that's a major achievement. The Playback library breaks the mold of read-and-click e-learning. You can buy a curriculum tailored to your company's needs from the 150-course library, and each program comes with supplementary resources to help students learn.

Recommendation

The delivery method may be the most notable feature of this course: online video that's comfortable to watch. The marriage of video to Web-based delivery could vastly improve desktop e-learning. Too bad the content falls short. Sales closing and cross selling techniques throughout the entire video would strengthen this program considerably.

Published: November 2001