[LaurenParticipant]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking to get a bit advice from those of you who have remote teams, basically I recently joined a company who provide reporting tools for search engines as the Support Manager and I’m looking to put together a really comprehensive training program for new support staff.

I am in the process of training up one member of staff remotely which is going ok, but I just wondered how other people are doing it! Do you have a go-to person in the office that the person in training goes to with questions? When do you get them answering tickets?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

 

[GraceParticipant]

Hi there!

My name is Grace and our entire company works remotely, so nearly all of our training is done remotely as well. I helped create our recent Training Core team, who works to train incoming trials and new employees.

Just a little about our training program: It takes 2 days - 6 hours each day broken up into 5 sessions with 4 different trainers. One of the sessions is solo work. The training is done essentially via chat. and we can have anywhere from 1-4 trainees per training.

So the first day is broken up into 3 sessions. In the first session, we give an introduction of the company - we talk about our goals, our company values, the structure of our team(s), how we communicate, etc. We hope this will give the trainees a good overall picture of how our company is structured and what we value.

The second session is solo set up work. We provide a list of simple set up tasks such as email signatures, filters, etc. We have a trainer available at all times for any questions, but we feel that setting up these kinds of tasks doesn’t necessarily need a trainer to go over it with them step by step. We thought this was a good idea because everyone works at their own pace and prepares differently.

The last session of this day is saved for going over our internal support tools and how to use them. We end the day with this and hope that it will allow trainees to digest our tools a bit before diving into tickets the next day.

On the second day, we focus purely on tickets, and it is split into 2 sessions. The first one is spent doing pre-written tickets based off of our most popular support questions. We started doing this to give all trainees more structured, consistent training sessions. This allows us to make sure that all trainees have gone over certain important topics.

The second and last session is done working through real tickets one on one with an assigned buddy. This allows the trainee to get more practice than working in a group setting, and we hoped that the one on one attention allowed the trainees to ask questions more freely and feel more confident before going off and doing them solo.

During all of this, our trainers communicate with the rest of the training team (especially the trainers taking the next session) so that we know exactly what was covered/not covered. We want to focus on creating a consistent training program so that every trainee not only comes out of training with the tools to be successful, but also comes out on an equal playing field with the other trainees.

So that’s about it. Our training sessions are always a work in progress and we will reiterate within a couple weeks so see how it’s working with everyone - trainers/trainees/buddies.

[LaurenParticipant]

Thanks Grace, that’s really interesting. So you have your new recruits answering tickets on day 2! I can see that’s a good way for them to get properly stuck in!

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