Training for Customer Loyalty: Pal’s Training Case Study

Training for Customer Loyalty
“Training is the systematic acquisition of skills, rules, concepts, or attitudes that result in improved performance” (Goldstein & Ford, 2002). Pal’s Sudden Service has focused their hiring practices on hiring the right people first, providing the best training possible and reinforcing training everyday. The investment in training has much more to do with the company other than low errors, reduced customer wait times, which lead to high customer satisfaction. The focus on training reduces employee turnover. The costs of hiring and training new employees greatly reduces customer loyalty, both significantly will impact profit. The challenge, comprehend the training requirements, formulating who will train and how the process will be trained. The repeated success of a training program must be quantifiable and re enforced. An efficacious training program with continual re enforcement will pay strong dividends in business profit, employee satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Process Development
Needs Analysis. The first step in any training program is determining, if any what is needed in the organization. (Aamondt, M. 2012). Obviously, in Pal’s environment there was room for improvement and training would be required. A popular distinction in what training may contribute is made in the four-level model of Kirkpatrick (1998). This model distinguishes; (1) reaction criteria that represent attitudinal and affective responses to the training; (2) learning criteria, learning outcomes of the training without reference to the performance for which the training was meant; (3) behavioral criteria, actual on-the-job performance; and (4) results criteria, distal and macro criteria that relate to productivity and p...

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