Scottish and Southern Energy

Energy company's own TV show brings new starters to life

New starters at Scottish and Southern Energy's Customer Service Centre are finding themselves on TV thanks to an innovative approach to training.

Instead of sitting through weeks of boring passive lectures, staff are taking part in a lively, interactive training programme, which uses different TV shows as the theme for each session. The programme, called SSE:TV, is much more fun for staff and they are learning more as a result, so much so that the company faces a new challenge – how to manage highly motivated and enthusiastic people who can't wait to start helping customers.

SSE faced a big problem with people leaving after their induction training because they experienced difficulties in their new jobs. So SSE decided to contract induction training specialists Leaps and Bounds, to design a new induction for them.

Our brief

We were asked to reduce the induction programme from 12 weeks to 5 without losing content and to make sure that staff enjoyed the process and were ready to deliver great customer service as soon as they started taking calls.

SSE also wanted us to make sure their trainers could deliver the induction and understand how to design it. The training team helped us design the programme and because they were involved, they can now keep making improvements and changes as the business needs them to.

Our approach

The TV theme makes it memorable and fun so that staff and trainers want to make the most of the programme. We are delighted with how well the SSE training team have responded to a very different way of training.

Some of the TV Show themes used were:

  • The S Factor in which people learned from the judges about observation and feedback skills
  • It's Hot to Dare (from the show What Not to Wear) to take people out of their comfort zone
  • Negotiation, Negotiation, Negotiation instead of Location, Location, Location which helped people learn how to negotiate with customers

Key outcomes

One of the managers in the customer service centre summed up the training as follows, "The facilitation style was not traditional talk and chalk, but instructive, involving, interactive and encouraging. Lots of coloured flips on the walls, evidence of activity-based games and exercises. I particularly liked the 2 metre high gas and electricity bill calculation posters the learners had constructed themselves, memorable!"

Chris Hough, Customer Champion watched one of the groups being trained and said, "The group were very lively and had a sense of enthusiasm."