Marian, you’ve nailed the biggest challenge- that of training people on soft skills, especially when it comes to engaging with clients. As a part of the classroom component, we usually show videos that demonstrate the skill. Just before learners are shown the resolution of the problem, the instructor pauses the video, gathers feedback on how learners would solve the problem (say an interaction with an irate customer). This strategy gives everyone a chance to think about the problem and provide their inputs. Once this is done, the video is continued and they get a chance to see how the players in the video resolved the issue. We’ve found Videos and role-plays to be the most powerful means of teaching and training people on people skills. The flip side is that making custom videos takes a great deal of planning and thought – and could be expensive. We have found that even using generic videos does help, provided the instructor can then give the learners a tailor-made situation soon after they have finished viewing a specific part of the video.
As far as online courses go, the most powerful way to teach people is through meaningful scenarios that are relevant in the learners’ everyday context. This is sometimes a bit of a challenge because usually in a time-crunch, it is very tempting to make do with generic scenarios and not customize them to the learners’ everyday work reality. However, unless the learners can see themselves up there in the course, actively facing real situations, it is very difficult to engage them and make that transition from theory to practice. We usually ensure that scenarios are meaningful by introducing situations involving actual learners or people who face the fire – these could be technical support staff or others in a customer-facing role. In fact, most organizations have recordings of actual interactions. If you can get hold of problematic interactions, where an escalation was required, it makes some pretty good raw material for crafting real-life scenarios. With the added advantage of course that the actual learners do not ‘risk’ anything by the choices they make. By allowing learners to make their choices, we can also encourage them to go along a certain path before discovering the ideal response in such situations through feedback on their incorrect choices. Hope this helps!