Changing Rooms - Orientation Workshop

Earlier this year, Resourcing Matters partnered with Allen International, an integrated strategic design consultancy. Allen International were asked to develop a radical new retail interior design strategy to revolutionise the customer concept of a major bank in Iceland. A fundamental goal of the design was to entice existing customers back to the branches whilst attracting new customers with the new brand image .

Resourcing Matters worked with Allen to evaluate the impact of the new interior design on the employee's role and what skills and behaviours they would need to adopt to be effective The new design required staff to be much more proactive and interactive with their customers. For some, however, this required a shift in mindset and development of new skills.

As a result, Resourcing Matters designed a workshop which enabled employees to experience the new environment and to try out some techniques in building rapport and recognising and using body language. The training majored on relationship building skills; focusing on the customer and helping staff to put themselves in the customers' shoes - and it also supported them to sell the benefits of the new strategy.

The workshops have been rolled out across the organisation so that all staff are now equipped to operate in the new branches. The feedback from the participants was extremely positive about what they had learned about their own and customer behaviour. They felt more confident to operate from day one and were clear about the benefits of the new design to the customer. The feedback was also positive about how the new layout would help increase business in their branches.

Since delivering this training Resourcing Matters has since run similar programmes for Allen International in Jordan, Greece and Russia. Our next project with Allen International is in the Czech Republic.