How to take full advantage of training at your creative agency

You’ve purchased new business management software for your agency, you’ve made the move and you’ve gotten the ball rolling.  Staff members are entering timesheets and business is flowing smoothly.  But there’s still so much to learn!  Sometimes you just have a couple of questions, or don’t yet understand why or how something works in the system, and sometimes you’re in a hurry to get an estimate into the hands of your client.  With any luck, the company you’ve purchased your management software from has great customer service and support and you can send them an email and expect to hear back within a couple of hours.  So you sent off an email or left a voice mail and got a response back saying “we need more information from you before we can help you out”.  Drat – they couldn’t read your mind, and now you have to stop what you’re doing to find information on the question.

How could this have been avoided?

When submitting help desk tickets or leaving a message on the support line, give as much information as you can about your question or issue.

• Is there an example Job # you can provide?
• Exactly what were you doing when you got the error message?
• Attach a screen shot if you can.

If you have online one-on-one training, you can also do a few things in advance to get the most out of the meeting – and help the trainer provide you the best information during the session.

Talk to your team a few days beforehand and compile a list of questions you’d like addressed.

• Is there something you don’t know how to do and really need to do?
• Are there specific reports you’d like to pull?  Knowing this information in advance will streamline the meeting and means your trainer can provide specific examples if needed.

Also, on the meeting day, make sure those who need to attend are reminded about it.  (A company meeting with pizza, coffee or doughnuts can always help if you’re having trouble getting people to commit.)

If you’re using an online virtual meeting software like TeamViewer or GoToMeeting, login about 5 minutes beforehand –software can take a few minutes to load.  This also means that everyone is ready to go at the start of the meeting instead of waiting 10 minutes after the scheduled start time for the whole team to login.

This means you’ll get the most out of your training and support services and gets you using the software more fluently, faster.