Training your staff in 15 minutes

Your staff need to be able to do three things. Everything else can wait, and most of it they will never need at all.

The three things

1. Ask a new customer to join, and hand over the link.
2. Award points to a member after a sale.
3. Confirm a redemption when someone claims a reward.

That is the entire job. They do not need to understand your earn rate, your tier thresholds or your liability number. Those are yours to worry about.

The one sentence

Give them the exact words. If you ask people to improvise, half of them will quietly decide not to ask anybody.

"Are you on our rewards card? It's free, takes about ten seconds, and your tenth coffee is on us."

Swap in whatever your best reward actually is. Three rules go with it: say it during the pause while the card machine thinks, say it once, and take no for an answer. A second ask annoys people and never works.

The two screens

One is yours, one is theirs.

Customers, at /business/customers, is the only VivaPoints screen your staff ever touch. It lists everyone's name, email, program, balance and tier, and it is where pending redemptions show up with a confirm action.

The customer's card at /me is the other one. Your staff do not operate it, but they should recognise it across the counter so they know what they are being shown.

The fifteen minutes

1. 0–3 min — show them a real card. Use your own phone. Say: this is what the customer is holding, and this is their balance.
2. 3–6 min — have someone join, for real. Send a staff member your join link and let them join with their own email. They will understand it because they used it.
3. 6–10 min — award points. Open Customers, find that person, and award the points for an imaginary €6 sale. Give them enough to afford your cheapest reward, because you need it in the next step. Let each person do this once themselves — watching somebody else is not learning.
4. 10–14 min — run a redemption end to end. Have them tap a reward on their own card, find the pending line on Customers, confirm it, and watch the balance drop. Seeing the two halves once removes almost every question they would otherwise ask you later.
5. 14–15 min — the sentence. Everyone says it out loud, twice. It feels ridiculous. It is also the reason it gets said at the counter on Thursday.

What to do when

The first row covers most of it. If it is still wrong afterwards, that is your problem rather than theirs — customer can't find their points works through the causes in order.

Do they need their own login?

Usually not. Most counter staff work from the shared Customers screen, on the till tablet or on whatever device is already behind the counter. For a single site that is the normal setup and there is nothing to arrange.

If you do want a separate account — someone who can confirm redemptions without seeing everything else — that is the scanner preset, and today you ask us to create it. There is no invite screen yet, so it is a message to us rather than a button you are failing to find. Team members and roles covers what each preset can do.

Next

Come back in two weeks and check one number on your Overview: Members. If it is not climbing, nobody is asking, and that is a training problem rather than a program problem.