Glossary

Front-Line Training

Front-line training refers to any education program designed to provide internal staff with the knowledge, skills, and expertise to effectively interact with clients or customers. It tends to prioritize practical, hands-on learning and problem-solving capabilities. 

Examples of frontline training include:

• Roleplaying to help overcome common pre-sales roadblocks 
• Remote hands-on training for healthcare professionals
• Scenario-based modules on incident management and threat intelligence within a managed security service provider
• Basic onboarding for retail associates
• Microlearning for deskless or distributed support staff

Why is Frontline Training Important? 

First impressions are everything, and frontline personnel are a business’s first point-of-contact with clients and customers. If those employees aren’t properly trained, they can potentially tank customer satisfaction and loyalty. On the other hand, well-trained frontline staff typically result in better retention, brand perception, and satisfaction.

Picture two competing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. One organization has provided its salespeople with comprehensive frontline training. The other has delivered only basic onboarding. 

Salespeople from the former are well-equipped to immediately address objections during the sales process, understand how to interact with prospects, and work seamlessly with marketing and customer success. Salespeople from the latter rely entirely on charisma and product knowledge, with some professionals still performing exceptionally while others can’t seem to close a single deal. 

In the long-term, the first organization will enjoy better revenue, sales growth, and overall success compared to the second. 

Core Skills in Frontline Training

In addition to proficiency with a company’s products and services, frontline training covers the following:

Soft Skills

May include active listening, de-escalation, objection management, and communication.  These are especially important for frontline staff who regularly interact with clients.

Compliance

Frontline personnel in regulated sectors may be required to undergo training on safety, security, and regulatory practices. These programs may include a certification which requires regular refreshers. 

Toolkit

Includes internal tools such as point of sale devices, ticketing systems, ordering software, and project management systems. This is often a core focus of sales enablement training.

Processes

Playbooks, policies, procedures, and roles/responsibilities. Depending on the nature of a role, this may include incident response and disaster recovery practices. 

What’s the Difference Between Frontline Training and Customer Training?

Frontline training targets an entirely different audience from customer education. It focuses on ensuring public-facing workers can deliver faster, safer, and more effective service. These may include healthcare personnel, sales professionals, call center agents, technicians, hospitality teams, and educators. 

Customer training involves employees as instructors rather than participants. It’s also typically onboarding-focused. Some organizations may also provide certifications, industry knowledge, and advanced product guidance via training.

Because each type of training has a different audience and different objectives, they also prioritize different KPIs. Measuring customer education results usually means combining sales, customer success, and behavioral data. Critical training KPIs for frontline education are generally performance-based and contextualized by customer success or operational metrics. 

Addressing the Roadblocks to Frontline Training

Frontline employees aren’t like typical office staff.

Rather than spending most of their time at a desk, they tend to operate in the field, with limited access to technology. Many of them are also time-constrained, making it difficult to deliver education that doesn’t disrupt workflows. High turnover rates even further complicate matters, leading to significant knowledge gaps within teams. 

Organizations can take a few steps to overcome these challenges:

• Embed microlearning in daily workflows, allowing staff to access training on-demand
• Prioritize self-paced, mobile-optimized content
• Work with team and department leads to personalize training by role, task, and level of expertise
• Provide leadership with the necessary tools and skills to coach and guide frontline personnel
• Establish a searchable, readily-accessible knowledge-base 
• Consider employing virtual reality or augmented reality-based training in fields where equipment access is limited, such as healthcare
• Leverage adaptive learning to dynamically personalize and adjust training content
• Forego traditional in-classroom education and virtual training environments in favor of cloud-based virtual labs