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Rhema Group “exports” instructor led and online training for BOC sales teams in rapidly expanding SE Asia market

BOC Group serves 2m customers in over 50 countries, and wins 30% of its £4.6bn annual sales in the rapidly-expanding Asia Pacific market. Plans for major growth there this year hinge significantly on centrally directed and supported training and development for BOC S.E. Asia sales forces.

Rhema Group was tasked with exporting its already-successful UK training programmes to BOC’s key locations in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Philippines. It had to ensure consistency of content, message and quality of training - via BOC’s regional training manager.

Rhema further supported that objective by Training the Trainer and licensing BOC to deliver a complete package of copyright training programmes, including Territory Planning, Consultative Selling, Negotiating Skills and Sales Force Management, customised for local culture and markets while ensuring consistency and quality of content.

More support came through Rhema’s innovative electronic interactive version of the instructor-led training modules; BOC offered these as an e-learning programme via its global intranet.

BOC Group Organisation Development Director Mervyn Smit says: “We have had excellent feedback from the delegates. We’re committed to the sustainable development of people, and Rhema has been our natural choice of partner because they have always met our needs in this objective".



Leadership Development prepares managers for global market

The need to equip managers to be effective leaders and change agents is fully understood by expanding, innovative companies such as Netherlands-based global vendor leasing specialist as De Lage Landen.

Rhema Group is involved in the pan-European roll-out of a set of programmes in DLL’s worldwide You can make the difference Leadership Development Programme. This demands customised content and messages which are absolutely consistent plus unfailingly high quality of delivery, to develop managers who can help to shape DLL’s “best in class” approach to serving its partners with innovative financing programmes.

140 European division managers are going through two Rhema programmes – New Realities and Leading Change (4 days) and Programme and Project Management (2 days) to equip them to operate in a global organisation and to prepare them for the global market. Other elements of this major leadership development initiative are being delivered by other world-class providers in Europe and the Americas.

Nicoline Carstens, De Lage Landen Global Leadership Development Programme project director demanded high quality, an international service, in-depth understanding of people’s learning and development processes, and flexibility in working with the company to deliver customised programmes.
"We expect of our suppliers that they foster within themselves DLL’s core competencies of co-operation, accountability, knowledge and an entrepreneurial approach. Our business will in future change, probably dramatically, and we need suppliers like Rhema who can be sparring partners and co-creators with us.”

Unique Editorial Academy for Editors at Reed Business Information

How do you get creative, highly individualistic people to lead and manage teams consistently (and measurably) in a creative, subjective profession?

The answer to this thorny question has traditionally been: You don’t - you let them concentrate on being writers, artists etc and don’t expect them to be managers in any conventional business sense.

However, as a world-class business to business publisher with more than 100 news and information products covering 18 markets, RBI recently challenged Rhema Group to come up with a solution which would really work for senior people in its UK editorial offices.

The result is the RBI Editorial Academy - a unique programme to develop consistent, effective editorial leadership across a wide range of publications covering areas as diverse as agriculture, healthcare, property, personnel, science, travel and TV. The Academy has won enthusiastic response from RBI’s Editors for the way it engages fully with the special creative nature of editors’ roles. It also serves RBI’s corporate goals of being a market and quality leader, embedding business best practice, and being an employer of choice for quality creative people.

Carol Eaton, Training Director RBI UK has seen the Academy win “universally high acclaim” and is convinced that “ Rhema has demonstrated an exceptional understanding of the editorial process and the role of senior editors. The programme content tackled and resolved many issues, including the soft skills and behavioural ones involved in managing creative teams.”

Customer service training is for logistics people too: ask BOC’s delivery drivers

The logistics operations which connect companies to their suppliers and their customers, and move goods between the three, are seldom regarded as playing a key role in “customer service”. Yet the right skills there can hugely improve cost-effectiveness, efficiency and customer relations.

BOC firmly believes this, and asked Rhema Group, which has regularly provided some of its HR development services, to work with the company on an unusual and imaginative training project: a specially-created training programme for delivery drivers handling potentially hazardous loads.

Working closely together BOC and Rhema have built and successfully started to run their Creating Excellence in Customer Service programme - for drivers who tanker propellant gases from refineries to client companies. The premise is that safe and legal supply of such a product must be in the hands of people who are prepared to do more than just drive; people who have skills in addition to the technical skill needed to manoeuvre an HGV with a sensitive cargo.

That relationship is not ‘invisible’ in the logistics side of the operation, Rhema’s William Burton stresses. “There, like everywhere else in the supply chain, satisfied customers cause less stress and take up less time per transaction – and finding a new customer costs four or five times more than retaining an existing customer.” Bob Girvan, Project Manager for BOC Special Products, strongly agrees: “I’m completely convinced that this training is time and money well spent. I have heard nothing but favourable reports, and I believe we have laid the foundations of an excellent customer service offering.”

The two-day course is taking drivers in groups, and covering procedures, hygiene standards, demonstrating expertise and building relationships, interpersonal skills and dealing with safety issues. A role-play element helps to deal with situations where customers must understand legal and safety requirements which may restrict a drivers’ ability to do precisely what the customer wants (while actually doing precisely what the customer needs).

Not turning a crisis into a drama:
Rhema Group trains the Crisis Help Desk an international bank

Rhema Group was chosen by leading international banking and financial services provider SG Corporate and Investment Banking (SGCIB), to create and deliver a two day Training and Development Workshop concentrating on the techniques needed to handle situations which demand an efficient and effective Help Desk. This meant thoroughly preparing Service Desk and switchboard staff to take on a Crisis Help Desk role promptly and knowledgeably the moment they might be required to do so.

Focused on thoroughly preparing administration staff to take on this role the moment they might be required to do so, the tailored workshops were judged a big success as training experiences, and some of the skills acquired were called on as companies all over London dealt with the disruptions caused by terrorist incidents in early July 2005.

Rhema Director William Burton, who created the customised two-day courses for Société Générale, focused firmly on one aim. “We had a single goal – to ensure that SG’s help desk staff could, when and if required, fulfil the vital purpose of a Crisis Help Desk – which is to provide 24/7 communications capability to all elements of the company’s crisis management organisation from the moment crisis procedures are officially invoked until the conclusion of the incident.

“Companies know that this kind of readiness cannot be created after the event; it must click into place the instant it is needed, and that means thorough and regularly reinforced training.”

James Coulson, who is responsible for SGCIB’s crisis management arrangements in London, was delighted with the results. “We were very satisfied with the training that Rhema provided for us. They showed a great capacity for understanding our specific needs and gave us an effective and customised training course.”

The training covered the key responsibilities of a Crisis Help Desk:

• respond calmly and efficiently to all external and internal calls
• transfer callers swiftly and appropriately ( especially to Communications team- without getting drawn into being a direct media information source)
• create an accurate record of all calls
• effectively manage callers who might be anxious, even overwrought.

The Rhema courses also dealt with technical skills, including operation of the company’s help desk system; familiarisation with a suite of pre-recorded phone messages and with SGCIB’s internal and external escalation procedures.