My Thoughts On Role Playing

I can say I have been one those employees that have been in sales and have hated doing role-plays. At my previous sales employer, the openers usually did them before the store opened. The managers or supervisors would also make us do them when business was slow on the sales floor and at other times. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t hate them just to hate them. I understood the importance of them. How else were we going to practice what we were going to say to customers without actually using real customers? It would be terrible just to fumble our way through a sale. My problem with the role-plays was that they didn’t seem challenging enough. Every time we just walked through the script and the employee playing the customer would just say yes to everything the employee said. Honestly, how often does that happen in real life? I say about one customer in about 100 that I had there agreed to everything I recommended without questioning. Everybody else didn’t. So what was the point of rehearsing with the most infrequent customer? From what I found supervisors and managers had quotas to meet with evaluations on employees, so that’s all they were really interested in, not our learning.

Here at PhoneSmart, however, the role-playing serves a little bit different purpose and still accomplishes the same main goal. Our role-plays have more of a point. We go through different screens to be exposed to the several companies we answer for. We get thrown curve balls to make sure we are actually paying attention to our screen. It’s done that way because the self storage calls that actually come in are unpredictable. We have to be aware of all things on the screen and what the customer is looking for. And the more familiar we can get with different screens, the better we will be able to serve our callers.