First blog

I have just started to do the second online training course. This is quiet different to the one i previously did because Turkish is my second language, conviniently for me though, during this course there are questions, where an audio voice speaks in Turkish which has made it easier for me to understand.

After every situation that this course presents gives me the choice (from a multiple choice setting) to select the most correct response. For the first question i selected one of the two correct answers, and when applicable the course shows that there is a second answer/statement that is also correct. I believe that this type of format is more convinient for the learner as there is no guessing games and facilitates the learning experience for the student… this facilitated my learning experience by realising the other correct answers that i have missed and reading and understanding why i have not answered it correctly. By doing this i almost memorise the correct answers i did not answer, because my Turkish is not that good and need to ask my mother in some circumstances what it meant and so it stayed in my memory.

The first ten questions is based on a customer service representative listening skills.. It provides the learner (me) a situation and gives options as to what situation or response is  most correct. It also allows me to enter a differet page or cell where another character enters and i can hear their voice. This provided me with a sound knowledge of what the scenario is as i can hear two characters and  can visualise what exactly is happening through animation. The first ten questions are based on a financial company and credit card issues. The next ten questions are based on  actively listening to the customer… again there were ten set of questions based on scenarios. The final section was passive listening and the different methods of listening to the customer.

Passive listening from what i have learnt so far is listening to everything that the customer states and making sure through non verbal communication that you have understood them. Unlike the other section there were facts that a character read out about what passive listening was and the most effective way of passive listening. The ten questions based in this section was actually repetitive and i didnt think it taught me every aspect of passive listening as it pretty much only focused on passively understanding the customer without verifying by words that they were understood by the customer service representative. Unlike the questions i actually thought that the information about passive listening was interesting and informative.

Active listening was basically the same structure as passive listening with facts about what it was and then questions that followed. In brief i have learnt that active listening is repeating what has been said, restructuring the sentences and clarifying all the questions that the customer may have.

Through doing these three modules on the online training it helped me become familiar with the Turkish alphabet and recap the language i used to be able to speak fluent in the past. I was particularly interested in this training more than the other one because there was characters talking and explaining what was going on, there were different topics and questions, and also it was not a MUST PASS 100% situation, but instead the course tracked my progress throughout the training and at the end of the training session it let me know what my weak areas are, strong areas and they ways i can improve them.

My weakest module on the Frontline Customer Service was passive listening. I believe that this may be because i found the questions very boring and repetitive, it felt as if they had nothing else to ask so they kept asking the same question over and over again. In this section i only did three out of the ten questions because they were almost the same questions rephrased.