Training, Education, Skills and Service Quality

[eleaza]

Today on my way home I stop by a food store and buy some lunch, at the checkout the clerk miscalculated my tab, and took 6 dollars more. I only notice with some quick mental calculation after I leave the counter. Most of the time, my OCD compels me to argue with her until the amount is right, but today I decided not to, since the clerk is an older woman, and I learned during waiting checkout chatting with her, that she lost her job recently, and just started to work here. Emotionally, I do feel sorry for her a bit, but this doesn't change the fact she made a mistake here (not a big one, but still is). And the general service quality does go down due to her lack of skills as a clerk (although her social skill is excellent). And from I learned from our conversation, I know she is well educated, even though what she learned back in the day might not be fitting for today's businesses. All in all, services do suffer, despite her general high education level, with the lack of training on the spot and the wrong kind of skills for the job (chatting with the customer, and causing the checkout line growing isn't a good quality for a clerk).

This experience got me thinking, like in CES DLC, service buildings get their separate "training budget", and "upgrade budget", and leveling efficiency depends on city wide education level. But for a normal store, retail sales unit, only get a single "training budget". And they only get an improvement of efficiency, without service quality, or customer complain. I even would go so far to say, the "traffic index" affecting the service quality more than the so called "training" of the entire building. So perhaps with the introduction of Service Quality in CES DLC, maybe not just civic building should have separate budgets, other general "training" should have such division as well, and it could also related to the general education level of the city (although might not be wise for university or high school level, but also middle school, maybe different units affect by different education level, like R&D will solely depends on university, etc). And a unit could have a "capacity level" separated from "skill level", thus an upgrade in the capacity level means it has expanded the efficiency, and switching to different products wouldn't affect this level, however it will affect the "skill level". The training budget will act more like signing bonus funds or HR budget to recruit any vacant slots, thus able to retain the "skill level", the decorating budget, affecting the capacity to sell. Education give boost to the training skill speed, not the capacity or efficiency. However a lack of service quality will causing some negative effect, perhaps reduce the brand loyalty of the product sold, or simple some minus in traffic index (I think there should be a base traffic, and bonus traffic from service quality, lack of quality will drop the value toward base traffic)

I think with this change, we can "simulate" certain services with "retail", like beauty saloon, where it can sell "service package", where its produced in a "factory" with beauty products and "teachers" as raw materials. Sounds weird, but I think it will be quite interesting.