Railways goes in for skills upgradation training

B D Narayankar

OFTEN YOU get frustrated over the rude conduct of railway staff at various customer care counters. The staff is ill-trained in providing first-class customer service. However, a few years from now, when you revisit them, you will find them giving service with a broad smile on their faces.

This will be made possible through Hero Mindmine’s (HMM), a leading training and consulting organisation’s, customer care training programme, which was recently launched at the Railways Customer Care Institute at Kishanganj, New Delhi. The purpose of Railways for taking this initiative is to train their front end staff to provide the customers a world class customer service experience.

Railways have awarded this training contract to HMM initially for the period of three years, which may subsequently be extended to two more years. Under the three-year customer care training project, HMM will train more than 1.25 lakh railway staff from station master level, right up to the help desk staff.

A W George, business head, HMM said, “It is of immense pride that Indian Railways have chosen us as their partner in training their employees. As our aim is to contribute to India’s competitive workforce and enhancing employability at large, the assignment brings yet another laurel to the organisation. We are pleased to participate in the skill transformation initiative of Indian Railways.”

Quoting union railways minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, he said, “Rail passengers are our revered guests; (atithi devo bhav) has been a tradition in our country for centuries. We have brought about several important changes to make the travel experience of our guests pleasant, comfortable and secure. With conscious investment in human resource, it underlines yet another initiative of Indian Railways to focus on developing skills of our staff members that may help increase their productivity and further contribute to Indian economy.”

Of late the Indian Railways has been striving to offer best of customer experience to its passengers. Last year with outsourcing its call centre facility to Bharat BPO and launching 139, a customer enquiry service, Indian Railways is showcasing their commitment of enhancing service experience and upgrading value prepositions for its customers.

HMM, is a subsidiary of Hero corporate service limited which is an academic and scholastic body which has emerged as one of India’s leading training and consulting organisation by partnering with spectrum of multinationals, Indian corporations and public sector organisations. It has built proven content delivery methods in the areas of communication skills, sales, customer service, leadership, people management, strategic planning, team building, cultural sensitisation etc.

Backed by the US $ 4.2 billion Hero group, it provides learning solutions in the area of training delivery, consulting, content development and assessments for sectors like airlines, automative, BPO, FMCG, IT, pharma etc. Till date, more than 225,000 people across the country and internationally, have benefited from HMM programmes. It has worked with blue chip clients like American Express, CSC, GE, Godrej, HP, IBM, Infosys, the Tata Group, LG, EDS, Samsung, NTPC, NHPC, Standard Chartered Bank, Wipro, Alcatel and a host of other companies. An independent industry think tank, HMM has renowned names like NR Narayana Murthy, Deepak Parekh, Raman Roy and RA Mashelkar on its advisory board.

Source: Meri News