Barnes & Noble Employees Worried About Lack Of Nook Training
Barnes & Noble employees aren’t satisfied with the Nook training they are receiving, and feel it is affecting their ability to provide customers with good technical support.
I frequent a lot of forums in the book, technology and gadget areas to see what others are saying. One such forum is called the Barnes & Noble Breakroom. It’s for employees to talk shop about working at the largest book chain in the country.
Here’s an interesting thread that recently caught my eye:
However, some are people who are having issues which don’t require exchanging the Nook but do require some knowledge as to how things work. We, as I assume most other booksellers, received absolutely no training on common issues that might be fixable at the store level and not require calling store support.
Speculation abounds about why employees receive such little technical support training for Nook. From rumors that employees don’t stay at B&N long enough to reliance on an employee-only Nook help number.
Of course, not all stores neglect employee training:
I’m lucky that my store does alot to support nook and nook-training. All a person has to do is ask for some additional training and time is made to allow them to watch the videos and read over the material. I do wish that there was more material available but alas. What I would really love is a training event where employees who regularly teach the nook classes could have one just for their fellow employees. Something focused and intensive like how we do the mandatory holiday meeting each year to study up on the various departments. But the hours just aren’t there which really sucks.
As for the troubleshooting and in-depth tech help, there are something that are just not in the store’s power to teach. When people were complaining of trouble using OverDrive ebooks on their nooks, the library practically refused to learn their own program and instead sent everyone to our store. Being a techy geek, I figured out pretty quickly that 90% of the problems were being caused by windows firewall. I can fix it myself in a matter of minutes or walk a customer through the fix over the phone.
One reason I think B&N has an advantage over other companies, like Amazon, is that they have a physical presence with their stores. This allows customers to ask questions and play around with the device right there, with trained staff (well, at some stores at least) helping out.
I do fear, however, that as the Nook Color becomes more ‘tablet-like,’ it’ll get harder and harder for employees to keep up with all the firmware updates and learn them well enough to help out the customer. But I have faith that B&N employees, the foundation of good bookselling, will step up to the challenge.
Related Posts
- Why is the Barnes & Noble Nook already generating a lot of buzz?
- Barnes & Noble releases the Nook digital reader
- Barnes & Noble’s Nook vs. the Sony Reader Pocket Edition
- Barnes & Noble Introducing Pubit! Authors To Stores
- Barnes & Noble Exploring Borders Purchase
Read More: eReaders, Technology
