Training retail sales personnel in transition economies: Applying a model of customer-oriented communication

The former Soviet Bloc countries have been faced with the challenge of switching from a command economy to a free market-oriented economy. The extent to which people have managed to cope with the resulting turbulent period of change largely depended on whether they were able to break from their old attitudes and behaviour. Naturally, the knowledge and skills related to the previous dominant paradigm in those societies all influence direct communication with customers. In order to train salespeople in transition economies, we constructed a Model of Customer-Oriented Communication (COC). This paper describes the COC model, looks at the subsequent training courses and discusses the evaluation of the training process.