Actio re-envisioned the learning experience for a global professional services firm, modernizing and improving an old, outdated, and ineffective onboarding program.

The Challenge

Outdated training for a critical customer support role created numerous organizational challenges. Here’s a snapshot of the issues:

  • Team member development was taking too long.

  • Training engagement was low.

  • Turnover was high.

  • Managers were frustrated.

Team member responsibilities were vague, which compounded the problems. In addition, because the training and performance expectations were unclear, Training leadership found it difficult to determine what to measure.

As a result, employees who completed onboarding were often poorly or unprepared to perform on the job, ultimately resulting in more “at-risk” clients than desired.

Organizational stakeholders wanted a solution that:

  • Clearly defined and set expectations for post-onboarding proficiency

  • Shortened onboarding and reduced time to proficiency

  • Provided better evidence of achievement, including both evaluation and assessment results

  • Resulted in employees who understood the end-to-end process, who could perform, think critically, and anticipate and account for the implications and consequences of their actions

  • Modernize training, making it more engaging and realistic

  • Established a roadmap to guide the employee development journey

The Solution

The mix and nature of the stakeholder goals meant that a thorough analysis was necessary. We assessed the learning ecosystem, analyzed call and agent performance data, and met with top-performing agents to identify and document performance, knowledge, and skill requirements. We uncovered a lengthy list of gaps – many of which needed to be addressed by solutions other than training.

The design process included:

  • Several stakeholders.

  • Members of the client’s training team.

  • Top-performers from the role.

Using the data to focus the design on high priorities, the design team established performance milestones that described an agent’s performance at each stage of development.

The team used the milestones to define more than one hundred practice scenarios that mirrored real-world performance situations. The team also organized them into a low, medium, high complexity developmental sequence. The team also assessed the existing training content, paring it down, cutting the “masters degree” level content, and eliminating the irrelevant content.

We used a blended learning approach mixing

  • eLearning for most foundational knowledge

  • Instructor-led workshops for more complex, nuanced understanding, scenario-based practice, and feedback

  • Performance-based assessments

  • Guided real-work with coaching and feedback

  • Job aids and guides for the topics that could be accessed rather than remembered

We provided employees and managers with a roadmap to guide the development process. In the end, the learning strategy included more than 170 modules. Our design also enabled gamification (with completion badges and leaderboards) and engaged organizational management in the coaching and feedback processes. The final redesign improved post-onboarding performance, improved customer experience scores, and 35%-40% less training time.

Company Bio

This global firm is a leading cloud-based provider of integrated digital human capital and business solutions. Leveraging proprietary AI and data analytics, they optimize business process as a service (BPaaS) to deliver superior outcomes for employees and employers across a comprehensive portfolio of services. As a result, they allow employees to enrich their health, wealth and work while enabling global organizations to achieve a high-performance culture. They have 15,000 dedicated colleagues who serve more than 30 million employees and family members. In addition, they serve more than 70% of the Fortune 100.