Blended Lear ning for Onboar ding Em ployees KnowledgeShift Inc. 888-929-2950 www.knowledgeshift.net
Client Situation & Challenge Cricket Communications is a low-cost prepaid wireless carrier located throughout the United States. Currently there are over 3,000 retail stores comprised of a mix of dealer owned and company owned locations. Sending employees to some central location wasn?t a realistic solution and sending trainers to each store didn?t make economic sense In order to train over 100 new retail sales reps either. Cricket knew that the majority of the per week, Cricket needed to find a cost new hires were in their early 20's, comfortable effective way to deliver the Cricket sales with web technology, and receptive to direction process to these new hires so that they could and feedback. quickly hit the sales floor running. The Goals Cricket looked at what this training program needed to address for success. They came up with three primary goals: To achieve these goals they also needed to look 1. Accelerate performance of new sales reps on the at the historical floor and reduce rep challenges they faced: attrition behavior. 2. Enable new hires to successfully perform the key behaviors that drive rep success. 3. Provide opportunity to practice and receive feedback on key behaviors in a virtual setting. - New Hire skill training falls short because of inadequate practice. - Lack of practice leads to lack of confidence, leading to higher new hire attrition. - Lack of time & resources to provide feedback in class. - Geographically diverse class makes it difficult to pair up students for role-plays.
Solution The team at Cricket came up with a blended learning approach that would address past challenges and support their goals for this New The instructors would provide information and product knowledge during the live sessions. Hire training project. Cricket trained their four facilitators to use a And, to help support their goals of gaining synchronous training tool for connecting to a practice time, each student was assigned a regional audience of new hires over a period of role-play using KnowledgeShift?s 3 days. Each new hire would log into the virtual Mobi-RolePlay? simulator. classroom for three consecutive days. Each class had approximately 20-25 students in them, very similar to a face to face class. This was a critical piece of the on-boarding process. Due to the fact that these employees were already hired and located in a retail location, it was critical to make sure they knew how to communicate the Cricket Selling Process: - Properly greet the customer - Build a relationship - Understand customer?s needs and desires - Recommend the right phone, rate plan, and ways to save them money
Even in traditional classrooms, managing hundreds of people a week would be a challenge to ensure employees had fully grasped these skills. By utilizing Mobi-RolePlay? employees could repeatedly conduct a role-play simulation until they became comfortable and confident with how to properly demonstrate the Cricket Sales Process. Mobi-RolePlay Set Up KnowledgeShift worked with Cricket to create five simple practice sessions to be accessed review and discussions. The simulator provides over a two day period. The simulations an online platform for managers and trainers to assign role-plays to users. Users select a role-play and then enter the phone number?the simulation tests were really good. It creates the environment of fun so you can also remember what you have studied that day. This training was well worth the time.? that they choose to use to conduct their conversation. In the simulation, the employee interacts with a real person who was pre-recorded and -- Muhammad, Philadelphia converses with them on topics relevant to their selling situations. After the simulation is done, provided realistic selling scenarios that students would practice each session until they were satisfied with their performance. the user can view their scores which are based on comparing their transcribed responses to a key word table which contains point values assigned to the key words. The user and Instructors would review each of the role-plays managers can also access the recorded and select some of the better ones for class responses for additional review and feedback. "In this training I improved my skills in everything! From speaking with customers, to how to bring out the value in Cricket. The 6 step process really breaks down how to properly welcome customers when they come in, take care of them, and ensure they leave the store a satisfied customer.? -- Yaseen, Syracuse
Results In the first six months of deploying this blended approach, the statistics for using the Mobi-RolePlay? role-playing simulator looked like this: - Total of 36,154 minutes of user access time - Average role-play 3.5 minutes long for a total of 10,330 role-plays conducted?we know one of the strongest ways to engage an employee to learn a new skill is by using simulations. - Cost per role-play =.72 each - High Value User Experience! Overall the learning experience received very high marks. On a scale from 1-10 the average score per region was 9.6 and the average assessment scores on a scale of 1-100 were 87.7%. Measurements of employee retention and sales are still KnowledgeShift's Mobi-RolePlay? simulator application was by far an extremely cost effective way of doing this. being tabulated. The Cricket Communications team was thrilled to have a tool in place that allowed retail employees to practice their sales process. They especially liked that the We are now exploring the use of this with our professional B to B sales reps too.? Mobi-RolePlay? solution exposed employees to a realistic setting, provided practice and reinforcement, and accelerated their ability to get on the floor to sell. -- Director, Cricket University KnowledgeShift Inc. 888-929-2950 www.knowledgeshift.net