Four years ago PBGC turned to Oracle CRM to initiate a major system implementation with the objective of continuing to improve its customer service. The agency successfully launched the new system that quickly reached an end user base of more than 800. By the project’s end, the CRM team in charge of the implementation set a new standard for collaboration and effectiveness in dealing with a vast user base and increased the effectiveness of training by more than 60%.
Yet, with so many CRM users – half of whom are in 10 field offices across the US – the CRM team soon had a hard time justifying travel expenses to sustain the train-the trainer strategy for every subsequent system upgrade.
Historically, end users for any system implemented at PBGC would have to wait for two trainers to be trained in the DC office: once back, the two had to spend an estimated 38 working hours to bring their offices up to speed. Besides complaints from the field offices and from management, the strategy seemed too cumbersome for the trainers who found themselves burdened with an extra task to be accomplished with little additional resources.
Hoping to get all offices up to speed faster to keep up with the dynamism of a system that is fine-tuned and quickly integrated within the agency’s IT infrastructure, we launched a “blended” training program. The solution was part of an integrated three-tier strategy. We decided to disseminate the knowledge and skills needed for each system release using a variety of formats, following the best practices of the state-of-the art ‘blended’ approach” and the lead from the PBGC Training Institute.
Forty days before the system upgrade a conference call announced the new training strategy: three live WEBEX Sessions for each office would be added to the existing CRM Intranet Website (for downloading system documentation, release notes, job aids and other resources) and CRM On-line Tutorials (On line module displaying new procedures introduced with each single release).
In 10 days more than 300 CRM users enrolled in 27 live WEBEX sessions — experiencing the powerful capability of the WEBEX training meeting environment and providing an astonishing 98.8% positive feedback with respect to using the tool again in future similar initiatives.
According to the CRM Project Manager with this approach we were able to leverage the technology in a way that drove commitment and buy-in on the new system as the CRM trainer talked about it with 300 people in 10 days!”
By using experiential activities, music and inquiry teaching skills the CRM team transferred into the WEBEX virtual classroom environment the active engagement of CRM classroom sessions and – more importantly – avoided the prevalent lecture mode of many of today’s system ‘Web-inars’ that turns so many people against this new technology”
In the process the CRM team was able to reduce training to 2 weeks, by making instruction connected to a major system upgrade virtually pain-free to deploy and to receive for staff and management alike. Besides offering good customer service to CRM end users right at their desk, perhaps WEBEX’s greatest benefit was that the CRM team could provide training to a vast user base for a fraction of the cost of comparable similar initiatives — finally finding a third way between “big training budget” and “no training budget at all” for system upgrades.
With training budgets lowered and complexity increasing at any new system upgrades, WEBEX can be a powerful way to do much more with less: support as many people learning process as possible while limiting their time away from their office.
