Table of Contents

Case Study: Improve New Hire Training for Financial Services Agents

New tools can help overhaul tired training programs that you don't have time to focus on yourself.
questions to refresh a training session

Betty Dannewitz of If You Ask Betty, shared some insights about how her financial services company was able to improve new hire training using a rapid authoring tool for face-to-face instruction called Soapbox. Here is Betty in her own words:

Old and Tired Training

Picture this. 

You wake up and pop out of bed energized and ready to start the day.  New hires are coming!  You dress to impress, take the short cut to work, drink all the coffee and walk into your classroom ready to make learning happen!  You begin to set up your classroom with care and confidence and as you set out the participant guides, your smile suddenly dulls. 

Improve New Hire Training so it isn't boring

One minor detail strikes you, and you can’t shake it.  This training you are about to deliver is old and tired.  It hasn’t been updated in years.  You’re getting ready to deliver the same thing for (and this is just a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation) the gazillionth time. You had to photocopy the binders last week.  You have only the one slide deck (that was given to you by your predecessor) and no interactive activities.  Yikes.

And it’s not your fault. You’ve been wanting to update this. But there are so many other things happening, so many other projects with deadlines.

Reviving Training for Call Center Agents

Sound familiar?  We were there too.  I am a Senior L&D Specialist at an insurance company.  The primary audience our team serves are the call center agents.  We teach how to intake and process insurance claims.  Did I lose you already?  Stay with me now. 

Last year, I was approached about a new software that was in beta testing called Soapbox.  I thought, why not give it a try and help the makers of Soapbox make their product better.  So I joined the beta test and started to use it.  I was amazed at the results! 

I took one of our core courses that was stale and stagnant and used it as an example.  Within minutes I had taken the main objectives, plugged them into Soapbox, and had a revitalized course before me.  Spending just a few minutes with Soapbox had created a whole new opportunity for this course to be even more effective.  It even offered some fun things to do with learning how to process insurance claims! 

Improving New Hire Training with New Activities

I called my coworkers and boss into a meeting to show them Soapbox and how it could revolutionize and expedite our instructional design process.  Our team is made up mostly of subject matter experts-turned-trainers.  Our ID skills are organic and learned along the way.  Having Soapbox there to enhance what we already knew was game changing – we leveled up! 

We continue to work on rebooting our core courses and Soapbox is a huge part of that effort.  It’s like our world changed from drab to fab – kind of like that moment in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy walks out of the crashed black and white house and into the colorful land of Oz.  Soapbox helped us add the color we needed to our tired, worn out curricula. 

About Betty Danewitz

Betty Dannewtiz was a Senior L&D Specialist with a financial services organization and is also ready to answer your questions about L&D or life in general at If You Ask Betty.

If you’d like to see how you can improve new hire training or any other facilitated training, check out a free live demo of Soapbox.

Articles Similar to Case Study: Improve New Hire Training for Financial Services Agents

Erin Clarke

Using a Whiteboard in a Virtual Classroom

Do you remember the time way back before COVID when we all gathered in classrooms for training? We have seen some Instructor-Led Training (ILT) return, but with the advancements of

Better PowerPoint
PowerPoint
Erin Clarke

Creating Better PowerPoint Slide Decks, Faster

PowerPoint can be a very powerful visual aid and important tool for training… if it’s done well. Creating a better PowerPoint Slide Deck is about organizing your thoughts before you even open PowerPoint on your computer.

Brian Washburn

Is this the world’s most effective role play?

When it comes to your training participants, two of the dirtiest, or perhaps scariest, words you can say during a session may be: role play. In today’s podcast, John Crook, Head of Learning at Intersol Global, offers some thoughts on how to make role plays more authentic and robust.

airline flying through a sky with palm trees
Job Aids
Brian Washburn

3 Job Aid Design Lessons from a Beach in Hawaii

An effective job aid might be able to replace the need for actually training someone. At the very least, it can be distributed as part of a training to help people remember a rule or how to do something new. Drawing inspiration from “job aids” we see every day when we walk around can make our job designing effective job aids easier.

Subscribe to Get Updates from Endurance Learning

Brian Washburn, Author

Brian Washburn
CEO & Chief Ideas Guy

Enter your information below and we’ll send you the latest updates from our blog. Thanks for following!

activities cookbook

Download the Training Activity Cookbook

Enter your email below and we’ll send you the PDF of the Endurance Learning Activity Cookbook.

Let's Talk Training!

Brian Washburn

Brian Washburn
CEO & Chief Ideas Guy

Enter your information below and we’ll get back to you soon.

Download the Feedback Lesson Plan

Enter your email below and we’ll send you the lesson plan as a PDF.

feedback lesson plan
MS Word Job Aid Template

Download the Microsoft Word Job Aid Template

Enter your email below and we’ll send you the Word version of this template.

Download the Free Lesson Plan Template!

Enter your email below and we’ll send you a Word document that you can start using today!

training materials checklist

Download the Training Materials Checklist

Enter your email below and we’ll send you the PDF of the Training Materials Checklist.

Subscribe to Endurance Learning for updates

Get regular updates from the Endurance Learning team.