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.
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.
