eLearning & Off Shoring…my experience

For the last year I have worked with different departments within my organization in support of our off shoring initiatives to India. This posting isn’t about whether it is right or wrong to off shore these are just a few of my observations and what worked for me.


One of the initial items to consider when starting a new process in India is how you going to teach the agents. We decided since it wasn’t feasible to bring all of our new Indian agents to the U.S. for training that we would use a blended learning approach instead. We decided to send a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to India for classroom facilitation and supplement his information with eLearning courses. Creating the assorted eLearning courses is where my assistance was needed. We began this approximately a year before the process was to go live.


I worked with our SME to create eLearning courses that not only included policy and procedures but mirrored system access. One problem we had was this group of agents would not have access to the system until they started their job function; there was no system in place that allowed new agents to practice their skills during the training period.
One challenge I had was taking standard operating procedures (SOP’s) and transforming them into a storyboard. Many people assume that a SOP is already appropriate for learning, but in most cases it is not. In order for our new agents to learn I had to go back to that training theory standby, KISS (keep it simple stupid.) Start at step one and continue. This worked well.


After the storyboard was completed it was time to build the course. I needed this course interactive so using Lectora I inserted radio buttons, transparent buttons and entry fields that duplicated what was in the system they were going to use. I also added a scored assessment at the end of each course. These courses are hosted on CourseMill and what is really great about that learning management system (LMS) is that you can pull interaction reports to know exactly how agents answered each question. This is beneficial when coaching agents on how they can improve their skills.


After the initial review of the courses we decided to add a bit more to them. Because our Indian agents would not be able to see someone performing the skills they were learning we added call examples to the courses. This allowed them to hear how a tenured agent made each call so that they had an example to follow. We also added call scripting to giving them a template of how to have a success call.


A few of the benefits that we experienced with our blended learning approach:
~ Tracking course performance through the LMS.
~As time permitted we were able to un-enroll and re-enroll agents in course so they could be re-taken and new interactions would be scored again.
~Agents felt a greater level of comfort with the system once they began to do the job, i.e. making outbound calls.
~Agents were allowed to practice what they learned without impacting customers.

Overall the project was successful; we had agents who were giving accurate information and comfortable doing the job they were trained to do.


How have others used their LMS to track performance of their courses?