For us here at MCAP, one of Canada’slargest independent mortgage financing companies, the pride we take in our teamisn’t simply an empty value statement. What sets us apart is the knowledge inour agents’ heads, and their ability to translate that knowledge to each andevery call they make. Without the right knowledge, it’s just like rolling thedice. And we’re not willing to take that gamble. We need our employees to knowexactly how to serve our customers to maintain our high standards of success.
MCAP has always had exceptional trainingprograms: New hires go through a five-week comprehensive onboarding course and sixweeks of on-the-job training, then receive regular, ongoing coaching from teamleaders. We’ve been able to take people with absolutely no previous knowledgearound mortgages to a place where they can be successful in their jobs.
But, when we saw an opportunity to takethings further, we seized it. There were four areas we specifically wanted to focuson improving:
- Increasing engagement—Our agents comeout of training ready to take on the world. We wanted to find a way to maintainthat enthusiasm throughout their learning journey at MCAP.
- Increasing knowledge retention—While ourcoaches do an incredible job of supporting their team, there’s only so much aleader can do to fight the “forgetting curve”—the 90 percent of informationthat many learners lose within 30 days without reinforcement. We saw some ofour agents retaining only 15 to 20 percent of material after receiving twoweeks of introductory training. We knew we could do better than that.
- Reducing manual processes and paperwork—Likemany organizations, we had a lot of training materials in different places.There were online procedure manuals, learner guides, facilitator guides,PowerPoint decks, the whole nine yards—all of which we needed to update individuallyon a regular basis. We needed a way to streamline this, not only to make ourprocesses vastly more efficient, but to help save our sanity.
- Making our coaching program measurable—Mostknowledge evaluations are painful—and costly—ordeals that don’t give you muchreal insight into what your workforce actually knows. Nailing down the ROI oftraining is the ever-elusive holy grail for businesses across the board, but wesuspected there might just be a solution out there.
Enter the modern corporate learning solution
The Axonify Employee Knowledge Platform hitevery button for us. We first met Axonify CEO Carol Leaman in 2014 at a conferencein California, and were pretty excited with her modern learning philosophy and innovativeapproach to training. There are a lot of learning management systems (LMSs) andeLearning solutions out there, but Axonify offered us a technology platformthat we believed would help employees build, sustain, and share knowledge in away that’s fun and engaging—particularly because its use of gamification is soeffective. The platform also uses adaptive learning to automatically build on employeestrengths and target weaknesses. Adaptive learning ensures agents follow apersonalized learning path and can work continually toward closing individualknowledge gaps to give them theconfidence they need to bring their best to the job. Finally, Axonify also offersa way for our coaches to view individual knowledge levels at any time toprovide precise support.
All of these parts working in harmony havemade for something of a powerhouse answer to our needs. We introduce trainingthrough Axonify during the onboarding process to help reinforce our content andestablish initial knowledge levels, which gives our coaches a baseline againstwhich to measure the agents’ growth as they progress. Then, the platform prettywell takes it from there. Every day our agents log in to take their daily microlearningtraining burst, where three to five questions are cleverly integrated intogameplay (Figures 1 through 4).
Figure 1: Colorfill isone of the most popular games among our employees
Figure 2: Questions can take many forms, from multiple choiceto match-ups
Figure 3: Learners are also asked for their level ofconfidence with every answer, a key indication of how likely they are to translatetheir knowledge to on-the-job behaviors
Figure4: Each learner’s digital Axonify coach providesexplanations for both correct and incorrect answers. Incorrect answers indicatethat the learner needs further reinforcement, which the platform will automaticallyfeed into the learner’s future microlearning training bursts.
This game-based play helps learners getinto a state of “flow” and better focus while answering questions. The gamifiedelements of the platform—the leaderboards, point system, and challenges—createin each learner the intrinsic motivation to take training every day. Because wehave such a strong performance-based culture here at MCAP, simply seeing theirown knowledge growth as they progress through each topic energizes many of ouragents. Topics themselves can cover the vast breadth of everything an agentneeds to know, including compliance and certification training, and can beprioritized to help reinforce knowledge in preparation for the upcoming taxseason, for instance.
Our coaches have been particularly excitedabout the platform. They have a way to measure the effectiveness of theirtraining, as Axonify’s knowledge maps and detailed learner history give themthe ability to drill down into each learner’s metrics at a granular level toidentify and target specific areas for support (Figures 5 and 6).
Figure 5:Coaches can view each learner’s individual knowledge map, which detailsknowledge levels in every topic
Figure 6: Coaches can then drill down into each learner’shistory with every question to identify and target specific areas for support
Our results
The results have been pretty incredible. Sincewe began this approach, quality scores for agents are steadily getting better overtime. We’ve achieved call-quality rating scores of 86 percent and decreasedcall escalations by 20 percent, both of which have played a critical role inimproving customer satisfaction.
The atmosphere on the floor has completelytransformed. There’s a greater sense of confidence among the agents, which isessential to success. (When you have an unconfident salesperson, it’s almostlike throwing them to the sharks. They’re not going to make a sale.) Ourcoaches have noticed a change in tone now when they listen in on calls. Theycan hear the confidence coming through, and conversations go smoother.
We’ve also put to rest many of our manualprocesses, including an annual knowledge assessment required as part of being aservice-provider organization. This used to be a paper-based test where we hadto schedule everyone to take time off the phone, which you can imagine in acontact center is a nightmare. With Axonify, we’re able to integrate thoseassessments seamlessly with our agents’ daily training, meaning we get immediateresponses and also see better results. It’s been a huge time-saver for theadministrative team, and a relief for agents who suffer from test anxiety.
Besides this, we’ve moved beyond the “check-boxapproach” to training, so that our agents are now actually breathing theknowledge they need to know to be successful at their jobs. Our coaches havetold us how they finally have something to offer those employees who have beenon the job for 15 years, and our training leaders now have a tool that hasreplaced any guesswork with data-based insight into areas where the workforceneeds additional training to further increase their performance.
The gamified, adaptive approach to learning builtinto the Axonify platform has transformed our agent training into a fun,interactive, bite-sized, and quick experience each and every day. It’s asolution that has not only truly enabled us to bring out the best in ourlearners, but has allowed us to continue to boost our business success at thesame time.
