They said it couldn’t be done! But we proved them wrong!
Our mission: ViP Spain – to provide Barclaycards Spanish Customers with the latest strategic servicing platform to enable our Agents in Zaragoza to provide the very best customer service coupled with the latest digital technology i.e. real time decisioning and digital communications. This would ensure Barclaycards customers stay at the heart of everything we do whilst supporting our vision of becoming the ‘go to bank’ for consumer payments. What’s more, we wanted to deliver the learning to support this within 6 short months.
A collaborative team of ‘swat’ training professionals were mobilised and led by Angela Cahill with the sole vision of preparing a learning programme for in excess of 500 Barclaycard Agents who would support the mission.
Our vision:
- To complete a thorough & formal Training Needs Analysis to fully understand the learning requirements of the operation which would underpin, maintain and support our customer service
- Deliver right training, to the right people at the right time to support the objectives of the project without compromising the operation and the customer experience
- Provide innovative activities and learning to keep the agents skills alive post training and pre go-live to ensure a seamless and smooth transition for our customers
- Leave a sustainable ‘business as usual’ learning solution to ensure continued and consistent training for our customer service agents
With such a short period of time to deliver results we maintained focus on our desired end result and that was to safely land the learning requirements associated with the strategic migration without compromising the customer experience during migration and more importantly enhancing the customer experience post training and migration.
Our Spanish Agents had to be fully prepared to resume full customer focused conversations even though we were replacing more than 80% of the systems they had previously used.
We needed to ensure that we didn’t just tell them what to do and what had changed but to provide them with the opportunity to ‘play’ with the new systems via a structured learning intervention, simulating the processes and procedures that they would need to transact on a daily basis but more than this we provided the opportunity to role play the customer interaction and conversation at the same time as using the new systems – this was the only way we could ensure that the customer experience would remain unaffected in the light of such a large change programme.
When our learners left our training room they did not leave the learning experience – we needed to ensure they kept their skills alive until they took their first customer call and conscious competence became unconscious competence.
We provided an entire suite of innovative ‘Sandpit Activities’ (Sandpit = somewhere safe you go to play) which enabled our Agents to practice the new skills and knowledge required to continue the first class service we provide to our customers (either individually or as a group).
Activities included ‘ViP Spain Trivial Pursuit’, Word Search, Captivate Simulations, A-Z of learning to name but a few alongside bite sized learning sessions where agents practiced the ‘Top 10’ daily customer interactions to ensure we were fully prepared to service our first customer calls.
Our Spanish colleagues received a sum total of 21,840 training hours to ensure we were ready on ‘day 1’ to provide a first class customer service to our Spanish Card Customers.
The end result is a safely landed migration to a new strategic platform with fully trained and competent Agents (one of the best and smoothest in Barclaycards history) and notably within record time!
Our Spanish customers continued to enjoy an excellent customer experience during migration and are now enjoying the benefits of the very best in digital technology coupled with first class customer service!
But don’t just take my word for it…
Shelley Malton, Chief Operating Officer, Barclaycard Consumer Europe & South Africa said:
“The migration of all of our major systems in Spain was one of our most important projects of the year and a critical component of scaling our business for growth. An essential aspect of realising the benefit of the investment was the capability of our agents in how they used the new tools being delivered. What impressed me around the approach taken to delivering learning was the fact that the team created innovative solutions, and not ‘chalk and talk’ – this proved so much more effective in retaining colleague knowledge and skills. The whole migration programme was delivered flawlessly – this couldn’t have been possible without having the right capability and operational readiness in place, and a very professional team leading this through”
Jon Dunnakey, Programme Director said:
“What has to be remembered is that in addition to delivering a large, complex, bilingual and fast learning roll-out to such high-quality, the team had to do this against a backdrop of extreme parallel activity. The learning was designed whilst technology & operational design was still being completed. The learning was delivered whilst user testing was only 50% complete. Delivering successfully in this context is something to be incredibly proud of, evidenced by the colleague experience post-live and the very low level of incidents or complaints“.
Well done everyone!
Angela Cahill – Learning Manager at Barclaycard and Learning Lead for ViP Spain
I have worked as a Learning Professional for 16 years mainly within Financial Institutions but also for a short period of time with a Plumbing & Heating Company!
No matter what the business category my drive, determination and motivation is to lead and provide 1st class innovative learning solutions that ensure the learner and the customer is at the heart of everything I do.