One of the most important ways training can help an organization is to make job performance consistent among employees. Each employee brings his or her own particular skills, talents, experience and personality to the job, and as a result, performance can vary widely from employee to employee. This can leave the organization at risk, particularly when these employees are working directly with customers.

For this training, if we were going to teach consistency in job performance, it made sense to first analyze and then harness the tools and techniques used by “star performers” – those employees who clearly performed better than others. Why did those star performers outperform others? How could we improve the performance of underperformers? By analyzing the best practices of the star performers, we found out how to best teach associates to perform consistently and with a higher rate of success.

The resulting WBT is based on a breakdown of a typical call a collections association might make, and details specific trainings for how to open the call, how to perform during the call and how to close the call. We use audio simulations to provide examples of successful and unsuccessful calls (to read more about the audio simulations, please see our eLearning Best Practices section). After each audio simulation, we provide the complete script of the call in a table that matches the best practices concepts to text of the actual call. Multiple-choice questions allow learners to check their understanding of the concepts.

The training results were exciting and exceeded our client's ROI expectations. Our evaluation strategy was based on the Kirkpatrick model, in this case evaluating levels 1-4:

• Level 1: 4.8 of 5 –- “top box” satisfaction
• Level 2: 89% -- scores on WBT
• Level 3: 90-100% -- skills/mastery of learning objectives
• Level 4: 34.38% -- reduction in group defect rate

We had fun with this project, exploring best practices and recreating those practices in audio simulations from which other associates could benefit. Our client was extremely pleased by the training approach and results, and we are currently working on a second project for this team.