Our client, a mid-sized utility, was transforming their customer service experience. The goal was to expand customer self-service options, reduce obstacles to complete service requests, provide proactive communication, and quickly anticipate and solve problems when they occur. The impacts of this business transformation on the way all employees who work directly with customers do their work was immense.

Mosaic partnered with the utility to build a training program that prepares their customer-facing employees to support customers in their use of completely transformed web and mobile applications. To accelerate the learning curve and decrease the amount of time spent in formal training, Mosaic implemented a three-phased approach:

1. Awareness: The program begins by providing moderated awareness sessions of what is changing and why well before any formal classroom training takes place. These sessions occur in person at targeted locations two to four months before system go-live. Their primary purpose is to provide a preview of critical process and functionality changes.
2. Knowledge: Following the moderated awareness sessions and leading all the way up to formal training, employees attend virtual knowledge sessions via a learning portal that takes into account every channel available to the customer. These sessions include functionality overview videos and how-to guides that demonstrate new customer interfaces and all significant functionalities.
3. Ability: Following two to four months of awareness and knowledge “training,” learners are required to attend a one- to four-hour instructor-led course that focuses on practicing new processes and responsibilities through role play and hands-on practice using a training environment that replicates the systems and applications they will need to use to do their jobs after go-live.

After go-live, the utility was able to use the learning portal to provide access to all of the awareness, knowledge, and ability materials from the three phases of training. This portal is used for new hire training and as a performance support tool that customer-facing employees can access quickly and easily.

Mosaic’s initial training assessment estimated that customer-facing employees would need to go through 40 hours of training to develop the skills and knowledge required to meet the goals of the initiative utilizing the new customer interface. By adopting a phased approach that introduces awareness and knowledge components before formal training, Mosaic was able to cut training time down to 10 hours per learner—a 75% cost savings in productive time.