Vodafone Turkey - Customer Service Training or Coaching Program of the Year

Company: Vodafone Turkey
Company Description: A part of the Vodafone Group, which operates as one of the world’s foremost mobile communication companies in terms of its revenues, Vodafone Turkey is Turkey’s second largest mobile communication company As of 30 June 2016, Vodafone Turkey had 22.4 million subscribers. Offering mobile voice, fixed voice, mobile Internet, ADSL and fiber services.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Training or Coaching Program of the Year - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Blended Onboarding Training Program for Work from Home (Vodafone Turkey)

Vodafone Turkey is an international company loyal to its local roots, within the body of Vodafone Group, one of the largest telecommunications and technology providers across the globe. With the vision to lead the digitalization of Turkey, Vodafone supports the individuals and organizations to prepare for the digital codes of the future. To achieve this, Vodafone places great importance on capability development of its frontline teams.

As known, new hire onboarding process includes technical and soft-skill trainings with product and service knowledge resulting in long training durations especially in Customer Service. At Vodafone Turkey, it was a 6-weeks training program being delivered as classroom trainings.

With an organizational change focusing on Frontline Capability Development dedicatedly, we started our Digital Library project to transform our learning materials into the most suitable micro learning formats like interactive e-learning, screen simulations, video learnings, infographics, motion graphics and animated videos.

With the start of pandemic in Turkey on March 2020, Vodafone Turkey’s Customer Service organization started to work from home with its 5000 frontline employees. This was the opportunity for us, as Frontline Capability Development Team, to create and launch our blended digital remote day-by-day onboarding program with innovative tools and platforms.

Outline the nominated achievement since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):

As Vodafone is outsourcing its customer service operations to its Call Center partners at different cities of Turkey, partner trainers are one of the important assets in addition to Vodafone Teams to deliver trainings all around the ecosystem.

Our Frontline Capability Core Team was consisting of trainers who were generally delivering classroom trainings and our learning materials was in the form of PowerPoint presentation. So, it is easy to estimate that in a 6-weeks Customer Service onboarding program there were huge numbers of documents categorized daily, updated periodically and spread out for each new hire group.

First of all, we have started to re-skill our own trainers on learning content design and development tools. 12 trainers in the first established Frontline Capability Team started to explore e-learning and digital content development tools like Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, Vyond Studio and Movavi and other innovative learning tools and apps. So, re-skilling of an internal team was one of the great achievements to pay attention while creating Vodafone’s brand new “Customer Service Blended Digital Onboarding Program”.

On March 2020 when was the time pandemic had been started and the need for a completely remote onboarding program was obvious, we were ready with the design of the program. The team had started to create learning contents at that time and created more than 300 e-learnings and video contents with all of the components including a Digital Buddy app (Journey), Gamified exam app (Quizgame) implementation and question bank till the end of June.

Explain why the achievement you have highlighted is unique or significant. If possible compare the achievement to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):

At the very early phase of the pandemic, it is decided foreseeing by the Vodafone leaders that Vodafone Turkey Customer Service teams would work from home in the future permanently and an Agile Squad teamed up to design the future Customer Service of Vodafone Turkey. This vision of great leadership put strategic importance on our brand new program.

With this visionary leadership, we trained our first pilot group on July in this program which is managed completely remote on the Learning Management System consisting of daily digital contents, virtual classroom sessions and interactive self-paced e-learnings.

One of the significant achievements of this program is offering the learners 50% self-paced learning experience. As stated in the research, every learner has his/her own learning speed and may need more repetitions. Our program is eliminating the disadvantages of the synchronous learning methodologies like classroom or virtual classrooms and limits the daily duration of them at the optimum level.

Secondly, we have created 18% efficiency on program duration by having less instructor-led trainings focusing on 84% more competency and skill development by integrating higher level cognitive activities like system simulations and call listening to make our learners not only get knowledge but also apply what they learned.

During six months period from July to December; we had 40new hire groups and trained more than 1000 agents with our innovative blended digital onboarding program. Program NPS is 98.4% and we have 99% participation at all components of the program of which details shared below.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):

Below are the details for the supporting materials:

1-Learning Management System (Success Factors):
This is a typical Learning Management System which Vodafone uses for all for its frontline employees. As Vodafone Turkey, we use this platform to manage day-by-day program with all of our innovative digital learning contents including interactive e-learnings, screen simulations, motion graphic videos, explainer videos, infographics, animated videos and question banks with hundreds of questions. You can watch the attached video presenting how it works through the eyes of the employee

2-Digital Buddy (Journey App): https://vimeo.com/478018665/6b46c7024d
Every onboarding is a Journey and studies reveal that first thirty days is critical for a successful onboarding. Being aware of this fact, Vodafone designed its Customer Service Onboarding Program as a Digital Journey with Journey App. As a digital buddy, Journey App guides and informs new hires for a seamless day-by-day onboarding journey. For example; on the first day, the new hire gets a warm message with some micro learnings introducing Vodafone Spirit, telco and customer service basics. On day six; some details of Vodafone products and services are shared and on day fifteen, as every day, she is invited to attend a virtual classroom session on communication skills. Program ends with a readiness assessment on day thirty.

3-Gamified Exam App (Quizgame) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtM6639cCZA

This is an app specialized to make exam experience a fun. You may watch the video to see how we used it and increased new hire engagement so far.