The challenge: two changes at once
The bank faced the rollout of new customer service standards and a new CRM system across its entire sales team - almost 20 000 people spread across the whole of Poland.
The difficulty here is not passing on the knowledge. A new CRM changes an adviser's daily moves: where to click, which field to record an arrangement in, how to find a customer's history. A new service standard changes what the adviser says and what they ask about. Those two changes meet in the same conversation with a customer, and more than ten thousand people are learning them at the same time, in branches hundreds of kilometres apart.
The classic answer at that scale is classroom training: a room, a trainer, travel, a day taken out of the branch's work. With a team this size, that answer costs so much that it becomes a problem in itself.
The solution: learning on a copy of the system
We launched a platform that supported the training process directly for 24 months. The programme stood on three mechanics:
- clickable CRM mock-upsreproduced the look and the functions of the new system, so an adviser practised on a copy before touching the real customer database,
- missions built around real sceneslet advisers rehearse service scenarios on the situations they actually meet at the counter and on the phone,
- a knowledge retention modulespread the repetitions over time, so the knowledge did not fade a week after the training.
The first one matters most. A CRM mock-up creates safe conditions for practising how the system is actually used: an adviser can get it wrong as many times as they need, and none of those mistakes lands on a real customer's account. That is the difference between watching a presentation about a new system and being able to work in it on Monday.
The retention module answers a second problem that classroom training does not solve by definition. Knowledge from a single day in a room fades within a few weeks, and nobody brings people in a second time just to refresh it. The learning paths spread over time were designed in a way that minimises the risk of an employee losing that knowledge - and it was on those paths that most of the tasks in the whole programme were completed.
What the programme was meant to achieve
The bank set three goals for the programme, and all three were met:
- effective knowledge retention,
- building new competencies,
- reducing the cost of classroom training.
Results
- PLN 43 552 790
- was the worth of the classroom training replaced by the programme
- 1.5M
- one-off tasks completed by employees
- 3.5M
- tasks completed in the knowledge retention system
- 300
- tasks on the platform per employee
Two of those numbers are worth putting side by side. There were more than twice as many repetition tasks as one-off ones - which means most of the work did not go into getting through a course, but into holding on to the knowledge after it ended. That is the part of the process classroom training does not cover at all.
The PLN 43.5 million is the worth of training that did not have to be organised, not a saving shown in the profit and loss account. We report it exactly as the client calculated it.