How do you welcome and integrate support partners outside of your organization?
With outsourcing rising in popularity, thoughtful partner onboarding practices are more important than ever.
Case Study
Brief: A well-known e-commerce company wants to onboard a new outsourced team to provide specialized risk and fraud support. The team needs to be fully up-to-speed in just a few weeks.
Solution: A blended learning curricula that communicates the company’s norms, tooling, and partner expectations in addition to more detailed risk and fraud subject matter
Result: A 25% reduction in anticipated onboarding time for approximately 60 new outsourced agents and trainers
Week 1- Laying the ground work
Due to the strict time restrictions, it was crucial to keep the curricula as lean as possible. This meant eliminating any fluff from a prior onboarding design while still effectively welcoming the partner team.
In the first week, I hosted virtual instructor-led (VILT) train-the-trainer sessions to socialize company norms and expectations. In between these VILT sessions, the trainers completed self-guided e-learning modules that introduced the organization’s tooling. They also reviewed relevant Guru cards (job aids) at their own pace.
Learners completed activity workbooks that challenged them to further explore tooling and prompted them to imagine how they might facilitate everything that had learned to their teams.
In addition to knowledge checks within our LMS, I kept a pulse on learning by conducting check-ins, q&a sessions, and meet & greets with relevant team members.
At the end of the week, the learners completed a Trainer Certification assessment to verify the knowledge transfer.
Week 2-3 Getting down to business
Now that the trainers were familiar with the business model, its tooling, and the expectations placed upon them as partners, we could dive into risk and fraud specifics. This meant leveraging the organization’s risk and fraud subject matter experts to partake in training. Training was delivered in both VILT and self-guided formats, with plenty of check-ins and office hours along the way!
Week 4-5 Agent Training
We quickly recognized that our outsourcing team was quite experienced in their craft and well-versed in the area of risk and fraud. Once we taught trainers the information that our agents needed to know, they were given the autonomy to teach back to their agents themselves. This meant that the trainers were able to continue to encourage their existing team norms and deliver the information in ways that spoke best to them.
Week 6-7 Agent On-the-Job Training/Nesting
Wow, that was a lot of information! We gave our new outsourcing team some time to practice what they had learned. This meant giving them the opportunity to use our tooling and workflows without the fear of quality assurance repercussions. Our SMEs were there to provide support as our QA graders reviewed tasks and provided coaching as needed.
Week 8-Present Ongoing Targets
To track progress, we set ramping productivity goals for each week based on agent experience and volume, allowing our QA team to promptly flag concerns that may require additional coaching or resources.