Auto-Owners Insurance - Lectora

Established in 1916, Auto-Owners Insurance Group is headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. Recognized for exceptional financial strength and stability, it is among the nation’s largest insurers and provides insurance to nearly 3 million policyholders.

One crucial part of associate training at Auto-Owners Insurance is the Effective Business Writing course. This training teaches a company standardized writing voice, which is used when an associate is approaching customers or during intercompany communications. Associates at Auto-Owners Insurance need to ensure that their words won’t be misinterpreted—because that could cause legal repercussions.

Part of Auto-Owners Insurance’s mission is to be a customer-focused insurance company. “It’s not just a job. You’re actually doing this with people in mind,” says Andrew Lockwood, Training Coordinator and Instructional Developer for the Claims Education and Training Department. That’s why the company manages their standardized writing voice with appropriate training to avoid any misinterpretations and regulatory issues.

This Effective Business Writing training was originally a 3-day-long face-to-face session only taught in the Michigan home office, but employees who weren’t in the Michigan office couldn’t get this training without traveling. Traveling increased the training cost per person and wasted a lot of valuable work time.

Auto-Owners Insurance wanted to convert their in-person training (including tests and PowerPoint presentations) to eLearning—especially the business writing course.

Auto-Owners Insurance hired Andy to create eLearning from their in-person training. Andy began using Lectora authoring tool to put tests online and convert PowerPoint training to a more interactive eLearning format.

Over Andy’s 9 years of using Lectora, he’s seen how the authoring tool is consistently updated to streamline the course development process. He said, “[ELB Learning] sees what their users are doing and [is] going like ‘Well, we can actually make this easier for them. That’s something that we can package into the program’—and now we just have to click a button, drag it into where it’s supposed to go.”

During the three different development stages, Andy was able to facilitate teamwork by using ReviewLink™ to get feedback from test users. “About the time I upgraded to [Lectora] 16, we also got our hands on ReviewLink, which was amazing for tracking issues and feedback,” Andy said. “It made the difference.”

Next, Andy converted the crucial in-person Effective Business Writing course to eLearning, which exponentially expanded their audience. Using Lectora, he incorporated ways to standardize writing instruction—something that can be a big challenge.

Andy created eLearning activities and tracking to evaluate associates’ writing, such as small snippets of tests. Associates revised sentences from passive to active voice, which was tracked inside drag and drop activities. Constructive feedback was built into the Lectora course. Building these features inside the course was a huge time-saver.

With Lectora, training that once took 3 full days to complete was now streamlined to only 60 minutes seat time—including all interactive exercises and videos. Employees are now able to take training ahead of time, on their own time.

The response from everyone at Auto-Owners Insurance has been positive too. Andy said, “We’ve all been really happy with the results of [the training].”