Barclaycard Drives Learning and Fun With Training Games

Barclaycard, part of Barclays Bank UK PLC, is a leading global payment business that helps consumers, retailers and businesses to make and take payments flexibly, and to access short-term credit and point of sale finance.

The company is a pioneer of new forms of payments and is at the forefront of developing viable contactless and mobile payment schemes for today and cutting edge forms of payment for the future. Barclaycard also partners with a wide range of organizations across the globe to offer their customers or members payment options and credit.

As the lead instructional designer at Barclaycard, Walter Gill must ensure that the 17,000 domestic and international phone agents not only learn the details about their products, but prove mastery. “It’s challenging to try to make the material exciting and engaging,” shared Gill.

Barclaycard wanted a training solution that would appeal to its very large and diverse audience. The learning solution also needed to ensure effective knowledge transfer and drive high retention. 

Having had the experience with other interactive learning tools and their cumbersome creation process, Barclaycard was skeptical about going through with it again. 

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ELB Learning partnered with Walter Gill and Barclaycard to provide a solution that met these objectives. The solution proposed was ELB Learning’s DIY game-authoring tool, The Training Arcade®. The game-authoring tool is known for its easy game creation techniques without any programming or coding. The tool is easy, intuitive and takes less than 30 mins to build a game. 

Barclaycard began using The Training Arcade® as the final step after their video-based training modules were completed.

They started with the Trivia game, a fun, competitive game with leaderboards, points, streaks and timers. The assessment questions are offered randomly, with a large selection available. The agent receives 10 multiple choice or true/false questions and a different order each time they retake it. The status bar time ticks down by the second for the agents to respond, and they find out immediately after each question if they were correct. The agents must prove they have mastery over the material with time limitations, in an adrenaline-fueled experience.

“They need to be at the top of their game on the account they’re talking about,” Gill said. The questions mimic the type of questions and scenarios they may experience when answering customer questions about specific product nuances. The training teaches them these nuances and details, and The Training Arcade games assess their mastery.

An added benefit to Barclaycard using The Training Arcade® is the metrics.

Previously Barclaycard couldn’t access the depth of metrics they wanted from their assessments. The Training Arcade can tell them if users have missed a specific question 90% of the time, for example. The instructional designers can then review the effectiveness of the training and make adjustments, if a topic needs more coverage. 

“It is working! I hear from managers that the agents love this format,” shared Gill. Plus, the data speaks volumes. “The agents pass the assessment and in overwhelming numbers, take it again multiple times to do better on the leaderboard, showing their competitive spirit.”

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The added advantage is more exposure and interaction with the training material in a quick-responding format.

Barclaycard requires a record showing the agents passed the assessment. Since their other training materials are in SAP’s SuccessFactors, a cloud-based Human Experience Management System (HXM), they did not want to have to consult a separate system to show compliance and a passing rate. ELB Learning worked with Gill to import his assessment results right into SuccessFactors via Storyline 360 by Articulate. 

“ELB Learning went above and beyond in getting the coding I needed, so it works flawlessly.”

Future Plans

Barclaycard plans to roll out JEOPARDY!®, an officially-licensed game in The Training Arcade. “I believe it will have a great impact on learners as we start to hire again and have them come in through the building,” Gill said. “Coming through this pandemic, you need something that will boost them up, and games do that.”

The instructional design group is also talking about other games from The Training Arcade that they could use for individual departments. They may implement a scenario-based game for their fraud department, for example. “There are so many avenues to go down.” 

While the current prize for Barclaycard agents using the Trivia game is bragging rights when they appear on the leaderboard, the company is looking at adding prizes as well. Some of The Training Arcade’s other subscribers find that prizes like gift cards, a day off, or lunch with an executive, is good for motivating employees to engage with the games. “Our first game was extremely well received,” Gill said. “Now that we see the interaction, prizes are on the horizon.”