Engaging Software Sales Teams and Support Reps With Customized Learning

Intuit is a global technology platform that helps consumers and small businesses overcome their most critical financial challenges. Serving more than 100 million customers worldwide with TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp, Intuit helps put more money in consumers’ and small businesses’ pockets, saving them time by eliminating work, and ensuring they have confidence in every financial decision they make. Intuit has over 17,000 employees operating in 20 offices in 9 countries. 

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Intuit had two main training needs: 

1. Quickly bringing sales associates up to speed on an extensive product suite
2. Enabling call center employees without financial expertise to support customer queries about products

Having a range of financial products requires comprehensive, effective training so the sales team can offer the right product solutions to customers. Additionally, to better support clients with its products and services, Intuit operates a call center. The staff managing the call center do not necessarily have financial expertise, and yet are required to have the knowledge and proficiency in troubleshooting queries. 

Employees need onboard quickly, get acquainted with products and services, and start making sales and handling customer calls as soon as possible. Further, employees need quick, easy access to resources and product guides during the customer call. 

The existing training material across all curriculums was dull and boring for employees, who barely engaged with the resources. Even during the onboarding process, employees found it difficult to follow the topic and hardly retained any information. 

Additionally, Intuit needed to:

• Find learning partners and tools to keep up with the size and pace of the training needs
• Revamp the bland, process-focused and disjointed learning experience
• Build an effective framework for continuous learning 

Although gamification was part of the training modules, the original gamification tool Intuit tried was complex and failed to provide a seamless learning experience. 

Intuit was already using the Docebo platform for its learning management system, and then partnered with ELB Learning to improve effectiveness of the learning management system, customize training content, and create better learning experiences for learners.

The first step was to create a thorough learning strategy, including a content readiness check, and identify learners' needs and preferences to pick a suitable learning mode. The solution offered by ELB Learning was three-fold:

Personalization

A skills-based approach to training was designed to assign a learning path to the employee hired for a particular role. Skills are tied to learning paths within Docebo, and a pre-assessment strategy will allow learners to “test out” courses, creating a customized learning path. In this manner, several customized landing pages for different self-led training experiences were created. 

Gamification
“Our previous gamification initiatives were highly customized, but complex to manage,” Angie Kleinsorge, Manager, Learning and Development.

To remedy this, The Training Arcade® - a game-based learning platform was added to their onboarding to offer role-specific experiences with the intention of engaging learners throughout the first 90 days. This helped to seamlessly integrate content and engagement into Docebo’s platform which they were already using. 
Gamification was also the mode of choice to engage sales initiatives and foster continuous learning. Scenario-based games helped them to practice learning and receive instant feedback. Reasoning games further allowed them to converse better with clients. 

Certification
Intuit believes their certification offers a big value to their audience, providing credibility and recognition, professional development, and career opportunities. 

To cater to this need, training courses that offer certifications were deployed. Certifications and badges were awarded to learners upon passing the course. Displaying these on social media demonstrates that the seller has a solid understanding of Intuit’s products and can provide expertise to their customers. 

Additionally, ELB Learning created training videos (explainer videos, guided walkthroughs and screencasts) that are helpful to learners with diverse learning styles. The videos were TikTok-styled to creatively immerse and engage learners. The Intuit Academy logo, the learning experience, and course templates were all reimagined and redesigned to infuse new life into existing courses. Facilitation guides and tool kits were also updated to assist trainers. 

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Learners find the revamped experience easier to navigate, more user-friendly, and visually appealing, with a cleaner look and feel that makes it easier to find resources in an instant. They also appreciate the ability to search for content by customer segment, specific skills, ILTs, or by location, and find their content quickly. 

Keeping the learners engaged via gamification during the first 90 days of onboarding provided a positive impact on ramp up speed and performance on the job. 

“Our primary finding is that learners who were consistently engaged in gamification were more likely to be in the top performance quartile and less likely to be in the bottom performance quartile,” shared Angie. “We also saw that those engaged in gamification saw a 3% lift in business acumen, 14% lift in sales acumen, and 4% in technical acumen.”

The certification demonstrates a commitment to personal development and expertise, gaining the seller more customers. This was possible due to the immense scope of practice and engagement with the training resources.

As a learning partner, ELB Learning assisted Intuit with creating engaging training programs and delivering them conveniently for all learners. In eight months, ELB Learning created over 15 learning paths and over 2000 training modules, leveraging multiple modalities that provided skill practice and assessment to learners.

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