REFLECTION – LEARNING LAUNCH

Challenge

I am an employee in a financial institution, specifically handling corporate clients. My challenge is to  improve the productivity of our team’s associates when it comes to marketing, in order to increase the  income contributed by our department to the whole organization. The project will include the associates  being introduced to the various products of the organization like corporate credit cards, life insurance,  non-life insurance, and deposit products. These products when marketed can help with the profitability  of the organization. The project will take 30 to 40 days to complete, and the solution must involve  adequate understanding/knowledge of the numerous products mentioned and increase in sales count  by the team members after.

Selection

Amongst the different design thinking activities or tools, our team decided to try the learning launch  tool wherein we can test various ideas.

Application

For the first learning launch, we tried to conduct a group discussion of the various products. This is to  get a sense of our associates’ level of understanding on the corporate products. We learned that most of  the service associates are only provided with basic knowledge in marketing as their job description are  mostly involved in loan transactions and administrative activities only. Also, we discovered that some  employees are only marginally competent or familiar with certain products but not all. We then invited  our product partners to conduct an in-depth training and discussion about the products for marketing.  This is to give the team members more knowledge about the products and that they may be able to sell  it with confidence. We see it also as an opportunity for them to improve in marketing and for their  career development also because eventually, they will handle marketing activities when they get  promoted.

For the second learning launch, we conducted testing of what was learned in the training by the product  partners and tried to involve the team members in marketing little by little. We also conducted surveys  to include questions about feelings of the team members being involved in marketing, how confident  are they to sell the products, understanding the process, and other opinions about the change. The  purpose of the survey is to get an idea on the team member’s willingness to market the products, and  also to get an idea if the proposal will work (whether profitability will increase if we involve the  subordinates in marketing).

Insight

By conducting the learning launch tool, our team was able to establish our assumptions and developed  ideas and activities to test them. With this tool, we were able to come up with solutions that would best  improve our productivity. Our actual results were almost same from what we anticipated. All team  members are willing to learn and contribute on the profitability of the organization.

Approach

We think that the learning launch is an appropriate tool in solving our problem. Since learning launch  involves testing/experimentation of various ideas, we were able to test the ideas that we have come up  and eventually find out whether if it is effective or not.

