Tool: Learning Launch.

Challenge    We are a Spain-based company, and one of our main products is a welcome course aimed at the  banking industry. It`s an “in-house” course. Students learn interesting methods and tools that  make them more productive in their jobs.     We have a lot of clients demanding this course, but the problem it is that is very difficult for us to  plan because as soon as they hire a new employee, they immediately want the employee to be  trained by us.    95% of our client portfolio are based in African countries.  This is great because we assure an important turnover every year just selling the welcome course.  But we had a problem… Sending consultants to Africa each time a new employee was hire it is  very expensive for us and our clients don´t accept an increase in our tariffs or changes of any kind.    Selection    We re-studied all the single aspects of our welcome course and we realized that it could be given  online without losing quality. What it is more, it could be improved thanks to some online tools  we have been developed.    We had to learn more about our hypothesis. Does an online format course meet the requirements  of our clients? What would be the result if we told to our clients that from now on our welcome  course would be an online course.    The learning launch tool was perfect to design prototypes and test a potential new growth  initiative when we had to test an idea quickly and with a limited budget.     We thought that developing an experiment on how this online course would be, and presenting  it to some clients, would be an interesting tool that would give us a lot of information in order to  go on with or re-think our hypothesis.    Application    Once we knew that we needed a learning launch to learn more about our hypothesis we began  to decide how to implement the experiment.    We took information from our consultants and clients. In addition, we reviewed every single  feedback note to check every client reaction to our courses.    When we got all this information, we realized that our customers, despite being very satisfied with  our courses, they where missing two things, one was that once the course ended and began to  work in their jobs, they came up with some quesions related with the course and they didn’t have  the possibility to ask these questions to our consultants. The other was that they would have liked  to have more practical exercises during the course.      Once we got the information we developed a mock-up that we tested with some clients, and,  after process their feedback we developed the final online tool for the experiment.

Insight    We had 10 clients who hired our course and we offered an important discount on the final price  if they accepted to try our online version instead of the face-to-face one. They accepted, and they  began the course. During the course we had a consultant with each client. Just to gather  information, to answere questions, and to conduct some usability tests, etc.    After these 5 days we had very valuable direct information about our clients. We realized that the  online format was perfect for this kind of a course, our clients appreciated the flexibility, they  realized that they had much more practical exercises, and even they had a hotline in order to  make enquiries up to 3 months the course had ended.  In addition, there were some things to improve such us the speed of the streaming and the quality  of the translation of one of the courses.    Approach    Once we had a final product with all the improvements, we developed a big marketing campaign  to announce our improved course. Some clients were reticent but we invited them to try the tool  for free. Most of them were satisfied after these tests. In addition, this new situation allow us to  broaden our target and we developed a big marketing campaign through banks in 10 different  countries to give to know our product.

