Design Thinking Challenge - Learning Launch

By Asia Lemus, 4/2/19

Challenge

I am a project manager in field operations and recently inherited a project to change behavior of our  field technicians.  The “ask” is for our field technician’s to start leaving descriptive notes as to what they  did to resolve a customer’s issue.  The importance and value of this effort is tremendous.  The intention  is to leverage the data we collect from the notes and other relevant data (such as call reason and  technician resolution) to influence how our call center team is trained and to improve their tools to  eliminate sending technicians for issues that can be fixed by us remotely or by guiding the customer  through the fix.  It is extremely important for the technicians to embrace and adopt this new procedure  by not only entering these notes, but entering the right information to support data analysis to uncover  the root cause.

Selection

While myself and many other identified subject matter experts could have easily pulled together several  solid solutions and approaches to this project, I opted to leverage the Learning Launch to ensure we  identified and deployed the best solution to not only be successful but to ensure we sustain our success.   Due to the fact that I am very much aware that changing behavior is no easy feat and by already having  a keen sense of who my customers are and what is important to them, I did anticipate they would feel  uneasy about the request as it will add time to their job and they may even be fearful to enter honest  and accurate information in the note the learning launch felt like the right tool to ensure we were  creating a simple and intuitive solution to help create their buy in and adoption.   The learning launch  process allowed me to focus more time on generating out of the box ideas and surfacing even more  assumptions than we have today.  But most importantly, the process of conducting a small test with  those that actually have to use it, adopt to it and embrace it is where the most value came from.

Application

I gathered subject matter experts, those that had previously been field technicians and others that did  not, as well as, included a few with technical solutions expertise.  We reviewed past training and  messaging published to get a sense of what the current ask was.   We reviewed data around how many  technicians leave notes, on what type of jobs, what type of information does the note include, are there  some technicians that do this every time, some that never do it and what is the difference between  those technicians?  We evaluated how the system presented the note field today, where it was in the  workflow, what was the verbiage and graphics around it, etc.  We then generated ideas to get  technicians to be committed to leave a note every time that included the specifics of what was done to  solve the problem they were sent there to solve.  However, we did limit ourselves to ensuring we  focused on making this simple and not adding time to the technicians job.

We came up with several good ideas and then picked the one we knew we couldn’t do without.  We  tested our solution with a small group of technicians and found our assumptions were correct. Our  technicians embraced the new flow and tools and it was very apparent that giving them options of how  they will enter the note was very important (ie, voice to text, text entry, picking from a defined list or a  combination of all options).  However, we discovered we didn’t spend enough time ensuring our testers  understood why the change was so important.  This was a huge discovery that we should have prepared  for as we readied the team for the test and is now something we are incorporating into the launch  package, but will be testing that through a Learning Launch first to confirm we have it just right.

Insight

The benefits to being able to perform a quick hands on experiment or test is a win for all involved.  Not  only were we able to confirm our assumption of what was needed, we also found that our oversight  around explaining the Why was a big miss.  In addition, the test allowed us to get our technicians  involved early and they quickly felt a sense of ownership and pride in helping to make this the best  solution it could be.  The learning lesson concept is truly a quick way to confirm if ideas make sense in  application not just on paper or in theory and if they will ultimately support the goal.

Approach

We are incorporating a bit of a different approach to our next learning launch for this same challenge by  incorporating Story Telling into the launch.  We will focus more on benefits for the technician (what’s in  it for them) and to tell that story in many different ways to support different learning types such as  visual, aural and verbal.  While we can easily modify our systems to support technicians entering notes  in many different ways and can make the note a mandatory field the bottom line is we still need the  technician to feel compelled to leave a note that accurately describes what was done to fix an issue.  In  order to drive this behavior we will tell a story to reach people emotionally in a way that ensures  genuine commitment to the cause, engaging their hearts as well as their minds in our call to action,  making them feel as if they are part of a game changing program.

