We’ve had a follow up meeting with their training and building services team to understand their training process. They told us that it wasn’t just the time taken in the training process which is the issue. They also want to improve the effectiveness of training, especially when financial products change and they need to get updates to all staff quickly. They also wanted to bring the Health and Safety training to life – it’s a dull subject and it’s hard to get younger people to take notice.

The technology involved in this solution is called Show and Share. It’s a piece of software which sits in Cisco’s Digital Media System. Short videos will be recorded by any staff member using a handheld digital video camera. The video is uploaded to a ‘You Tube’ style web site in minutes and then can be viewed instantly by any person who has access (can be internal and external). The videos can be viewed from any location, and on any computer device.  The videos are ‘tagged’ with key words which makes them searchable – for example: training; insurance; objection handling. Access to the system is role based, meaning that people can only see content appropriate to them.

On-line questionnaires can be placed at the end of a video to test whether the knowledge has been absorbed . Reports are available to show viewing statistics per video or per person. New starters (or any staff) would consume certain training or compliance material at their own pace from a desk and reports can be run at any time to see who has viewed the content. The next step is to present the idea back to the board in context of their actual process and quantify the value of the improvements which have been identified.

I would appreciate any opinions on whether this ‘ideas’ based consultative sales approach is welcomed by our customers.