No Time For Conventional Training

In April 2020, Chris King was pulled into an impossible project.
Help train 300 new call center agents who have no experience to follow a 40-page standard operating procedure (SOP) document and deliver a 20-page call script during each call they make.
His marching orders: To train these agents while the contact tracking system is in development and changing almost hourly. And, while you’re at it, build an Embedded Performance Support System (EPSS) and supply it with the scripts the new agents will need to follow with each of their calls.
And…do it all in eight days in the middle of a pandemic.
The call center was mandated by a state health department. The call center agents would notify citizens who had tested positive for COVID. They would gather information about where the citizens had been and who they had interacted with during their infectious period. They would then call those close contacts to notify them of potential exposure. The agent would tell the contact to quarantine, where to get tested, and where to find state resources for help.
Getting the call center running in a hurry was literally a matter of life and death. So, the health department pulled in three firms to pull off this mission impossible. Maximus, Inc., a firm that helps government agencies turn policy into working programs, was hired to find and train the 300 agents. They specifically sought out furloughed medical personnel who could explain the protocol being used to treat pandemic victims.
CEEK, LLC, Chris King’s employer, was referred by Panviva, an Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) provider, to develop the EPSS, which would guide the call center agents during their calls and make it possible for them to learn while they worked. Chris’ company would also populate the EPSS with call center protocols and scripts the agents would follow as they made calls.
“There was no way training in any conventional way could get this team on their feet in the time we had,” King said in a podcast with APPLY Synergies co-founder Bob Mosher. King is a certified 5 Moments of Learning Need instructional designer who uses APPLY’s EnABLE performance support design methodology. Panviva helped create the EPSS framework and King’s team added the content in three and a half days, right through the weekend. “They never took their foot off the gas,” King said.
At the same time, Maximus taught the agents how to listen actively, treat the people they called with respect and compassion, and empathetically inform people they had COVID. Agents were introduced to their call scripts but most of their training time was spent learning to work in a call center and how to use the call center phone systems. There were also eight different computer applications they would work with. They would rely on the EPSS to coach them to use the scripts while they worked.
In the limited time King had, he could use only two tools in the EnABLE toolbox, the Performance Support Pyramid and the Learning Experience and Performance (LEaP) template. The Pyramid helps instructional designers organize content to optimize it for the workflow because not all job information is of equal importance. The tip of the Performance Support Pyramid is contextual — “Where am I and why am I here?” The next level is “doing” information. Lower levels are supporting knowledge an employee can search to gain deeper understanding.
“The Performance Support Pyramid continues to be probably one of the best tools to help people understand the hierarchy of information,” King said.
The LEaP template helped the team organize new content, track content revisions, and ensure that each content chunk addressed a specific performance need. Fortunately, the health department included workflow maps in their SOP. These maps identified the order in which steps and processes needed to be executed, so the team didn’t need to figure that out. The team also developed supporting knowledge structures from content in the SOP.
The genius in the EnABLE framework resides in peoples’ ability to learn by experience. The Five Moments of Learning Need, a model also developed by APPLY, is the cognitive foundation of the EnABLE framework. The model shows that performers must be able to learn in five different situations while they work. These are the learning moments of New, More, Apply, Solve, and Change. Apply is the moment when performers must turn training into results. So it’s the moment around which King organized the EPSS content.
While King was populating the EPSS with content, Maximus taught the call center agents how to pull up the script in the EPSS interface, make the call, and follow the script. Most importantly, agents learned to trust the EPSS. As conditions changed in the fast-moving pandemic, the EPSS could be updated very quickly. The script could, in fact, change between calls that an agent made. So it was critical that the agents rely on the EPSS. It would always be current when notes or information from other agents would become outdated very quickly. “We got three or four different versions of the script within the first six weeks,” King said.
When the system went live on Day 8, the EPSS was functional and 300 new agents were ready to use it. On Day 9, the team started looking at more ways to improve the EPSS’s trustworthiness.
During the weeks after go-live, an internal team trained to take over long-term maintenance of the EPSS. Content authors, call center supervisors and a few high performing call agents met weekly to figure out needed improvements. Fortunately, the EnABLE process is iterative, so it gave the call center a built-in, continuous improvement cycle.
“I’m really proud of that team because they did a great job of leaning into it and understanding what needed to be done, and really picking up the ball and running with it,” King concluded.