Zurich Financial Services

How the soft skills division of QA provided e-mail training and floor walking for over 10,000 end users, nationally, to Zurich, one of the world’s financial services companies.

The challenge

When Zurich needed to provide training to 10,000 of its staff on new e-mail and collaboration software, it chose its training provider carefully. “We needed a partner which could work jointly towards a common goal; which could understand our objectives, be flexible, adaptable and focused on meeting our needs rather than their own,“ said Ian Farr, programme manager at Zurich. “A lot of potential training providers were simply proposing off-the-shelf products, with minimal tailoring – and a huge price tag.”

The solution

Zurich wanted partnership expertise – and an ability to share ideas without attempting to improve pre-built solutions. They found these qualities in the the management and personal development team at QA.

As a result of several acquisitions, Zurich in the UK was using a mixture of e-mail systems – instead of the worldwide company standard of Lotus Notes. It was decided that this needed to be rolled out across the UK – but, with 10,000 staff, even just half a day’s training for each person would mean a cost to the business of 5000 person-days. A smarter solution was needed.

QA worked closely with Ian Farr, to shape and develop a training programme which would meet Zurich’s needs – and address the necessity of speed and cost-effectiveness – while matching the programme to the learning styles of a broad population of people. “The team staff did a fantastic job,“ said Farr. “They took our concepts and made them into a fully workable, deliverable solution.”

The resulting training programme blended many learning approaches, seamlessly, into one cohesive programme. There was an initial one-hour demonstration of the new features of the software, which was attended by large numbers of staff simultaneously. Self-paced reference guides were developed and distributed and an e-learning model was embedded within the software itself, to provide training and reference at the point of use. Finally, just as the system went live, Xpertise provided teams of expert ‘floor walkers’ to be on hand, answer questions and give one-to-one tuition on specific topics as they arose – plus provide guidance in using the e-learning and self-paced materials.

The development of the programme took just four weeks, after which a pilot was run – with some small changes made, based on feedback. After this, the programme was successfully rolled out to the wider business. During the rollout, any customer feedback or suggested changes were immediately incorporated into the learning materials, ensuring their relevancy.

Zurich measured the quality of the training and the at desk support (floor walking) in this case using feedback directly from learners. “95% of staff were highly satisfied,“ said Farr, “which is an incredibly positive result. The team has delivered beyond my expectations. What made the difference is that they delivered a genuinely tailored solution, which, in my experience, is fairly unique. I would have no hesitation in working with them again.”

Due to the success of this project the division was awarded an office XP rollout for 8,000 end users throughout the Zurich Group.