In Defense of Remote Training
How Hopper Trains Our 100% Remote Customer Experience Team.
Remote learning — it’s a polarizing concept. Often, opinions are either in staunch support or completely against. There’s a perception that you’ll be sitting in front of a computer screen, watching poorly designed animated powerpoint slides with that all too familiar monotone robotic voice. It’s definitely easy to get sidetracked and not hold any accountability to the content you’re supposed to be learning. It can feel two dimensional.
While remote learning isn’t always a perfect solution, it’s the right fit for Hopper’s Customer Experience Team. Our Customer Experience agents operate nearly 100% remotely, so it makes sense that we would offer our training and development for them remotely as well. When building our virtual learning for agents, we keep specific tenets in mind to ensure we don’t get trapped in the pitfalls that can occur when training a team remotely.
1. Focusing on Engagement: Creating a Blended Experience
Our favourite part of offering remote training is providing excellent online resources that allow our Customer Experience Agents to learn at their own pace. With pre-recorded videos and learning modules, Agents are able to spend as long as they need to on a subject without being rushed by the pace of the rest of the class. Many complaints about the remote learning experience, though, revolve around the lack of classroom time to ask questions directly to the instructor while learning the lesson, or that they lose the benefits of learning from live lectures.
Our solution is to offer a blended learning approach. Training modules are supplemented with live (remote) webinars with other members of an onboarding cohort, giving Agents direct access to live lectures and classroom experience. Hopper Learning and Development Specialists move fluidly between being a trainer and presenter and also being a learning facilitator.
We also keep in mind adult learning principles. We operate on the thought process that Hopper trainers have the attention of learners for roughly 5–7 minutes. When you’re operating in a classroom setting, it’s easy to watch learners getting distracted after a 5–7 minute period, but it’s easy to forget when creating remote learning modules. If modules are longer than 7 minutes, it’s important to divide into different delivery styles to foster engagement. Information can be shared in different ways, with a 5 minute pre-recorded video, 4 minutes of reading, a 3-minute quiz, some information in flip cards or some information in a paragraph format, for example. Diversifying the delivery method makes it more likely that the learner stays engaged past 5–7 minutes.
Finally, we can all use some extra motivation, and sometimes the best way to do that is a deadline. The modules that we offer outside of live webinars have a completion deadline to serve as the final push to make sure that learners are completing what they need to excel at their role.
We’ve made sure to provide clear learning objectives at the beginning of every course, so as learners go through the content they know exactly what they need to take from it. As we build our remote training, we have to always be mindful of all the nuances that come with classroom training, so we need to create a strong foundation with clear narratives.
2. Symmetrical Communication: Collecting Regular Feedback (And Implementing It)
Look, we’ve been at this a while, and we haven’t always gotten it right. A lot of figuring out what works for your team is trial and error — but most important is listening to your learners’ feedback. Gathering feedback is truly an art (and a science). At Hopper, we have specific moments throughout an Agent’s initial onboarding and training, as well as throughout their learning and development during their time with us. We outline how, when, and what needs to be measured to evaluate the success of a particular piece of training.
Recently, to train the Hopper Customer Experience team on a new engagement tool being implemented, the Learning and Development Team released 15, 5–15-minute videos with little-to-no required engagement from the Agents learning the information. We quickly learned, through feedback and evaluation, that this was not effective or engaging for learners and that participants’ experience with these videos had been negative.
From this negative experience, our team has grown. Now, we offer the previously described “micro-lessons,” which keep learners engaged with the content.
There are many layers of possible evaluation that can provide different results. Assessment starts on the surface level, diving deeper with multiple types of evaluations and feedback from the learners. Feedback provides the Learning and Development Team with the opportunity to improve the training content and build on what we know instead of just working with our own assumptions.
Here’s how we do it: we give our CX team the platform to provide anonymous feedback, right after they’ve completed training, while it’s still fresh. In addition, we follow up with them one month and six months later, to dig deeper and evaluate how well their training experience prepared them for their role. Often, feedback directly after training is about whether they liked their experience or not. Asking for feedback from learners both one and six months later tends to provide a more in-depth indication of the success of the training.
3. Investing in Your Learning and Development Team
Successful remote training happens when your content is fully developed and you’ve created engaging material. At Hopper, we invest in our trainers — making sure that they are up-to-date on the latest best practises in creating workplace training, and are feeling motivated and excited to consistently improve on the way they are teaching our Agents.
Our trainers are versed in adult learning principles, lesson creation, and many of them have actually joined the team after working as Agents themselves. We provide trainers with $125 per quarter to spend on professional development, and also have a cute little team book club to make sure we are all growing and learning together.
It’s a no-brainer that the better your trainers, the better your training.
4. Incorporating Social Learning: Peer-to-Peer Training
Beyond the webinars and the remote learning modules, an important element of learning that can sometimes be missed in remote training is peer-to-peer. Hanging out in the hallway before class, walking to training together or even just trying out exercises side-by-side can be key in grasping concepts. We substitute this element by providing new training groups with their own live chat spaces with one another, comment boards, and hangout sessions. We also offer a mentorship program between senior members of the Customer Experience team and members fresh from their training sessions.
The peer spaces and mentorship program offer no-judgement spaces to ask questions and make sure that they are fully grasping a concept. It’s helpful to hear things in different words and under different circumstances than in a classroom or training session. It can also sometimes be overwhelming to ask questions in front of your entire team, and offering these spaces supplements the official training to help cement the skills they have just learned.
To summarize…
At Hopper, we strive to give world-class customer service. To offer world-class customer service, you need to have well-trained agents. The Hopper Learning and Development team plays a crucial role in making sure agents have the skills they need to grasp the complex airline and hotel integration tools while also improving their soft skills to serve our customers with empathy and compassion. Additionally, we use remote training to maintain those skills and ensure that Customer Experience Agents have a growth path at Hopper, and are continuously learning and improving.
We’re customer-obsessed. Customer Experience Agents are the face of our company, and keeping them motivated, trained and constantly growing is integral in making sure Hopper customers come back again and again.
Oh, and by the way, Hopper is hiring! Check out our postings here: www.hopper.com/careers
