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The National Trust

Workshop Conversion

Background

The National Trust runs two half-day workshops to help staff and volunteers understand the importance of excellent Customer Service, called Focus on Customers, and Handling Difficult Situations.

With such a geographically diverse audience, the training team was over-stretched and the Trust identified that an effective tool to aid the dissemination was required.

A digital solution provided an alternative means of learning for a target audience of approximately 55,000 volunteers and staff. As the two workshops covered complimentary aspects of customer service, the decision was made to combine them into one ‘Focus On Customers’ e-learning course.

Solution

Effectiveness was a key concern. The workshops were popular and the online version needed to engage the learners with the same content but – crucially - without the motivating influence of the trainer and other delegates. The National Trust was keen to understand how ‘live’ team-based learning activities could be translated into digital interactions.

The key was that even though the workshop activities occurred ‘live’, they were, of course, designed and planned by the trainer beforehand in order to take each learner through a specific learning journey.

Through discussions with the traditional course designers, the digital designers were able to take this underlying ‘learning journey’ and create digital interactions that took learners through the same thinking process in a different way.

The most significant difference between workshops and digital is that workshops are a group experience and digital is (usually) a personal, individual one. That’s not to say that one is better than another – going to the theatre is not ‘better’ than reading a Booker prize winner – but they have to be used for their strengths! The importance of designing specifically for the digital learning experience, rather than simply trying to ‘copy’ the content from the traditional experience, cannot be underestimated.

It was also critical that the digital version didn’t ‘stand alone’ from the performance management process. There had to be links back to the learner’s line manager so that there could be follow up afterwards.

The digital course was designed around a simple three-point action plan that the learners would take away with them and implement (what they would continue to do, what they would start doing and what they would stop doing). This ensured that when the learner’s line manager looked for practical outcomes from the course, the learner had already been through the action planning process.

The Focus On Customers e-learning course took the two half-day workshops (approximately seven hours of content) and condensed them to around an hour of e-learning.

How? In traditional workshops, much of the trainer’s commentary is improvised and embellished around the key learning points. In digital, every word counts. The less that’s said, the higher the impact.

Consequently, in the initial stages of the project, every word of content was evaluated against its relevance to the project objectives. What was irrelevant or tangential was discarded. What remained was developed until its meaning and purpose were unambiguous.

In the design phase that followed, different kinds of content were ‘treated’ differently.

• Content that was designed to stir an emotional response (for example customer testimonials) was designed into animated mini-movies.
• Content that was intended purely to inform was then designed into simple ‘click to reveal’ type interactions or ‘try this’ type questions.
• Content that needed to take the learner through a journey was designed into much more complex, multi-stage interactive activities that built understanding. The kind of content that was designed in this way included interactive activities that enabled the learner to:
  • consider their personal experience of different high-street brands, what emotions those brands created and what kind of brand the National Trust has itself
  • compare what they thought were effective ways of implementing the customer service standards with best practice
  • identify different kinds of body language and what emotional impact they create
  • explore how the assumptions that people make about each other affect their behaviour
  • try out their customer service skills in two virtual role plays

The Results

Despite the evident challenges of taking a popular ‘live’ event and redeveloping it for the digital medium, the finished e-learning course was an engaging, highly interactive experience that was not afraid to challenge the thinking and assumptions of the target audience. It built on and developed further the ideas and best practice covered in the traditional workshop, and provided a route (through the action planning process) through which the learner and their line manager could discuss and put into practice what had been learned – and, in the end, improve customer service at the National Trust.

What the client said:

'From the outset Academy Internet provided an enthusiastic, professional and pragmatic approach.  Working through the face-to-face workshop content and really stripping it down to the key messages, was not only essential to ensure a high quality end product, it enabled us to re-visit the content itself in a systematic and highly effective manner.  Their understanding of the National Trust as an organisation and the different target audiences, coupled with the attention to put the learner at the heart of everything, has meant we have ended up with an e‑learning solution that not only delivers it objectives but truly engages the user.  This will prove to be a valuable tool in our quest for delivering customer service excellence in all areas of our organisation.'

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