The Royal Bank of Scotland takes a solutions approach

Offering a better customer experience

The UK cash management market has become increasingly competitive over the last few years. It has become vital for bank and building societies to empower their staff with relevant knowledge about the product and services the organisation offer.

Employees at The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) have a huge mix of products to choose from when they recommend a solution to their customers. Because of this wide variety of products available, RBS wanted to make sure that customers were always offered a full range of products - through adoption of a solutions approach.

Improving product knowledge

RBS recognised that to be able to adopt this approach, staff had to ask customers the right questions and to follow up with a mixed product solution that is suitable to that individual customer.

Therefore, to expand certain employees' knowledge about the bank's products and relationship service, RBS decided to create an e-learning programme. As the bank had to reach nearly 2,000 employees with the same training material - and customer facing staff can't be taken off duties for a longer period of time - e-learning was considered the optimal solution. The same material can be rolled out to the whole target group and the individual learners can take the course at a time and pace suitable to them.

Challenging perceptions

The core audience for the e-learning programme are employees who answer queries about RBS products over the telephone. Because the programme is all about challenging perceptions and changing people's habits, it would be difficult to do that simply by conveying theoretical information on a page without putting it into a real-life context.

Brightwave often uses a 'test to teach' approach to learning, otherwise known as the Socratic method. This is where we introduce theoretical content to learners by asking them a question on it first (many courses present the theory then use questions to check learner understanding). This approach gives them the chance to think logically about the content before reading about it, making learning more effective.

To therefore make the course as realistic as possible, Brightwave decided to use the call centre environment as a theme. So throughout the course, customers pop up to ask questions about products. Learners then have to select an appropriate response based on their knowledge.

It doesn't matter if they don't know the answer - getting it wrong is as important in the learning process as getting it right.

Brightwave also went for a simple, clean approach. When the subject matter is potentially dry, the temptation can be simply to cram the screens with information and drop in plain photographs. But instead we stripped text to a bare minimum and gave each photo faded edges or tints. These were simple techniques, but they resulted in a corporate yet contemporary course.

Crucially, The Royal Bank of Scotland were pleased with the end product. After the course went live, the client thanked us personally, commenting: "It all went very smoothly and we are delighted at the results."

Call us on 01273 827676 or email us at enquiries@brightwave.co.uk to find out how we can help you teach your products and services with our high impact product knowledge e-learning.