While working on the Enablement team for Avalara, I was occasionally asked to design and facilitate live training on new products that were being handed off from the product team to technical support. Previously these hand-off trainings had consisted of a live PowerPoint presentation followed by a Q&A session, but this approach posed a number of difficulties. Avalara's support teams were based in three different locations in the U.S. and India, so at least two separate sessions were necessary to accommodate the different time zones. The company also still needed a small team of support agents to work during the scheduled sessions, so they needed a way to quickly catch up on what they missed. Because the prior support launch trainings had been conducted by subject-matter experts instead of an L&D specialist, the live sessions tended to be boring, the slides were poorly designed, and no attempt was made to assess the impact of the training. Furthermore, the Q&A sessions were unstructured and unregulated, allowing participants to ask questions that had been answered during the presentation or were not widely relevant.

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I designed a new blended training model consisting of a cluster of learning assets within an LMS training path. First, each support agent was assigned an asynchronous e-learning module that included video demos, step-by-step product instructions, interactive hands-on activities based on documented support issues, and links to additional internal resources. Then I scheduled two 30-minute Q&A sessions with product experts and compilied a list of rules and guidelines for asking questions. For anyone unable to attend, recordings of the live sessions and list of FAQs were archived and made accessible in the LMS.​ Finally, all support agents were required to complete and pass a scenario-based quiz which focused on common troubleshooting issues. 

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Requiring completion of the self-paced e-learning module prior to the live Q&A worked well for this audience, since technical support agents often prefer to learn independently and via hands-on tasks instead of passively listening to a live group presentation. The assigned pre-work also meant that everyone attending the live Q&A was already familiar with the product basics. Not only were there very few redundant or irrelevant questions posed, but the level of discussion was raised considerably. In fact, the support agents brought up a number of potential customer issues that the product team hadn’t considered. The new training model enhanced cross-functional communication, helped to improve the product itself, and indirectly led to greater customer satisfaction.