Elly Yates-Roberts |
Abri is one of the largest housing providers in southern England, with 1,400 colleagues. Its roots lie in a two-year-old partnership between Yarlington and Radian housing associations, with the integrated organisations becoming Abri a year later.
Abri implemented an Anywhere365 contact centre solution to enable even better teamwork and customer service – but its colleagues needed to get used to the new system while juggling work in a busy environment.
Abri asked 1UC – a Microsoft partner specialising in change management – to support adoption across the organisation. After the two companies reviewed the challenge of providing training for more than 200 users, Abri chose a fully managed training programme rather than the ‘train the trainer’ course it had initially planned. “This freed up our super-users to use the time they would have spent training others, to get themselves familiar and skilled at using the system,” says Hannah Richards, change manager at Abri. “Now the super-users are in a better position to support their teams after the go-live, during our ‘hypercare’ period and beyond.”
1UC devised a training flow comprising an introduction to Anywhere365 for supervisors, training for supervisor end-users and agent end-users and – as the solution went live – Anywhere365 Attendant Console, administration training and supervisor reporting training.
“1UC has been flexible with our training dates, enabling us to provide training to our colleagues as close to go-live as possible,” says Richards. “For instance, we arranged reporting training for after go-live so we could use our own data to help gain a clearer understanding and embed the learning. Plus, we had a reporting training session before go-live to make sure we can continue to provide essential business reports without delay.”
This flexibility enabled Abri to work closely with its frontline teams, focusing on system testing and reinforcement of the changes through updating processes, drop-in sessions, show-and-tell sessions and communications. Abri has also been able to share recordings and slides from training sessions so the team can review them at a time that suits them.
Throughout the project, 1UC has matched Abri’s own passion for delivering great customer service. “The same trainer provided all of our training and I worked closely with her to identify areas where additional engagement or support was required,” says Richards. “I’ve also been able to support her to understand our business so she can manage any process-specific questions. It’s really felt like the training was delivered collaboratively, in a way that was best for our colleagues and ultimately our customers.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 21/22 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.