My First Video Conference Class

So, my first class was in April of this year. I had 8 students in Arizona and I was in Webster in the videoconference training room all by myself. I worked from 11:30 AM until 8:00 PM due to the time difference. I was teaching Call Center employees how to take a new claim report for one of our affiliates.

The students were with the company for about three months prior to my training. They had been trained when they were first hired by one of our trainers in Gilbert. The first class they attended was for five days and they learned a little bit about insurance, a little more about claims, and a lot about providing excellent customer service. They were taught one computer system and how to enter a new report that would have been received either by phone, by mail, by fax, or from our website. The students learned about assigning an adjuster to handle the claim, an appraiser to see the damaged vehicle, set the customer up in a rental, and what forms it is necessary to send out.

The students returned to class about a month later, again in a typical classroom setting, to learn how to make outbound calls to all involved parties in the claim, how to take good accident information, and how to create claims in the system.
After each training class, the students participated in Peer Training. They would sit with an experience Call Center Representative until they felt comfortable in taking or making a call.

When they come to my class, they have been in the Call Center for about three months. They have gained more experience and are ready to learn a new computer system for another one of our affiliates. My class is a four day training event.
So, what were some of the challenges I faced? Let me count the ways ;o)
Even though most of our training material is on our internet, the student usually receives some paper training materials, job aids to hang in their cubicle, or policies to check to see if something is covered. The students also do several workshops to reinforce the learning. Some of these workshops are also on paper. How did I handle this? I created a binder divided into each day of training. I made sure the job aids were color coded so I could say, look in Day 2 at the purple job aid. I had all of the paper workshops in the manual and I did many quizzes on line at a site I would recommend for any kind of teacher. It is called Quia and it is a software application that helps makes quizzes and other types of games to reinforce learning. For example, there is a hangman quiz, a matching quiz, a fill in the blank quiz, and a scavenger hunt quiz. I also had many types of different claim reports for them to enter in our system training environment. It took a lot more preparation than a typical classroom setting when I could just hand out the job aids and workshops as needed.

Next week’s blog will talk about some of the problems I encountered in this first class and how I resolved them in real time.