Case Study: Wave Transforms Training With Elephants Don’t Forget

Challenges

For Wave, Clever Nelly offers powerful benchmarks that map awareness and knowledge for their people, giving them actionable insight to support employees and set them up for success.

As one of the UK’s leading business water retailers, Wave are an agile business that anticipated the far-reaching impacts of COVID on workplace training and employee wellbeing and responded accordingly.

By pivoting from classroom-based teaching to a virtual learning environment, it was their intention to support their people through the pandemic and amplify the return from their considerable training investment.

Prior to the pandemic, Wave – like many others in the sector – opted to use modular courses for the purposes of training their staff.

These mandated sessions were seen as a tick-box exercise; all employees were required to complete the mandated sessions but management had no way of checking understanding of taught subject matter.

For senior management, it was not enough to know that a course had been completed, they wanted demonstrable proof that learning had been absorbed and could be applied in-role by their advisors.

After deploying a considerable customer experience training investment programme in 2019, Wave desired a solution that would work in conjunction with wider training to tangibly evidence how material was landing in real time.

Many firms are still navigating their way through the aftermath of the pandemic, refining processes that were hastily thrown together and cementing new norms to reap operational efficiencies.

Where previously advisors had close contacts to turn to for help, Wave found that the physical barriers brought about by remote working meant that they had fewer opportunities to seek peer-to-peer assurances.

Solutions

Clever Nelly exposed the gaps in knowledge on an individual basis; 8,300 individual assessments were conducted, with the most engaged users demonstrating the highest increase in knowledge.

At a consistent engagement rate of 94% over Q1 this year, they found that Clever Nelly’s AI could deliver learning interventions to a dispersed workforce in as little as two minutes of an employee’s day.

Having identified areas where knowledge scores were low, Clever Nelly automatically personalized learning journeys to repair these gaps, whilst signalling to managers where they should be focusing their training resource to make business performance improvements.

Whether it’s a new process or a business-critical item, Clever Nelly gives you evidence-based answers on how it lands.

What Clever Nelly did for Wave was turn the lens back on themselves, shining a light on what more they could be doing to support their people.

Senior stakeholders played an active role in the initial and ongoing implementation of Clever Nelly. As a company that fostered a healthy feedback culture, taster sessions were introduced to integrate the AI as seamlessly as possible.

Questions were produced from their existing collateral and tested within these feedback sessions to gauge employee reactions and determine any changes to better frame the training question content.

In the first three months of Clever Nelly being activated, each employee would receive two questions to help the AI determine baseline knowledge profiles. This information was then put into action to begin repairing employee competency gaps.

The project was spearheaded by the Director of SME Customers – Lissa Balmer – who illustrated how successful Clever Nelly was by presenting her own metrics to the Wave Leadership team and the wider Wave population. To this day, management continue to lead by example by completing their own question sets.

To expand Clever Nelly’s potential, Wave increased their original question set to include role-specific and scenario-based interventions that evaluate not just information recall but decision-making capabilities. They have also since rolled the AI out to other departments and teams.

Clever Nelly resolved that through its daily learning interventions; explanations were given when a question was answered incorrectly, whereas a correct answer would be followed by an affirmation.

Individuals were also able to observe their own progress to further compound their in-role competency handling client cases.

Throughout their AI journey, Wave have devoted continuous attention to Clever Nelly’s Management Information, distributing weekly reports for team leaders and senior members to monitor. By keeping sight of this, they are able to fulfil their objective of setting their people up for success.

Users have complete control over their Clever Nelly experience. Questions are timed to ascertain their instinctive answer that they would reasonably provide on-demand with a customer, with each employee able to interact with these interventions at their own convenience.

Results and Achievements

Engaged users demonstrated an 18% higher knowledge score compared to less engaged users.

For Wave, a virtual learning environment proved incomparable to previous training methods. Their incorporation of Clever Nelly alongside modular teaching has resulted in higher employee engagement and actionable data insights for their people, translating into higher advisor in-role confidence.

Clever Nelly’s most active users demonstrated a knowledge score that was 18% higher – on average – in Q1 2022 compared to users who had engagement levels that were below 80%.

With improvements across the board, Wave are empowering their employees to take control of their own development.

Wave are a prime example of how Clever Nelly’s AI embeds learning and engages people to optimize in-role performance and advisor confidence.

With 9 out of 10 employees preferring the new model to the default, companies using Clever Nelly avoid operational inefficiencies from a one-size-fits-all approach to training.

“I wanted a team of experts; people who can answer – with confidence – any customer query at any point in time. That’s where Nelly came in.

We had to make sure that we were giving them every possible chance to be supported, to learn, grow, develop and be successful. Nelly gives us all of that,” said Lissa Balmer, Director of SME Customers

For more information about Elephants Dont Forget - visit the Elephants Dont Forget Website

Author: Elephants Dont Forget
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell