Curriculum Design

My colleague and I were sent to train a small new hire class at our outsource office. This is the second iteration of what were eventually 5 iterations of new hire training curriculum in our time at Aspiration, given the rapid product changes and class size changes.

The audience was about 6 people. Most of them had no prior financial knowledge or Zendesk experience, which was common.

At this time in our department, all service personnel were taught to be generalists, rather than siloed by specialty or seniority. They had to know how to handle our banking product and our four investment products. We also had to prepare them for an upcoming migration to a completely different banking product, which had unfinalized features and the ETA was dependent upon FINRA governmental approval.

We negotiated for a 5-day training, up from the prior 4 days.

The first day was designed for introductions and to understand the banking product as it was supposed to work, learning static banking 101 concepts like ACH. We avoided pulling back the curtain on common banking customer issues.

As the days continued, the issues became more complex and we gave learners hands-on practice.

The schedule in the sample is high-level, designed for the eyes of HQ management. The times for live meetings had already been determined based on the presenters’ calendar availability.

After these 5 days, we put the trainees through a “graduation” process, assigning them tickets on topics they had been taught and having them submit their responses to us for approval. To break up the day during this nesting period, they were also assigned shadowing and additional reading to familiarize themselves with the dozens of email templates and FAQs they'd be expected to use for our products' many and varied support requests.

At the end of each week, we assigned them 8 tickets as a “graduation” test. If the trainers felt their performance on these tickets was appropriate for everyday work without supervision, they “graduated” to live ticket work with no assignments, no approval. While this process seems thorough and time-consuming, agents were expected to handle five financial products on three customer communication channels. Quality control for new hire performance and comfort was essential.

A few weeks later, we would put them through chat shadowing and chat practice (not included in the attached sample). Once their performance seemed satisfactory after a few weeks, we would place them in a two-day phone training (not included in the sample). Upon passing this training, the agents were considered fully functional and cleared to handle phones, chats, and email.

I’m not able to provide the module breakdown (ex: our breakdown of microdeposit troubleshooting). I can, however, share the methodologies used in the 5-day classroom training:

• Lecture with white board

• Switch between trainers and speakers to break up teaching style

• Hands-on live practice tickets

• Engagement game activity with whiteboard by handing trainees a marker each and asking them to fill in blanks

• Lecture with slide deck

• Tour of correctly completed previous tickets to show a successful/correct model of a process end-to-end (also called “dead tickets,” vetted well in advance)

• Silent reading time: agents were given a list of most common macros and FAQs and tasked with finding and reading each one in order to get familiar with the material and build muscle memory in finding them