The self-proclaimed Un-carrier has taken an un-usually successful journey to ensure that its learning and development strategy aligns to its core business drivers. These include improving time-to-market, decreasing the ramp-up time for its customer support reps to hit 100% productivity, and increasing employee performance and retention over the long term.
How Did T-Mobile Accomplish This?
T-Mobile recently shared its story on a webinar with Bersin by Deloitte (watch it here). The company created what it calls a learning ecosystem, a broad range of content, processes, and technology all used together to drive performance.
As Jennifer Falkenberg, Director of Customer Service Learning & Development at T-Mobile, shared, T-Mobile’s customer care organization trains 20,000 front line reps and leaders over 22 unique lines of business, in addition to training 17 US call centers and service partner call centers across the globe.
Each of these different audiences has a different learning curriculum designed for its specific business operations which means T-Mobile updates, maintains, and delivers tons of learning content on a regular basis. T-Mobile knew it needed a new strategy to manage that content.
When it comes to speed-to-market, for example, it’s critical for T-Mobile to be agile in order to contend with much larger carriers. As Sr. Program Manager Tony Gonzalez put it, when you’re up against the bigger guy in the ring, the way you win is by being fast. T-Mobile needed the pace of its learning content to match the pace of its volatile market.
To tackle this challenge, T-Mobile implemented Xyleme’s learning content management (LCMS) platform as part of its learning ecosystem.
The Results
It used to take Jennifer’s team up to 3 weeks to edit and publish content and get it out to their frontline trainers, but now they are able to make real-time updates, ensuring that their learners are always accessing up-to-date information. They build a single-source curriculum, meaning they author their content one time and then push out multiple formats of training materials, including desktop, mobile, and print versions, with ease.
Going forward, as they often need to make changes to their content to keep up with the latest products and services, they can edit that single-source content and have the changes propagate out to anywhere that content is being used, saving huge amounts of time.
Their instructional designers now work in a single LCMS platform and can share content amongst different business lines, helping to further increase their speed-to-market.
Another critical benefit to T-Mobile’s training strategy is the ability to tag content in specific ways so only certain types of information will be displayed to particular audiences. For example, the team can create one large training document for the call centers, but the information displayed for an internal, US-based rep is different from that for a services partner based overseas. This saves them further time and valuable resources, as they don’t need to create multiple iterations of the same piece of content.
To learn more about this high-performing learning organization’s learning ecosystem, be sure to watch our webinar: T-Mobile’s Effective Learning Ecosystem. To learn more about how Xyleme helps organizations like T-Mobile better manage and deliver training content, please contact us.
