Keys to success
Autonomy Multimedia won an E-Learning Award for its innovative solution to practical challenges for Citroën.
By Nige Howarth
The public sector is facing the tough consequences of the recession and the financial crisis, but the private sector has also been struggling with ways of addressing the same challenges. It has been a particularly difficult time for those in the automotive industry, with car sales slumping by up to 30%. Early on, the industry had to respond by taking drastic action in cutting staff and budgets and reviewing processes that could be delivered more efficiently and with less cost.
Citroën’s warranty department was looking at one specific issue that it thought it could really make an impact with. Car keys represented the greatest number of warranty claims for Citroën in 2008, costing the business in the UK over half a million pounds. Citroën couldn’t continue paying for new keys under its warranty scheme on this scale, so from the start of 2009 it decided to settle warranty claims only for keys that couldn’t be repaired by dealerships.
The majority of keys that had been sent to the company didn’t have any intrinsic manufacturing defect – they had simply been damaged accidentally or through misuse. The most common problem was that the key blade either no longer sprang out or no longer went back into the recess. The good news was that for 80% of keys, this problem could be easily remedied in a few minutes by the dealership – but only if staff knew the fix.
The repair was simple but fiddly. It was particularly difficult to describe on paper but easy to carry out once demonstrated. It took only 10 minutes to train people in the repair, so it made no sense to bring all the technicians across the dealer network together to address the issue in the classroom. And, of course, the company wanted to train everyone in its dealer network as quickly as possible.
The Citroën warranty department approached Autonomy E-learning as it had recently heard about its video-based e-guides – short, quick-win learning modules that tackled technical and service issues. More than just a video podcast, the e-guide combines video, often shot live at the client site, within a more structured environment that quickly makes sense of the problem that needs to be addressed, and demonstrates the practical solution so that staff are confident in dealing with it. The quiz at the end provides feedback on the extent to which the staff have grasped the ideas.
Often these issues need to be dealt with quickly. And typically the in-house L&D department is just not equipped to deal with the challenge as it is constrained by traditional ways of delivering and planning for learning. The Citroën warranty department decided to deal with the issue directly. In this case, the course was completed in just 10 days using a process agreed with the client up front.
The course was included in the roll-out of the new business process for warranty of keys. The keys would no longer be accepted under warranty if they could be repaired, which provided a strong incentive for technicians within the dealerships to do the training, often getting involved with e-learning for the first time.
And the feedback from an experienced bunch of technicians was very powerful – 95% rated the programme content excellent or good and 100% thought it was relevant to their job role, showing that the process of using video really addressed their need for a practical solution to a real problem that they could deal with immediately. As one commented: “Fortunately, I have carried out re-tensioning of key blades for quite a while, I could not have done this any better – well done!”
For many it was the first time they experienced this type of learning – the evaluation forms received were overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic about training delivered in this way. The first experience was a good one and that bodes well for the future.
97% said that they would recommend it to a colleague and in fact the programme was so successful, within a week, a second version had been commissioned for the Peugeot network, which was experiencing the same issues (the brand is part of the same group as Citroën).
Did it impact the bottom line?
Right from the start, the warranty department was able to measure the reduction in warranty claims for keys. In other words, dealers were fixing the keys rather than returning them and claiming money for a replacement. The savings on warrantee payments alone due to the repairs that were now done on site amounted to over £1m, which is not at all bad for an investment of less than £5,000 per guide!
Repairing keys has also had a positive effect on customer satisfaction, as a key can be repaired there and then. The repair takes only a couple of minutes, whereas ordering a new key takes far longer.
This approach provides a real opportunity for organisations to respond to specific business problems such as a recall campaign, a technical problem or the introduction of a new system or tool. It is ideal when the solution needs to be delivered very quickly, to a large number of people, and requires very little study time.
Practical, useful solutions like the e-guide also help to build an appetite for using learning technologies generally. As a result Autonomy’s multimedia division has seen a real growth in the number of projects it does outside the traditional training department, but there are powerful lessons here for learning and development departments who want to create responsive solutions that really drive the business forward.
Nige Howarth is head of community at Towards Maturity