RSA

Challenges

To optimize its operations, leading UK insurer RSA decided to consolidate some of its major financial products on a single, full-featured underwriting system from Accenture. To ensure success for this major project, RSA needed to train 750 employees at multiple sites on the new system – in just 12 months. The RSA Learning and Development (L&D) department started training employees using a version of the underwriting system previously used for User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

This RSA course solution helped hundreds of employees gain confidence in the new system. However, RSA is committed to continual improvement and decided to evaluate the potential benefits of the eLearning developer, new training technologies and approaches. Krissie Owen, Learning and Development Partner at RSA, says: “With the existing system, we allocated a full ten days of classroom training for each employee and we wanted to see if other approaches could speed up the process. In particular, we were interested in new training tools that were more interactive and engaging, and that were constantly available for trainers and employees.”

Solutions

RSA’s search led it to the Assima Suite. This creates clones of an application’s interface, allowing organizations to build simulation-based training content that replaces traditional training systems.

With support from Assima, two RSA developers quickly created Assima Training Suite clones of specific functionality in the new underwriting system. They then used the clones to build 23 interactive training exercises for employees in an extremely challenging timeframe of just four weeks. RSA used the Assima training exercises as the foundation for a ‘blended’ training strategy, which included both classroom-based sessions and self-service e-learning. Once employees completed their classroom training, they were able to revisit exercises online, 24 hours-a-day on the company’s Learning Management System (LMS). Assima exercises provide step-by-step, on-screen instructions to help learners master key underwriting tasks quickly and effectively. They look, feel and behave exactly like the live application, providing a fully interactive, realistic training experience. The Assima solution was used for training for staff in the company’s Motor and Pet divisions and RSA are exploring how they might also roll out to support Household and Commercial insurance, and Claims divisions in the near future.

“Soon, we’ll have a full set of Assima training exercises that covers all underwriting training requirements across the business,” says Owen. “We’ll be able to use these as the foundation for classroom training and e-learning to meet employees’ training needs, and they will also be used as real-time support tools if employees get stuck in the live system.” To gain more skills in how to create effective Assima Training Suite training content and build a training sandbox, RSA’s L&D team attended one of Assima Academy’s specialist courses on Effective Design Techniques for the Assima Training Suite tool. Andy Gallagher, Lead L&D Designer, had this to say of the course: “The advanced eLearning Design course really allowed us to take our already revolutionary training solution with Assima to the next level.“

Results and Benefits

The following results were achieved by RSA by using Assima Cloning and Assima AI-powered Digital Assistant:

Faster training saves £300,000 a year

“With Assima’s interactive approach, classroom training is faster and employees can access training exercises online in their own time to reinforce their skills,” says Owen. “As a result, we have cut the time needed to train each employee from ten days to just seven.” This 30% of time-saving delivers direct financial benefits by lowering staff training costs. “Assima is helping us reduce time spent on training by 3,455 days a year, which adds up to an annual cost saving of around £300,000,” says Owen.

Efficient training enhances customer service

By speeding up training times, Assima Suite has helped RSA increase the availability of frontline staff, directly benefiting its customers. “Today, we have more customer-facing staff available than we had six months ago thanks to the speed and efficiency of Assima’s solution,” says Owen. “This is having a positive impact on our customers’ experience – reducing their waiting times and giving them access to capable, knowledgeable staff.”

Increased employee engagement

Training is now more engaging at RSA. “Instead of attending instructor-led sessions, employees now get fully interactive training exercises and assessments,” says Owen. “Assima has helped us engage employees better, which is demonstrated by a five percent uplift in training assessment scores.”

Training content delivered 60% faster

With RSA’s traditional training solution, it took the training team 33 hours to create each one-hour training exercise, which is the industry standard. With Assima, this has been reduced to just 14 hours. “To build training exercises, we used to grab screenshots in the live training client and manually import them into PowerPoint presentations, but not any longer,” says Owen. “With Assima, we can quickly capture clones and develop training exercises, which gives us more time to train more employees.”