Empowering employees and transforming the workplace with augmented intelligence.
A global CRM platform wanted to find more time for employee training; to empower team members; and to expand its “army” of highly effective managers who could serve customers and ensure successful outcomes. With Klever Insight’s digital coaching solution, managers balanced both strategic and tactical tasks, while team members felt engaged and empowered to contribute proactively to the workload.
The challenge
The fast-growing, ever-evolving environment at one tech giant resulted in employees citing “more training” as their top priority in an internal company survey of employees. Tech support managers were tasked with developing and executing an actionable strategy to facilitate more training time for their teams. But this wasn’t easy to do, as both managers and teams were busy day in, day out, putting out fires and addressing customer support issues, according to the company’s internal survey. Company executives sought a solution that would create a path to more training time for employees; empower team members; and require minimal oversight, while expanding its “army” of highly effective managers who could serve customers and ensure successful outcomes. In its search for an efficient solution, it found Klever Insight, a unique digital coach for managers.
Innovative A/B test pilot
How could we prove that a digital coach helps managers achieve a better outcome than managers that receive no coaching? And how could we do it in a timely, cost-efficient manner that requires almost no investment by potential customer companies?In this instance, the global tech firm’s leadership team decided a pilot of the Klever Insight solution could facilitate its goal of finding ways to expand time for employee training. Unlike alternative solutions, Klever Insight required no consulting time, no professional services, and no intrusive integration with the organization’s existing IT services. The software was easy to set up and easy to learn to use; required only minutes a day from each user; and offered modern metrics against specified outcomes to measure success. The Klever Insight team trained the company’s managers on how to administer and use the software—in less than an hour. The pilot was designed as a competition between two highly-skilled and well-regarded teams of six managers and one senior leader each; Team A would have access to the Klever Insight software, while Team B would not.
Head to head: The competition is on!
Both teams were tasked with finding ways to expand time for employee training. The workload was broken down into a 45-day “leap” (or assignment). The first task—more tactical in nature—was to Identify and reduce inefficient processes to provide employees more time for training. Both teams were given the same challenge to solve. The only difference between the two groups was that Team A was provided with and trained on how to use the Klever Insight app. Team B, the “control” group, did not have access to the app. Team A spent a few minutes each day interacting with the software, reviewing the contextual, actionable, step-by-step assignments the team needed to complete to move their process forward. Both teams tracked their time spent in weekly team meetings as well as those spent actively working on the solution. For an added twist, the competition kicked off during the organization’s annual user conference, its signature and biggest event, and it also overlapped a major product release. The two teams were facing significant external pressures as well as the thrill of internal competition.
The results are in
The teams were judged on the number of quality ideas generated and pursued during a leap; the impact they were able to make during each leap; and how well they articulated the potential effectiveness of their ideas based on the pilot results. At the end of Leap 1, the control group Team B generated one idea after 60 hours of meetings and project time. Team A generated four ideas, averaging 23 hours of time per idea; they won the leap.
The leadership team was impressed and decided to pilot the entire Klever Insight offering—including the employee survey. Employees completed a 14-question, five-minute survey on their handheld devices that helped ensure the pilot would address the issues employees cared about most.
Next, employee responses were run through the Klever Insight engine, in which algorithms extracted the Salesforce tech support team’s “Service DNA,” synthesizing the team’s perceptions with its ability to execute. The Service DNA score evaluates an organization’s maturity against six dimensions—people, process, culture, leadership, technology, and metrics. The outcome determined the company should address the issue of sources of rework in the support process in the next leap of the pilot. Similar to the first 45-day trial, a competition scenario was put in place as two teams iterated on solutions for this issue. At the end of Leap 2, Team B generated one idea in 35 hours, while Team A generated three, averaging about 16 hours of meetings and project time for each. Team A won again.
The company’s executive team found the results “eye-opening”:
The senior leader using the Klever Insight app spent just 2.7 hours working with the team on its tasks, while the control group’s senior leader spent 9.75 hours doing the same. In evaluating the success of the pilot, the company’s leadership looked at how well the teams executed according to the three main philosophies they set out for the exercise: minimal oversight, team empowerment, and expanding its skilled army of managers. Team A, the winning team, clearly demonstrated that with the help of Klever Insight’s augmented intelligence platform, team members took initiative to solve the challenges with minimal assistance from their senior leader: They generated seven ideas in 141.6 hours, while the senior leader spent just 2.7 hours overseeing their work.
