Finding Information in a Proprietary Database

Staff at this Health Insurance Provider needed to find information quickly and accurately in their proprietary Member Database.

The Database was complex and non-intuitive. The Health Insurance Provider estimated that it took 6 weeks of training and practice before a new Customer Service Representative was reasonably proficient in using the database. It took many months before they reached full proficiency.

Existing training was on-the-job training, then practice with a mentor.

The organization wanted to speed up the training process for new hires. They also were dissatisfied with the consistency of new-hire performance after training:

• Content of the training was situational, reflecting the type of member calls that happened to come into the trainee’s workstation while working with the mentor.
• There was a lot of turnover in the job. As a result, some of the “mentors” were fairly new themselves. The organization was concerned that the “mentors” were passing on approaches that were not “best practices.”

We conducted a front-end analysis to determine the nature and root causes of the problem:

• The database itself was the major cause of the problem. It was difficult to use and Byzantine in complexity. The best answer to the problem was to simplify the database interface. Unfortunately, due to intellectual-property issues, that was not possible. The organization determined that the only approach open to them was a training approach.

Typically, a good approach to database training is to create a “practice database,” then create training exercises which simulate real-world problems. Unfortunately, due to intellectual-property issues, a “practice database” approach was not possible.

Therefore, the best answer to this client’s unique need was a blended learning solution:

• An online, self-study tutorial on navigation and database features/functions, followed by an On-the-Job Worksheet that guided the learner through a tour of the live database. Exercises in the Worksheet required the learner to find information in the live database, but not to change any information in the database.
• A second online, self-study tutorial on how to use 5 “Gateway Screens” which our analysis identified as the most-frequently used screens in the database. Again, we followed the self-study tutorial with an On-the-Job Worksheet that guided the learner to use the “Gateway Screens” to find specific types of data in the database.
• We constructed the On-the-Job Worksheets so they could also be used as Mentoring Guides. In this way, anyone who was serving as a “mentor” had a consistent, structured framework to follow when mentoring a new Customer Service Representative.

Special Skills/Software

• HPI (Human Performance Improvement) Gap Analysis
• Training Needs Analysis & Task Analysis
• Software:
  • The most difficult software task was mastering the proprietary database itself.
  • E-learning tutorials, which included “interactive simulations” of specific pieces of the database, were created using Articulate and Flash.
  • .PDF files of the worksheets were embedded in the Articulate modules, so we could instruct learners to download them at the appropriate time during the training.

Health Insurance Provider had a more consistent, more reliable way to train new Customer Service Representatives. Both the initial training period, and the mentoring period, were reduced. Skill levels after training/ mentoring were improved considerably.

New-Hire Customer Service Representatives had solid, coherent training that was less dependent on the skill of their mentor, or the types of incoming calls they received during a training session. Their on-the-job training worksheets served double-duty as reference material, as well.

Mentors had a consistent framework on which they could base any on-the-job training that they did with new-hires. Many of the mentors were pleased to find that the Mentoring Guides contained more efficient approaches to handling certain database tasks.

For more information about this project, please contact us.