Operations leaders at Aptive Environmental were struggling to train their Service Professionals about how to strategically use pesticides, especially those with no prior experience in pest control. This was causing new Service Professionals to make mistakes in the field, leading to high reservice rates and poor customer retention due to ineffective services.

I was tasked with providing a in depth weekly product training to help Service Professionals avoid mistakes and provide more effective services.

After reviewing current training material, I noticed the new hire content lacked organization and contained an overwhelming amount of information. I met with SMEs to determine what skills or knowledge the Service Professionals needed to increase the target KPI's. Essentially, they needed to know the function of each product so they could make strategic treatment decisions with their products during services. The SMEs pushed hard to justify additional information but I was able to articulate that a lot of the content they wanted to include was compliance-related and was not aligned with goal of the training. 

From here, I examined the list of products and listed the functions of each. I quickly found that I could create simple categories to organize content, reducing the cognitive load on the learner and making it more retainable. Rather than create new training, I could adjust the new hire content to reflect these categories, and create a digital job aid for reference (Thanks Cathy Moore!).

I met with my stakeholders to tell them the good news. Weekly product trainings were not necessary to solve their problem. The adjustment to new hire training with a digital job aid would provide a better foundation for new Service Professionals who were responsible for a majority of poor performance. To achieve buy-in, I broke down the cost of weekly training to demonstrate the potential savings of my solution. 4000 employees earning an average of $16 an hour would cost the company $32,000 for a half hour of training (multiplied by the number of weeks desired). This definitely got their attention, and I justified why my solution would be as effective as what they requested. The adjustments were implemented into new hire training and trainers distributed my job aid to their trainees.

Over the next three months, operation leaders tracked the performance of new hires in their first 30 days and performed reservice audits to determine their cause. A level 3 evaluation demonstrated a clear change in behavior.  Fewer than 20% of reservices were caused due to a lack of product knowledge. This was a decrease of 12% from the year prior. A level 4 evaluation indicated that new Service Professionals had 2% less reservices (from 7% to 5%) and lost 3.5% less customers (from 4% to 1.5%) than the year prior. 

By approaching my task like a consultant rather than order-taking, I provided the company an effective solution to their problem while saving them thousands of dollars.