How Gigaclear Transformed Onboarding to Drive Employee Retention & Customer Satisfaction

Onboarding directly influences employee satisfaction, performance, and retention, which all ultimately impact business success. This makes it paramount to get your onboarding program right.

In this customer spotlight, we sit down with Dave Brown, Technical Training & Development Manager at Gigaclear, to dive into his experience overhauling Gigaclear’s onboarding and ongoing learning and development programs for employees with Workramp’s All-in-One LMS and how it’s helped boost the employee and customer experiences. 

Tell me a little bit about you and your current role at Gigaclear 

I started over a year ago, in March 2022. The company was expanding rapidly, and it was clear that we needed a Learning Management System (LMS) to replace the method we were using to manage training. 

When you started seeking out a solution, what were some of the top priorities or the most important things you were looking for in an LMS?

To be fair, there are a lot of LMS systems out there and 80 percent of what they do is pretty much the same.

However, it’s that final 20 percent that makes the difference, and I spent quite some time during 2022 reviewing some of the better systems to see which one would do what we needed it to do. 

Ease of use, content creation, reporting, recording of certifications, and quality pre-built content are some of the key things we needed, but equally important is how responsive the provider is to requests and changes. I felt that WorkRamp was well ahead of the competition in wanting to understand our business and finding ways to do what we needed it to do. 

Read more: 16 Must-Have LMS Features

This has gone well beyond the sales cycle and, now that it’s up and running, the support and continuous partnering we have with you guys is second to none (and you don’t mind getting up early in the morning to talk to us Brits when needed.) I really can’t fault your engagement. New features are coming out regularly and offer significant new enhancements all the time. 

Support calls are handled with lightning speed, even when it’s stuff that we’ve done wrong (which is most of the time,) and your live chat is superb.

The whole training team loves WorkRamp and gets genuinely excited when new stuff comes out. 

More specifically, we needed something that would support the training we do. Our engineers work out in the field. They’re installing fibre to the premises, working in the street, at heights; underground, excavating, working with potentially dangerous materials, etc. It can be a dangerous environment. So there’s a lot of compliance training required for them to be able to carry out the job safely. 

Our previous training process was very manual, reporting was limited and time-consuming, and we had no method for delivering eLearning, so we needed a system that could facilitate easy content creation, manage training events, record training certifications, and deliver sophisticated reporting. 

Additionally, it was important for us to have a system that would work well on mobile devices since many of our engineers work in the field. 

Ultimately, what I liked best about WorkRamp, in addition to the LMS capabilities, was how on the ball the team was. Every time I asked a question, there was a straightforward answer. If something wasn’t possible, a workaround or alternate solution was provided, which gave me confidence to move forward. 

You talked a little bit about training being very manual previously. I’d love to hear a little bit more about what the program looked like prior to building it out in WorkRamp. How was it structured, and what did engagement look like?

Because it was such a manual spreadsheet-heavy process, it was very reactive. Engineers were often delayed getting into the field while awaiting essential training. As we have different requirements in different parts of the country, this compounded the problem.

 As we were taking on more and more engineers, that problem was getting bigger, and installation targets were aggressive, so I knew that I needed something that would not only be able to accurately report on training but also be able to forward book training so we could be more proactive about getting people field-ready early in the cycle.

Since relaunching with WorkRamp, how has your programming evolved? 

We launched our Bootcamps in January through WorkRamp, and now, when a new engineer joins the company, they have a couple of weeks to settle themselves in, get their tools, PPE, vans, and everything sorted, and then, as soon as they’ve done that, they jump into Bootcamp training. 

So within 2 to 3 months of starting, they’re fully trained, as opposed to before when we were often 2 or 3 months behind. WorkRamp has significantly helped us to reduce the time it takes to get our field staff trained, which in turn helps us meet the needs of the business and our customers. 

It’s helped us so much with capacity planning; it’s easier, transparent, and scalable. 

That scalability is so important. Are there any other content strategies or best practices you’ve leveraged to help drive engagement in this new program? 

One thing we do is have our experienced engineers record video demonstrations in the field. Then, once the videos are approved and edited, we add them to a Library in WorkRamp that we’ve created for engineers so they can dip in and out of that as needed.

This has been especially helpful whenever we have a new requirement because it allows us to quickly create some content around it, and it’s been proving quite useful.

We added on WorkRamp Content a few months ago as well, and that’s been really useful because we’ve been able to leverage some of that pre-built, off-the-shelf content to enhance existing skill sets within the organization, from Excel training to project management training. We’ve also enabled the Development Tab within WorkRamp Content so learners can go in and search for and self-assign their own training topics of interest. 

What I like about the pre-built content is that there are certain technical subjects, things like Cisco CCNA or project management for APM, and the training is good enough to take people up to their certification.

So now we’re starting to look at how we can build learning paths for all of the roles we’ve got in the company so that if somebody wants to move from one role to another, we can provide them with the necessary training they need to be able to step into that role. Staff retention is a priority for Gigaclear, and helping our staff reach their career goals is important. WorkRamp is an essential component in this strategy. 

Read more: 6 Ways to Support Employee Career Growth

That’s awesome. I especially love the peer-to-peer learning you’re encouraging through those field demo videos. That’s a really interesting approach

Yeah, and it’s scalable because now we don’t need to get everybody in one place to do the training. You can ping these videos out to people, and they can watch them when it’s convenient.

Since launch, what’s the feedback been like? How has company-wide engagement improved with the way continuous learning and development is structured now? 

There are three ways I would say we’ve looked at engagement.

• The first is access. Everybody is loving WorkRamp–it’s accessible anywhere, enabling everyone to easily access their training. Managers love it as well because they can see the progress that their teams are making, which is great. So there’s an engagement from that perspective
• The second is revolutionizing the way we book and manage training. Previously, it was all very manual because we were managing training for over 200 engineers alone and doing it in person, and that hindered our ability to be proactive about scheduling engineers for jobs in the field. Now, with WorkRamp, we can easily put the training in a learning path, and assign it out to everyone, allowing us to plan ahead with the face-to-face training and provide additional eLearning that can be taken whenever they need it. Our Operations Managers are able to see when training is available, book their team members directly onto training if necessary, and easily report on who is qualified in each area to do certain specialized tasks.
• The third, and most beneficial to the business overall–is the reporting. We’ve got people who are involved in reporting our overall compliance. We’ve got HSEQ, which needs to make regular reports, and managers and resources planners, who need to know how many engineers they’ve got certified in certain areas, along with general compliance training, from fire safety to data protection.

  Having all that data readily available has enabled us to better report out to and engage our senior leadership team. It has been really useful not just for immediate planning but also for future resource planning, which is saving us time and money in the long run.

You’re getting more people through this program now that it’s more systematic. How has that been reflected in employee performance? 

There are a lot of factors that contribute to success and failure out in the field because there are so many things involved, but what I can say is that it has had a massive effect because we’re actually getting an engineer field-ready about four months earlier than we were doing previously, increasing productivity much earlier in their cycle. They’re also going out with more confidence now, reducing the failure rates of complex installs. 

Are you seeing improved customer experiences as well? Are you measuring any correlation between increased productivity and customer satisfaction? 

A lot of the engineers can do repairs and installations that they weren’t able to do before. Previously, we might have had an engineer out in the field unable to fix something due to lack of training. That’s happening a lot less now.

The engineers are more engaged because they feel better equipped for their work, and, of course, that means customers are happier as well. We’re seeing the number of installations going up quite dramatically, and the number of problems that we’re getting with installations is going down.

What other metrics of success have you been measuring?

Another metric we’ve been looking at is our employee turnover rate and that’s been going down. What we’re now finding is that fewer people are leaving, and when they do look for another role, they’re looking for roles inside the company because they’ve got all this training behind them, which gives them what they need to be able to continue their career with us rather than go somewhere else.

How has WorkRamp enabled you to deliver on your training and development vision? Any favorite features? 

The ease of use for content creation is one of the key benefits because it empowers everybody to feel like they’re capable of building their own content, which is great.

As I’ve mentioned already, reporting is the most valuable feature. Having that visibility into training data has been a complete game-changer. The pre-built content is really good for easily enhancing our training development without us having to create additional courses from scratch. And finally, I’d say the new AI Assist feature is another favorite we’ve been trying to use more to make content creation even easier. 

Are there other areas of continuous development and learning that you’ve been investing in? What’s next for the team at Gigaclear? 

One of the things that we’ve started to look at is redoing our management training. Before WorkRamp, it was mostly done face-to-face, so now everything has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Being able to leverage the pre-built WorkRamp Content and create a lot of this stuff online is making that a lot simpler to deploy.

The other thing that we do a lot in this company is project management, and a lot of the project managers that come to us have certain qualifications, but those qualifications sometimes don’t match the methods that we use, so we’ve been building out learning paths for them and getting them involved with training around our methodologies, as well as some of the related background processes like Microsoft and Power BI. Making that available to people is helping as well.

There are lots of exciting learning initiatives going on at Gigaclear, and we look forward to following the progress! 

Interested in building a company culture committed to employee growth and development from onboarding and beyond? Chat with our team to see how WorkRamp can help you deliver end-to-end L&D programming.