Cam GDO Corporation - An Instructional Design Project

The Organization

During my graduate studies at Boise State University in the Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning program, I worked on a team project with two other OPWL students. Our project focused on an instructional design plan with an outside organization based on a real-life performance need. Our team of three completed this project titled, "Installation Training for Self-Employed Sales Technicians" (Christen, Cook, Garcia, 2017).

CAM GDO, a pseudonym, is a corporation, that manufactures commercial garage door operators, residential operators, sliding and swing gate operators as well as a variety of accessories for those products such as keyless entry systems, transmitters, lighting, biometrics, battery backup systems and other access controls.

CAM GDO is a privately owned European company. It has several divisions throughout the world. The location that sponsored this project is based in the USA and CAM's USA Chief Executive Officer was the direct client project sponsor.

The Challenge

CAM's CEO informed us of a problem in the customer service department. One of CAM's business strategies is to generate and increase sales in the customer service department through excellent customer service. The CAM customer service team's core job functions are to take sales orders, increase sales orders, call customers for orders, process those orders and to answer technical questions in the field.

However, at CAM the customer service department was in a trend of declining sales and on an upward trend of customer complaints. Customers complained of waiting on hold for too long when calling the CAM customer service team and not getting a returned call when leaving a message.

During this time of decreasing sales and an increase of customer complaints, the customer service team saw themselves spending 30% of their overall time on the technical hotline with Self-Employed technicians, also known as Tailgaters. CAM's product is known for being easy and trouble-free and 30% of their time for technical calls was out of the ordinary and preventing the customer service team from handling their first four primary functions. On the technical calls, what the customer service team was doing, was walking a specific type of customer through basic installation of the CAM product, those customers being the Tailgaters aka Sales Technicians, which was contrary to being an easy and trouble-free product. As a result, this affected the CAM customer service team to miss other incoming revenue generating calls; likewise, they were not able to return all phone calls that came in on the same business day, frustrating their customers and losing sales to competitors. This issue was a problem for CAM's CEO when reporting back customer service sales numbers to the corporate headquarters in Europe.

Performance Gap

The following is the desired performance outcome versus the gap. The CAM GDO company needs Self-Employed Sales Technicians to install CAM GDO garage door operators as specified in the manual without relying on the CAM GDO customer service team for basic installation, step-by-step instructions. CAM GDO needs the Technicians to complete those installs within 40 minutes as the exemplary performers do without assistance. An installation of 37-40 minutes is the standard for the exemplary performer as CAM's top three highest garage door dealers, who employ over 120 installers, purchase over $3 million dollars in product annually. These exemplary performers consistently demonstrate installations in 37-40 minutes. 37-40 minutes also coincides with the CAM engineering team's expectations.

Instead, what the Sales Technicians are doing is failing to complete an install without relying on the CAM GDO customer service hotline team resulting in an average of 9-15 minutes per call per installation. The hotline is for defects and troubleshooting, it is not for basic installation. 30% of calls are coming in from the Self-Employed Sales Technicians, and they are using the hotline for reasons which it was not intended and subsequently, causing the customer service team to miss many other revenue generating calls altogether, frustrating CAM’s customers, and losing business to competitors.

Solutions

One of CAM GDO's business strategy is to generate revenue through excellent customer service, which their monthly reports indicated declining sales from the customer service team as well as an increase of complaints to the customer service inbox order line. A performance analysis was conducted to qualify the need related to a training request. Overall, the CAM CEO wanted to reduce the amount of time the customer service team spends on the technical hotline with Self-Employed Sales Technicians for basic installations. To improve this performance gap, the focus was on how the Self-Employed Sales Technicians get trained on CAM product and what was different between them and the exemplary performers and their training. After investigating, the CAM outside sales team is responsible for training all new customers across North America. The OPWL team discovered that the CAM Sales team often combines the following: they conduct both a sales presentation with Self-Employed Technicians, trying to show them the benefits of the product as well as present the installation steps in order to convince them to buy the product. When the prospects (Self-Employed Sales Technicians) decide to buy the product, the CAM Sales Team return offering another sales prospecting opportunity as well as a training session which are combined into the same session. Secondly, each CAM Sales representative is implementing their own style and irregular training, meaning, there is no uniformity of what is being presented. Furthermore, is it even a "training" when the CAM Sales team is trying to convince customers to buy? The OPWL team determined that what would make most sense is to separate the sales presentation from the training. These should be two separate sessions with two different types of groups, CAM prospects and CAM Sales Technicians using the product. Specifically, a training session is to be delivered to learners who are using the product. With that goal determined for CAM, the OPWL team then proscribed an installation training program to offer to CAM's customers where CAM's Sales team delivers the same systematic cohesive training to all of their customers across North America; thereby allowing Sales Technicians to consistently learn what they need resulting in installations within 40 minutes and zero need for installation assistance on CAM's technical hotline.

Figure 1

Job-Focused Instructional Objectives

Note: Example of two of the nine written instructional objectives from this project. From Installation Training for Self-Employed Sales Technicians, by L. Christen, J. Cook, S. Garcia, 2017. [MS Word Document]. OPWL 537 course website. https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Approach

For this project, the team followed the Bronco ID model (Stepich, Villachica, & Conley, 2016), specifically the phases of analysis and design. After conducting a performance analysis, the team determined that a business need existed for a sound instructional design plan, one that solidified a training program on how to install CAM garage door operators with the learners being Self-Employed Sales Technicians. In order to move forward, the project goals were to:

1. Design a task analysis to identify the training needs.

2. Conduct a learner analysis of the participants.

3. Create instructional objectives specifying learning outcomes from the program. See Figure 1 for an example.

4. Develop a performance assessment, a guiding tool for the instructor.

5. Create an instructional plan blueprint with the intended outcome being a comprehensive and effective instructional design training program using the Bronco ID model (Stepich, et al., 2016) with Merrill's First Principles (Merrill, 2002) in the context of CAM GDO's business goals in order to eliminate the performance gap.

Results of the Instructional Plan

An instructional plan was developed specifying the desired performance, rationale, and sequencing of instructional objectives using Mager's three-part method (Mager, 1997). Merrill's First Principles of Instruction (Merrill, 2002) were integrated as the guiding instructional methodology. The task at hand, basic installation of garage door operators was the problem-centered real-life situation followed by activation, demonstration, application and integration incorporating associated corollaries within each principle. Likewise, integrated into the plan were Keller's Arcs Model (Keller, 1987) for motivational instruction; real demo units are incorporated, as well as recorded video, four advance organizers (see examples in Figure 2 and Figure 3), a table for a diminishing coaching strategy for practices and feedback, varied scenario problems and time for learners to reflect on what they've learned. The design included motivational strategies to engage learner's attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction. Overall, the instructional plan is 180 minutes in length divided into three units.

The project was submitted to and accepted by CAM's CEO. The CEO indicated their eagerness to put the training program into place by introducing the company's intention and forming a task force at their next monthly meeting. Lastly, it was determined that the CAM GDO company would need to incentivize the Self-Employed Sales Technicians, ensuring they attended the trainings and found value in the learning opportunity that was offered. Working with the CAM CEO an incentivized plan was created and was to be implemented and announced once they were ready to integrate the instructionally designed training program.

References

Christen, L., Cook, J., Garcia, S. (2017, April 26). Installation Training of CAM GDO Garage Door Operators for Self- Employed Sales [MS Word Document]. OPWL 537 course website. https://Blackboard.boisestate.edu

Keller, J. M. (1987). The systematic process of motivational design. Performance & Instruction, 26(9/10), 1-8.

Mager, R. F. (1997). Preparing instructional objectives: a critical tool in the development of effective instruction (3rd ed.). Center for Effective Performance.

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research & Development, 50(3), 43-59.

Stepich, Villachica, & Conley. (2016). Bronco ID Model. OPWL 537 Spring 2017 Detailed Instructional Plan Handout

Appendices

Appendix A. OPWL Portfolio Worksheets for the Instructional Design Project