Reduce onboarding time, decrease employee frustration, ensure consistent delivery, and quantify effectiveness.
A centralized knowledge base is at the heart of successful employee training. In this post, we outline four ways it can transform how your financial institution trains, retains, and ramps up frontline employees for success — so you can spend less time on re-training, and more time on coaching and development.
1. It Can Significantly Reduce Onboarding Time
Training new employees is a time-consuming and costly endeavor, albeit an extremely important one. Today’s banks and credit unions have high expectations of your frontline, to deliver sound, accurate financial expertise and guidance.
Effective training is a top priority for many financial institutions, but not always an easily attainable goal. It takes significant time and effort to ramp up employees quickly and effectively. Traditional LMS’s (learning management systems) are useful for new employee training but put the bulk of learning on extensive repetition and rote memorization.
Conversely, a centralized knowledge base enables institutions to train employees on how to find and use the information they need when they need it, helping them to get up to speed faster and more effectively.
The demand on bank and credit union trainers to re-train and answer repetitive questions is reduced, allowing them to focus on what matters most – coaching and developing employees on the skills they need to deliver better consumer experiences.
2. It Engages Employees, Reducing Frustration
Keeping employees engaged in continuous learning is a challenge of its own, let alone after their initial onboard training is complete.
Research shows 63% of training staff spends 40% or more of their day answering employee questions. Likewise, policies and procedures change as much as 30% annually – creating a constant need for re-training.
A centralized knowledge base with banking-specific search functionality enables staff to easily find answers to policy and procedural questions. No need to ask others, or hunt for answers. Employees can actively engage in content any time they need. Enabling employees to self-serve improves confidence among employees and customer experience among customers.
3. Ensures Consistent Information Across Your Entire Institution
Your frontline staff is responsible for learning and accessing a mountain of information – 1,000s of pages of policy, procedure, and product documentation; 1,000s of unique answers to customer questions; and 100s of scenarios.
What’s more – this information changes and needs continuous updating (on average, 30% change per year). A centralized knowledge base within a single, easy-to-use portal is critical to deliver accurate information across the organization.
You may be familiar with this story: A new employee training program is initiated at the corporate level and disseminated to branches. As time goes by and employees come and go, several versions of the original training materials come about.
A centralized knowledge base prevents these inconsistencies by delivering one version of the truth. No more multiple or outdated versions of a single document.
A centralized knowledge base allows your institution to maintain accurate, up-to-date information on a platform that’s easy to use and search, enabling employees to find the information they need to confidently do their jobs.
4. Allows You to Gather Feedback & Quantify Training Effectiveness
Feedback is essential to the continuous improvement of employee training content, and banking documentation in general.
A strong feedback loop surfaces errors and exceptions quickly and effectively, reducing risk and rework. A centralized knowledge base managed and maintained within a single portal can capture feedback by asking users to rate the helpfulness of the content they reference.
It also enables them to leave feedback on what can improve so that updating and improving documentation is fast and effective.
At Engageware, we believe the same applies to employee training. When you train employees to find information within a centralized knowledge platform, you’re enabling them to succeed and taking back time to focus on coaching and development.
Learn about our Employee Knowledge Management solution enabling 200+ banks and credit unions to provide real-time training to their staff so they can deliver exceptional consumer experiences.
Related Resources:
- 5 Knowledge Management Best Practices for Banks & Credit Unions
- Reimagining the Bank and Credit Union Training Approach
- 5 Must-Haves for Banking Knowledge Management Software
- The Ultimate Guide to Fixing Your Policies and Procedures
- The Banking Acronyms Guide
- Bank of Oak Ridge Turns to Engageware to Increase Efficiency and Employee Focus