Business: Insurance
Location: Lansing, Michigan
The Company
Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan is a multiple-line insurance company licensed to do business in the state of Michigan. Their total assets are $2 billion with more than 450,000 policyholders, 450 agents, and 700 employees state wide.
The Challenge
One of the big issues that Farm Bureau Insurance faces is managing training in agents’ offices to deal with staff turnover. To address this problem, the Corporate Performance Improvement (CPI) department developed a series of training booklets on the different types of policies agents and their staff needed to be familiar with. These booklets contained information on how to sell and support a policy including how to complete all the necessary paperwork. At the end of each booklet was a quiz that agents and their staff had to complete and mail back to the CPI department.
Before an agent or staff member could begin their training program, the booklet had to be ordered and shipped from the Lansing warehouse. This process ate up valuable time from the start-up training for new staff. In addition, when policies were updated or enhanced, booklets became obsolete. This required more time and expense for reprinting. With the advent of the Internet, Farm Bureau Insurance thought there had to be an easier, more time- and cost-effective way to provide this type of training.
The ReadyGo WCB Solution
Deb Dennis, Web Communication Services Manager at Farm Bureau Insurance, saw ReadyGo WCB and ReadyGo SST at a trade show and realized that these tools could be used to simplify their current procedures. “I thought ReadyGo’s solution was an effective and economical way to simplify and speed up our training process,” Deb states. Deb and her colleague, Jon Hirst, Web Communications Developer, have converted the content in 14 of the training booklets to a series of online courses that include registration, testing, and certificates of completion. Student registration information, test results and certificate status are all tracked by ReadyGo SST. “Online delivery has been very well received,” states Deb. “Learners say the courses are easy to use and helpful. Agents and their staff appreciate receiving training when they need it. Supervisors have commented that having an easy way to track employee training simplifies their annual review process, and the CPI department appreciates no longer having to manually administrate quizzes.”
Recently, Farm Bureau Insurance was faced with a new challenge. They needed a way to deliver their Internet usage policy to all agents, confirm that each agent had read and understood the policy, and track/store the agent’s agreement to comply with the policy. Deb suggested they use ReadyGo WCB to create the training and ReadyGo SST to save responses, with each response being date-stamped and saved on the web server. In less than a month, more than 1,000 people had registered, taken the course, and agreed to comply with the policy. Everyone was pleasantly surprised how painless the whole process was. As an added benefit, many of the people who took the compliance course had not previously taken an online course. After a positive initial experience they say they are much more open to taking courses over the web.
Next up for Farm Bureau Insurance is to further simplify training for new employees in the field. Currently new field employees have a four-week training period during which they have specific weekly milestones. In the past they had to mail a printed checklist of their accomplishments to the CPI department. In the near future they will take an online quiz that will register that they are in compliance with their requirements each week.
“When you have people spread out all over the state you really need ways to easily provide training. ReadyGo’s products have given us an effective tool to enable online training for our organization. The products have been reliable and easy-to-use for both developers and users, and the service and support has been outstanding” states Deb Dennis.
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