How Spekit Helped RoadScholar Reduce Repetitive Questions by 4x

The challenge

Road Scholar is the not-for-profit leader in educational travel services for adults. Like many industries, travel was heavily affected by the COVID pandemic. With such rapid and drastic changes to travel regulations, Kirsten Lennox, Road Scholar’s Training Manager, needed to solve two major needs: an efficient way to communicate process changes to the company’s customer-facing teams and an easy-to-update training solution for onboarding and training.  

Before Spekit, the team was holding verbal training sessions and testing knowledge with Lessonly (a learning management system) and Confluence (a knowledge management system). However, employees were not retaining information, the content was not easy to update for training managers, and the information was not organized to allow customer-facing teams to quickly access the answers they needed after their training period. 

In fact, management found that 90% of the reason the contact center advisors weren’t hitting their KPIs was due to lack of up to date, easily accessible resources. In an effort to address this problem, Road Scholar decided to invest in a knowledge base that would allow employees, both new and old, to access training information when and where they needed it. Enter Spekit.

“Our team has so many different FAQs that they have to answer. Giving them those answers on the fly has been really helpful with utilization, which we didn’t have before with our previous knowledge base.”

Kirsten Lennox, Training Managerat Road Scholar

The solution

On-the-fly knowledge base

With Spekit, Kirsten can add all COVID-relevant information to a single knowledge base so Road Scholar’s advisors can quickly look up policy and procedure information when they are on the phone with customers using Spekit’s Chrome Extension. Content is organized by team, topic, and use case and is also searchable by keyword. 

To make content even easier to find, Kirsten created a visual icon system. For example, content with a book icon indicates knowledge information, a phone icon is used for call examples, a brain icon is for new hire training and quizzes, and a head icon indicates talking points. Now, every employee has a consistent source of knowledge — no matter where they are in their onboarding and day-to-day journey.

“Spekit helps me enhance my job skills by having a place where I can find answers to questions that I commonly have about new policies so I am always up to date with the best answer. I love how we get immediate access to any updates and have the ability to let those who create the Spek know they are helpful.”

Trina, Service Advisor at Road Scholar

Effective training for both new and tentured employees

In addition to a knowledge base, Road Scholar uses Spekit like “a classroom environment” for a 3–4 week new hire onboarding and training. Instead of having to go back to view lessons in an LMS, advisors can search for any keyword using the Spekit Chrome extension to look back on any information they missed without the need to leave their workflow. 

Kirsten loves that she can easily update Speks with the latest information and manipulate where and to which team the information is delivered. For example, she can embed relevant information directly into Salesforce so advisors can access knowledge where they work. And because the travel industry has so many nuances, Kirsten loves that her training materials don’t have to follow the structure and flow of an LMS. Plus, only 31% of sales reps like to learn by taking online courses (LMS), compared to 75% of reps who want to learn by “doing.” This is why Kirsten leverages Flows — Spekit’s step-by-step walkthroughs — in Salesforce so that advisors can learn processes by doing, rather than just listening to someone explain. 

Additionally, Kirsten can track most-viewed Speks as well as each individual advisor’s viewed Speks in order to see where people are getting stuck in training and how she can optimize the training material. She has found there is a direct correlation between those who leverage Spekit and those who hit their KPIs.

“Spekit has really influenced how we train our reps and maintain our knowledge. Having learning integrated with their knowledge base is just such a huge game-changer for us.”

Kirsten Lennox, Training Manager at Road Scholar

Simple integration and maintenance

Compared to an LMS, Spekit is easier to manipulate and update. Each Spek can be easily customized with relevant videos, clipart, links to quizzes and forms, and more. Plus, when Kirsten has to update a policy, she can easily communicate those changes with pop-up notifications called Spotlights. 

“Spekit has been so much easier for us. With an LMS, you have to create this huge course module that can be really burdensome. Spekit gives me much more freedom. Right now I can make a Spek in the middle of a meeting…I don’t have to follow the structure and flow of an LMS in that case. Instead, I can do whatever works for our team.”

Kirsten Lennox, Training Manager at Road Scholar

The Results

With Spekit, about 70% of reps are hitting their KPIs within the first week on the floor. Before, only about 50% of new hires hit this number in the same timeframe. Furthermore, saving sales during the pandemic in the travel industry has been a tough job. With Spekit, Road Scholar has increased its deal save rate to 70%.

Additionally, Kirsten has seen a drastic decline in the amount of repetitive questions from advisors. For example, new hires generally reach out to support 20 times a week until the end of training. Kirsten was concerned with a new hire who had only reached out to support five times during her three-week training period. When Kirsten dove deeper into the issue, she saw that that advisor had viewed Speks over 500 times, and Kirsten was pleased to know she was using her resources like she had trained her to. 

Now that the team has a single source of truth, they are much more collaborative and engaged with content; in fact, there have been 22K content views on the Contact Center team of just 35 members. Plus, all four new hire classes who have taken training through Spekit have shared overwhelming feedback that they’ve never had better training at a job. And advisors are feeling more confident than ever. The team uses the #checktheSpek hashtag to share information through email and on Zoom chat. The Road Scholar team is now planning  to roll out Spekit to the entire organization.