Post Office

Background

The Post Office has over 11,500 branches across the UK, 97% of which are on an agency or franchise basis. Along with significant online business, they are the biggest retail network in the UK, providing over 170 different products spanning mail, financial and government services, broadband and home phone, currency and travel insurance.

Challenge

With around 40 new Postmasters and Agents coming on board each week, the process to onboard new starters with all the relevant training needed to run a successful franchise involved a lengthy course of between 10-15 days and a trainer coming in branch to facilitate face-to-face sessions.  The Post Office needed a solution that would allow these Postmasters and Agents to get up and running in a much shorter space of time and in a more cost-effective way.

Solution

The Post Office commissioned Learning Pool to deliver the Learning Pool Platform, offering its full onboarding process online to all new Postmasters and Agent Assistants within their franchise network. This allowed them to reduce their training to approximately 8 hours of online material which could then be followed up with 2-3 days of face-to-face training and final on-the-job observations.

With 40 news Postmasters and Agents being added to the system each week, this amounts to around 3,000 users of the system across the year.

Alongside the onboarding material, the Post Office also implemented content from Learning Pool Library Content, including the Foundation and Business Skills collections. This content is available to all agents within the branch network via self-registration as well as to all internal Post Office employees via the Post Office’s internal learning platform. To complement the system, the Post Office also uses Learning Pool Authoring to author their own content and add additional content with the ‘Post Office Way’ branding to their off-the-shelf content.

Alongside the onboarding material, the Post Office also implemented content from Learning Pool Library Content, including the Foundation and Business Skills collections. This content is available to all agents within the branch network via self-registration as well as to all internal Post Office employees via the Post Office’s internal learning platform. To complement the system, the Post Office also uses Learning Pool Authoring to author their own content and add additional content with the ‘Post Office Way’ branding to their off-the-shelf content.

Response

“The flexibility of the relationship with Learning Pool has been great; they have always helped us flex our agreement in line with our business needs and their pricing model allows us to pay for what we use, rather than the potential audience. To have the flexibility of bespoke off-the-shelf content too is superb.

One thing that makes Learning Pool distinctly different from other companies that we work with is having a single point of contact with a Learning Specialist (in our case Billy). He is unbelievable; he is always available and if there is something we don’t know, we can always get an answer from him. This makes a huge difference to us.

The Learning Pool customer community is also a very helpful part of the relationship and the events and webinars are very insightful. They open your eyes wider than just the business that you are in and allow you to share ideas with other companies and understand what is new and upcoming with the technology. We feel very much that they are a partner of ours and we will continue to involve them in upcoming decisions about our learning needs.”

Robert Oldland, Learning Technology Manager

Results

Bringing the onboarding online with Learning Pool Platform has resulted in agents being able to get up and running in just 1-2 weeks. Looking forward, the Post Office is now keen to improve things so that the agents have access to ongoing training rather than treating the training as a one-off onboarding exercise.

This will be achieved by the imminent launch of a new intranet site, Branch Hub which is designed to help them better communicate with the Post Office. This offers a great opportunity to link through seamlessly to the learning via a single sign-on, enabling them to stay connected with the Agents on an ongoing basis. It will also allow better advertising and access to the ‘Learning for All’ catalogs, improving the take-up of these course materials. The Post Office predicts that access to these might reach 10,000 users by the end of the first year.