LandAmerica: Selling a New Learning Structure

A senior group of managers will deliver the training and carry the new message throughout the organization, Anderson explained. A large project team comprised of representatives from Anderson’s department as well as corporate communications and strategy resources will work with an outside consultant to develop a train-the-trainer program, not only to help managers deliver the necessary learning, but also to help gain their buy-in for the process. The manager curriculum currently has three core pieces with accompanying modules: employment law, managing performance and managing problem performance. The rest of LandAmerica’s roughly 12,500 employees are enjoying customer service and sales training. “Our method of differentiating ourselves from our competitors is the way we deliver our products and services,” Anderson said. “We are partnering with our superior service champion and strategy resources to deliver customer service training to about 3,500 to 4,000 employees. It will basically take them through touch points of how to deal with their customers effectively so that we can ensure consistency. In 2004, we launched the first step in this whole process, the Superior Service Guarantee program. It really was the first example of bringing our customer-facing employees together and giving them a tool that they can use to build loyalty with their customer base. It’s been extremely well received. We trained probably about 60 percent of our customer-facing employees, and the only reason that we didn’t train 100 percent is because there are still some states that, from a legal perspective, we’re working through how that guarantee works.”

In keeping with LandAmerica’s desire to create and take advantage of the benefits in a blended learning environment, the Superior Service Guarantee pilot program involved e-learning as well as an instructor-led component, where individuals from Anderson’s staff and the project team developed and delivered a series of classes to customer-facing managers and employees. “The learning itself became, ‘Take the online learning and understand conceptually what this guarantee is about. Come to the classroom, practice how you will share this guarantee with your customers and how you will make sure that you’re learning from the issues that might happen.’ The third step is giving the managers a tool to facilitate a lunch-and-learn environment where they can discuss how they can use the learning from the Service Guarantee to make their processes stronger. The Superior Service Guarantee served as the foundation. Now we’re going to step two, which is what we call Drive for Service Excellence: Part 1, taking each of our lines of business and developing the areas where employees can touch the customer, then defining very clearly how to behave in those environments,” Anderson said.