Customer Overview:
The 7th largest local exchange carrier in the U.S. and a growing force in the cable industry, TDS Telecom (TDS®) provides 1.2 million connections to high-speed internet, phone, and TV entertainment in rural, suburban and metropolitan communities, as well as business communications services including VoIP phone service, dedicated broadband Internet and hosted-managed services.
Challenge:
In the highly competitive and regulated telecom industry, product offerings can play a critical role in setting one provider apart from all others. TDS was charged with rolling out a new business services flagship product while also preparing for the acquisition of two cable companies.
Given the inherent disruptions that can occur during an acquisition, TDS sought a way to reduce delays and streamline the process of getting its commercial sales reps up to speed on the new product offering and associated process changes.
The company also sought to decrease the amount of time their managers had to spend reinforcing the new information and determining areas where reps are struggling.
Solution:
TDS deployed Qstream’s microlearning solution to provide an engaging and effective method of reinforcing new product information and to help managers guide their sales teams to success. Each challenge was related to product details, pricing and positioning, and took 3 minutes a day or less to complete.
Manager dashboards, which use the Qstream analytics engine to continually analyze response data, provided managers with graphical updates, comparisons and trends on salesforce capabilities, as well as targeted coaching actions to help address any knowledge gaps that could put a potential sale at risk.
Results:
TDS commercial sales reps achieved a 97% engagement rate, which led to an average 25% increase in product knowledge proficiency.
“This impressive engagement level led to equally impressive gains in product proficiency, enabling our reps to have more compelling conversations with sophisticated B2B buyers.”
Moving forward, TDS plans to use Qstream’s knowledge reinforcement solution for onboarding new reps more efficiently and to drive ROI on the company’s annual sales conference investments.
“Qstream also positively impacted our managers, who found the graphical dashboards an easy and efficient way to identify and address knowledge gaps among teams and individual reps, saving them some much-valued time during a tremendously busy time for our company.” – Heidi Tuftee, TDS sales leadership coach and sales enablement manager