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Engaging the giant
Revitalizing Xfinity product and sales enablement at Comcast
Best Use of Video for Learning
Comcast Product Training
Originally streamed as a Learning Guild webcast in 2020
A gigantic job
Finding one product story to inspire thousands
Kristy Blaise, Vice President of Learning Engagement at Comcast Cable, had a big problem. A problem the size of a telecom company.
She joined Comcast’s Business Engagement team in 2018 with one goal: make sure everyone in the organization understood the Xfinity residential product suite, which spanned entertainment, internet, mobile, security, and more.
“We have a lot of ambassadors that are potentially out there, interacting with their neighbors, their family, and friends—people at the grocery. How can we arm them with the ability to speak to our products confidently and with ease?”
But she had taken on a big challenge—Xfinity had multiple divisions, regions, and customer acquisition channels with differing priorities and go-to-market approaches.
The entire network was bogged down by duplicated content, inconsistent messaging, and time-crunched employees rushing to learn how to do their jobs.
That’s enough to intimidate anyone. But Kristy had come to Business Engagement from marketing, and experience told her she would have to unite all these conflicting messages into a clear, consistent, and universal story about Xfinity products.
To manage this monumental task, Kristy brought in Sublime Media.
Total completions by year
The year we began, Xfinity learners had completed courses 138,000 times.
In 2019, when we launched the new training approach together, learners completed courses 468,000 times.
The Sublime approach
How did we make that number jump?
We focused on two goals: empathizing with learners and engaging their interest.
Empathy
We started by empathizing with our audience. What did learners at Xfinity need to know to do their jobs day-to-day?
With Kristy’s expertise, we realized that the existing training flooded learners with product details and included no context to help them use it. Often, the information was irrelevant to a learner’s role, it conflicted with other information they had learned, and it left learners unprepared to talk to customers and investigate their needs.
We planned several types of training so we could target different audiences with the content they’d need. Each type of training would have a defined structure that allowed information to be clear and consistent no matter the subject. And everything we gave learners would focus on customers, so learners would never lose sight of what Xfinity products do for them.
Engagement
Now that we understood learners’ needs, how could we meet those needs effectively?
To avoid overwhelming learners, we limited the number of modules we’d produce to three per product suite. The modules themselves would be snappy and effective, so they could fit into any learner’s schedule, no matter how busy.
As we drafted each module, we wove in stories about how customers use products. These narratives would help learners absorb and apply information in the context they’d use it: meeting customers’ needs with just the right products.
To make customers fans of Xfinity products, employees would have to be Xfinity fans, too. We would need to drive our learners’ excitement about meaningful customer benefits. So, on top of the other content we’d teach, we planned additional marketing-like materials: a library of microlearning modules designed like commercials to engage an emotional response, even when teaching.
And finally, we invested time and attention into writing, designing, and building our content, so the result would be polished, well designed, and interesting—giving learners no reason to tune out and every reason to take one course after another.
Sublime solutions
Essentials
Motion graphic video
An Essentials video connects products to real-world use cases in ways everyone in the business can understand. With a runtime of less than two minutes, it’s high-energy, punchy, and the perfect way to introduce yourself to (or reacquaint yourself with) a line of products.
Know the Basics
Customer-focused digital modules
A Basics module introduces learners to three fictional customers who use the product suite. It teaches the suite’s key features and benefits by showing how it enables the customer to live their lifestyle. With more detail than Essentials, it takes just minutes to complete.
Connect
Digital conversation simulator
A Connect course teaches the learner how to talk to customers, investigate their needs, and recommend the best possible solution. First, the learner answers a series of warm-up quiz questions about the product. Then, they jump into elaborately branching customer “conversations” and select the best questions and responses for the customer at hand.
Xplore the Awesome
Library of microlearning modules
All Xplore the Awesome micromodules form a comprehensive library highlighting key customer benefits across the business. Designed to generate excitement, each Xplore is a miniature course that inspires learners with the same logic and features that Xfinity shares with customers—plus next-level skills that learners can practice and resources where they can learn more. Xplore modules transition from training product specs to training possibilities, highlighting the way that product details come together to improve the customer’s life.
The results
Consumer-quality product training that ignites engagement
Total completions by year
Comcast’s course completions more than tripled from 2018 to 2019—meaning employees finished Sublime’s training three times as often as they finished the previous trainings.
“Every time a product is coming to market...we are leading the foundational knowledge and strategy.”
Comcast measures their Net Promoter Scores in two ways: externally, which measures what customers think of their products, and internally, which measures what employees think of their products. As they’ve implemented this training strategy, Comcast has seen internal NPS scores rise across the board. Kristy reports, “Our product lines are thrilled with the movement that they've seen and the shift from ‘I'm selling a bunch of lines of business’ to ‘I'm selling experiences to our customers.’”
For their part, leadership was delighted that workplace learning could work—and that it could be enjoyable. Kristy continues, "We've seen an increase in budget, people have thrown money, we can't even keep up with the volume of requests that are coming in because people are desiring the work we are doing, it's all because we've increased satisfaction."
That’s how you wrangle an oversized challenge into a resounding success.