Zeta Global's India Onboarding Project
About This Project
Zeta Global had just acquired us, and as part of the acquisition, we gained access to a large India office anxious to start supporting clients. None of them knew our platform or had dealt with client relationships like this before. I was asked to lead the effort in training this team on both fronts.
Our client Havaianas was generous enough to be a guinea pig for this India integration. It was on me to architect and deliver onboarding that was well-timed with the client's needs and the India team's ability to deliver on those needs. They also needed to learn the platform and learn the soft skills necessary to communicate effectively with enterprise-level clients.
This was a massive blended learning approach, filled with virtual live training to India, lots of documentation creation as I worked with those teams to develop processes, video creation, one-on-one coaching and follow up sessions after meetings and communications where I needed to serve as main point of contact for the client.
Spanning two months and given one-week to prepare, much of this was developed on the fly, with me creating content as we went along and adjusting to a bigger, scalable plan as we saw success with Havaianas.
Details
Type: Blended learning as there was no time to develop in advance.
Client: Zeta Global / Havaianas
Tools Used: Powerpoint, Camtasia, WebEx
Results
I was successful in getting Havaianas to a point where there was a great partnership between them and their India-based support team without me monitoring. Training efforts continued with the rest of the India team, but I was not with the company long enough to see the long term effects. The company's support team is still heavily India-based though, so I can assume it went well.
Key Challenges
The biggest challenge was there was no opportunity given to onboard India ahead of time, so I took on a client and showed India how I operated with Havaianas in the room, then had to go and turn that into dedicated training within a day or two to train others in the office based on the reception I got in the moment.
Additionally, this was a crux of the acquisition; the ability to outsource, so executive leadership wanted to see success incredibly fast for an organization that did not put a lot of energy into training to begin with (thus why I was doing it, and doing it alone).
The Approach
In my one-week preparation, I focused on foundations: what will their role be with clients, how do I translate our client's needs into solutions provided by our platform, and at what rate to I introduce platform training (thankfully I had much of this from previous projects)?
I also put together the bigger outline, but simply identified needs that I would need to train in one-on-one sessions to buy some time to develop content on later. Basically "get India started in being self-sufficient, use that time to strengthen training."
This also meant a lot of conversations with Havaianas, setting proper expectations with them that I will always be A point contact, but will be trying to not be THE FIRST point of contact. I partnered with them on ways to communicate feedback to both me and India in tandem, which also guided the creation of SOP and more universal training.