Automation Anywhere is a Silicon Valley-based tech company that develops robotic process automation (RPA) software and bots that automate a wide range of business processes.

The problem

In 2018 Automation Anywhere raised $500 million in Series A investment. The company took the opportunity to power up its training and onboarding approach. They wanted to rapidly onboard a large number of new sales reps around the world, and get them up to speed with the company’s products and processes. In-person training workshops couldn’t scale to achieve that. They needed a digital sales enablement solution up and running quickly in order to meet their targets.

The solution

Learning design

To help Automation Anywhere achieve their ambitious goal, we applied our learning design expertise to develop a simple, scalable microlearning format for their chosen mobile learning platform. Our approach was to develop a large number of highly targeted 5-minute custom animations with a series of concept checking questions that enabled the user to demonstrate understanding of the key topic / process. 

Unlike traditional training resources, our approach was designed to be accessed at hyper-relevant moments in a sales rep’s working life – ‘just in time’ learning interventions. For example, if a new sales rep encountered a conversation in which a client mentioned a competitor’s advantages, we had learning units detailing how to respond in the most effective way.

Our main constraint was the amount of time we had with a user – we needed to ensure we were using the 5 min video to deliver precisely what they needed and nothing more, in a way that they could apply in the field. 

Subject matter expert interviews

To that aim, we developed an information gathering process that enabled us to extract the most important, relevant information that a new sales rep needed to know about any topic, process or product across the organization. Despite not knowing anything about robot process automation or AI bots ourselves, our process enabled us to work with SMEs to develop a set of key learning objectives and supporting information for each topic. From that, we were able to create the briefs for the animations and learning content.

Content production

To ensure there was enough sales enablement content for the growing numbers of new hires, we needed to create a large number of learning units every week. In order to do that we assembled and managed a team of editors, writers and project managers to ensure there was an uninterrupted pipeline of new content being added to the platform every Friday afternoon.