AI Microlearning: Your Key to Agility and Scale for Frontline Training

A major component of frontline team success lies within training. A well-trained team is a high-performing team that delivers results – and is also a retained team. The right training delivered at the right time and continuing as part of employee development is critical to curbing attrition, delivering an outstanding customer experience, and meeting critical business KPIs. 

Creating content for employee learning plays a critical role, and creating relevant learning materials quickly is sometimes a bit tough. But a new era in frontline training material creation is here, with the Centrical platform’s newest capability, AI Microlearning powered by ChatGPT. In this article, we’ll dive into a quick overview of microlearning, the benefits of AI Microlearning, some use cases, and how to get started. 

Microlearning 101 

To discuss AI microlearning, it’s important to first delve a bit into the concept of microlearning.  

Onboarding, training, and learning and development material are often delivered via live/virtual training sessions, longform documents and video, and longer online modules.  While these methods convey good information, they are not always as effective as they can be. Not only are employees unlikely to feel engaged or retain much of the knowledge, but they need to take time out of their workday. This means dropped productivity, including time away from the phones and customer chats.  

These delivery methods are necessary to get employees started in their roles and to deliver ongoing training. But when personalized microlearning is included as an additional layer of training, this knowledge is reinforced and validated to help employees better retain all the new information they are learning. Think of microlearning as an enhancement to traditional training, and not a replacement. Additionally, when leveraging AI, microlearning activities can be triggered based on individual performance and knowledge gaps making it both timely and relevant to every employee’s unique needs. 

Microlearning is the delivery of bite-sized learning modules delivered in the flow of work, enabling employees to complete each module in just a few minutes. Because it is delivered in small increments, and often followed by a quiz, employees are much more likely to engage and it’s a great way to reinforce the information learned through more formal training or share and validate understanding of organizational updates (e.g. new process updates, new product updates, etc.).  

AI Microlearning 

In nutshell, AI Microlearning is the ability to create microlearning content in just a few seconds by using the power of generative AI.  

Part one of microlearning is the creation of fresh, timely, relevant learning content. While this can be done in a sustainable, scalable way, it does require some bandwidth. And often, there are immediate content creation asks; for example, teams might need to quickly create training around regulatory changes or a new company policy or process. Teams might not have the bandwidth or agility to fully understand the new information, let alone jump in right away to create a new piece of content, and that can delay communication, and in turn, proficiency, and performance.  

Another example of the need to create critical new training materials revolves around BPOs. For instance, a BPO might receive new information from a client that they will quickly need to share with agents. Considering the number of clients a BPO might have, and how large those clients might be, there can be a steady stream of mission-critical information that must be communicated, and that agents must learn as fast as possible. While team huddles and other methods are a good way to communicate, Microlearning adds another layer of validation to ensure new information is understood.  

With AI Microlearning, learning and development teams and anyone else in an organization can create micro-content summaries and knowledge check quizzes in just a few seconds. Need to create a new learning module on a product update for sales and support teams? 3,2,1…done! Does a customer service team need to work on their soft skills? Putting together a best– practices guide and quiz can be completed in the blink of an eye.  

Benefits of AI Microlearning 

The Centrical platform’s AI Microlearning capability brings key benefits to organizations, including: 

• Saving Time Content creation is simplified for operations and learning and development teams, making it much easier to create new content quickly, and keep existing content fresh and updated. 
• Scaling Content Creation AI Microlearning helps bring content creation to scale by democratizing content creation and empowering more teams to participate in creating content. 
• Accelerating Proficiency Developing content to ramp new employees, communicate changes or provide training takes bandwidth. AI Microlearning can do the “heavy lifting” for you so that onboarding and training content can be swiftly rolled out to employees. 
• Driving Impact Leveraging AI Microlearning as part of a holistic, personalized approach to learning helps you drive results and impact for your organization.  

Now that we’ve covered AI Microlearning and its benefits, let’s explore a few ways you can use this capability in your own organization.  

Uses for AI Microlearning 

When it comes to training material creation, AI Microlearning is an excellent tool for agility, speed, and scale. While this is all helpful in general, here are a few examples of where these attributes can come in especially handy: 

• Onboarding new hires Quickly create micro-content from onboarding materials. Adding microlearning to reinforce onboarding and initial training can help speed up time to proficiency by 30% or more. 
• Product launches and updates Bring sales and support teams up to speed as quickly as possible with new product launches and updates. AI Microlearning enables the quick creation of modules based on the latest documentation.  
• Regulatory changes Compliance-bound organizations, including debt collections, healthcare, financial services, and insurance must keep agents updated with new regulations and even the smallest of changes to existing regulations.  
• Upskilling and cross-skilling initiatives Your new hires might need to acquire multiple skills to take on more than one role or handle customer interactions across multiple channels. Or perhaps tenured employees are progressing or expanding their roles, and you will want to upskill these employees as a means to drive retention.  Whatever the scenario, create custom training to cross-skill and upskill , quickly and at scale 
• Updates to company policies Company policies and procedures can change in a moment. Now, you can create learning materials that reflect those changes just as quickly.  
• Shange management Changes to the company might be more than a policy or process shift. Your organization might have taken on major new clients or perhaps merged – all of which will require new training materials. AI Microlearning helps you quickly and efficiently keep up with multiple changes at once. 
• New training opportunities Team leaders and supervisors have their finger on the pulse of employee and supervisor training needs and gaps. Anyone can create a quick guide for specific areas of opportunity.  
• Teambuilding While this example might seem as urgent as compliance or product updates, it is a critical element for businesses. Leaders can very quickly create short quizzes and content summaries around less-serious topics, such as holidays, company fun facts and history, and more. 

Summary and Key Takeaways 

We’ve just covered the basics of AI Microlearning, the benefits, and use cases. A few key takeaways: 

• Microlearning is an engaging, highly effective method to onboard, train, and develop employees. 
• AI Microlearning helps operations and learning and development teams create frontline training materials, such as quizzes and content summaries, in just seconds using generative AI. 
• Benefits include agility, saved time,  and scaling and democratizing content creation, so that anyone can create microlearning modules. 
• This new capability is especially helpful for potentially complicated or quickly evolving topics, such as regulatory compliance, product launches and updates, upskilling and cross-skilling materials, and much more. 

Learn more about ChatGPT for the frontline, and stop by our press release for more on AI Microlearning.    

Centrical as an Operational Performance and Learning and Development Partner 

For over a decade, Centrical has partnered with leading organizations across the globe, including Microsoft, HP, Webhelp, Teleperformance, and others to elevate the employee experience and deliver meaningful results. Microlearning is only part of the Centrical platform experience, which takes a gamified approach to performance management, augmented coaching, quality management, targeted microlearning, and more. Centrical customers have achieved solid results, including: 

• 12% increase in productivity 
• 15% increase in CSAT and FCR scores 
• 50% faster onboarding 
• 30% reduction in early attrition 
• 3.5x more learning participation 
• 53% less time authoring learning content 

Learn more about Centrical, AI Microlearning, and how we can help your organization build motivated, engaged, and high-performing frontline teams with a quick preview and request your personalized demo today.