by Site Staff
December 20, 2005
Rob Lauber, executive director of learning services for Cingular Wireless, realized that in order to successfully integrate AT&T Wireless after it was acquired in October 2004, it was critical that the “New Cingular” possess a highly trained sales workforce, an enhanced technical infrastructure, an aligned business purpose and strategy, and support from its business partners. Lauber’s vision was simple: Leverage and strengthen Cingular’s existing learning infrastructure and governance, and focus energy and resources on carefully screening and prioritizing training needs for each business sector in order to build a comprehensive yet concise learning road map for every employee.“There was a lot of focus around keeping it as simple as possible, in terms of the message, of what people needed to do and making sure we had enough resources behind us to execute so that everyone had the opportunity to get done what needed to be done,” Lauber said.
One of the strategic initiatives was to create a consistent employee and customer experience. Lauber created a learning strategy that enabled the company to implement an acquisition-driven training program without detracting from Cingular’s existing learning initiatives, but simply expanded upon them. To achieve a seamless transition, Lauber centralized and strategically aligned IT deployment efforts with the sales and call center training needs. Cingular’s pre-established Training Council was responsible for guiding and advising training efforts, and ensuring alignment between organizational objectives and business needs and requirements.
Lauber also led and coordinated the efforts of multiple vendors as they came together to deploy training at Cingular. Vendors were used to enhance and build upon Cingular’s existing infrastructure. In all, more than 400 contract resources were involved in the merger initiative. The involvement of vendors was extremely important to ensure that the systems and databases used to deliver training would not only support the large increase in the employee population, but also would make the training process a user-friendly experience.
Maintaining close partnerships helped Lauber recognize and react to issues before they surfaced during the acquisition process. Lauber maintained an integrated project plan with enterprise-wide dependencies, which allowed him to develop alliances and partnerships with executive owners of these dependencies. “We had a tremendous amount of executive-level and business-level support that helped us get done what needed to be done,” Lauber said.
Following the training efforts, post-class surveys indicated that 90 percent of retail sales associates felt confident that they could provide their customers with an excellent customer service experience, and 89 percent of customer care employees understood how to apply the skills and knowledge that they gained in training. Lauber’s leadership and extensive training efforts also limited any interruption to the company’s sales and service levels, which actually exceeded analysts’ expectations. Cingular achieved the highest net add quarter in its history after the nationwide launch.
Although the integration is an ongoing process, Lauber said the entire acquisition training project was a chance of a lifetime. “We are focused on continuing to improve business productivity, meeting our operating and income margins, efficiently eliminating redundancies, and ensuring that our company is sustaining a level of growth by guaranteeing that people have the skills and knowledge they need to be able to do that,” he said.