How Aircall Onboards 40 New Hires a Month With One Full-Time L&D Manager

Company overview

Aircall is the cloud-based call center and phone system of choice for modern businesses. The company strongly believes that a great conversation is the most powerful way to communicate with customers, prospects, candidates, and colleagues–and learning and development is a fantastic way to embody that conversation. 

The company was founded in 2014 and has raised over $226 million in funding. With offices in New York, Paris, Sydney, Madrid, Berlin, and London, and with over 650 employees and counting, Aircall is growing at an exponential rate.

The challenge: Find a scalable training solution and eliminate knowledge-hoarding

Aircall has 650 employees around the globe, and the company is still growing, fast. To accommodate new joiners and provide a consistently exceptional onboarding experience they needed to restructure their onboarding program to make it scalable, interactive, and collaborative. Aircall faced four main challenges with their previous solution: 

1. There was a lot of “knowledge-hoarding:” people maintaining their own small database of what they needed to know. This wasn’t a scalable or effective solution
2. Information was scattered across many different tools which the L&D team found difficult to manage
3. They were lacking one single source of truth for their training courses. This resulted in new hires having inconsistent training experiences which threatened to negatively impact the company culture
4. Being so geographically spread out, they didn’t have a training solution that could bridge the physical gap

Aircall needed to change tack. That’s when they found the perfect solution for them: collaborative learning. 

The Solution: Make collaborative learning the heart of how people learn and grow at Aircall

For Marine de Scorbiac, VP Talent, Learning and Development and Missy Strong, Global Learning and Development Business Partner, collaborative learning was the answer to help meet Aircall’s training needs. Here, Marine and Missy highlight five key benefits that have transformed the way people learn and grow at Aircall.

1. Collaborative learning enables Aircall to scale fast

Aircall is growing at an increasingly rapid rate, so it was critical for Marine and Missy to choose an onboarding solution that would keep up with the pace of new hires entering the business. “Embracing a collaborative learning approach met this requirement, and now we see 360Learning not as a provider but a partner,” says Marine. 

With 360Learning, Aircall can typically onboard 40 new hires with only one full-time employee, and they aim to double that in 2022. This shows just how efficient their onboarding system is. 

Aircall is also able to ensure their courses stay updated, even as their product and processes evolve, resulting in a 99% relevancy score on courses and a 97% completion rate for employee-created courses.

These results show the positive impact of implementing collaborative learning and a substantial part of the success achieved is down to harnessing subject-matter expertise. Read on to see how Aircall is leveraging its institutional knowledge.

2. Collaborative learning puts the power into subject-matter experts’ hands

With collaborative learning, course creation is powered by subject-matter experts (SMEs) and the L&D team working together. This is a concept Missy was keen to implement from day one. “One of the first things we did was gather a team of around a dozen SMEs and highly knowledgeable stakeholders to design and contribute to the ‘Aircall Basics,’ the information materials new hires receive when they join Aircall.”

This initiative has been highly successful, not least for Hannah Longworth, VIP Customer Success Manager. “As the co-founder of our Gender Equality Group which strives to facilitate women’s development and growth, I have found the 360Learning platform to be a fundamental part of educating people on this important topic.”

Collaborative learning facilitates knowledge sharing and enables everyone’s voices to be heard and their needs to be met. With the power firmly in SMEs’ hands, Missy is able to take on the role of coaching experts through content creation by providing tips on structure, design, and learning style, allowing them to take full control of their creativity. 

Related: L&D in a Hybrid World: Aircall’s 4 Tips for Upscaling Manager Training to Drive Growth

Another benefit of embracing collaborative learning? This approach allows them to manage their training materials all in one place.

3. Collaborative learning provides a single source of truth

One of the key benefits the Aircall team has leveraged is the ability to centralize training materials. “Instead of having training courses spread out over different drives and devices, we can centralize and store all our training materials in one location,” says Missy. 

This single source of truth has proved indispensable for Catalina Balan, Knowledge and Training Specialist. Catalina says “Aircall is constantly improving its processes and products, and the 360Learning platform allows us to easily identify, update and improve our training content. It has become the ultimate collaborative training library.”

A central repository for Aircall’s training programs has been fundamental in creating an exceptional onboarding experience for new joiners. Read on to see the positive feedback Missy and her team have received about the onboarding.

4. Collaborative learning delivers an exceptional onboarding experience

Aircall has employees in eight different timezones, so it’s important to be able to bridge the physical gap and have everyone feel part of the same international community. To make this a reality, Missy wanted to create an efficient, fun, social learning experience for newcomers. 

“We want people to feel that they can learn and grow here from the very first moment they begin,” says Missy. This approach is essential to everybody’s growth at Aircall. “Without learning, we aren’t really Aircall,” adds Missy.

Missy has had positive feedback from employees about the onboarding experience, including from David Suarez, Senior Customer Onboarding Specialist.  “The onboarding process allows you to understand how your role is contributing to the wider company goals. It was a simple, interactive journey through a huge amount of information, which could have been really overwhelming but wasn’t: it really shows the added value of knowledge sharing.”

So, what makes Aircall’s onboarding so easy to follow? Great product features of course.

5. Collaborative learning increases efficiency through useful product features

Missy and her colleagues use a number of 360Learning product features to increase the efficiency of their training programs. These include:

• Paths. The Paths feature allows course creators to combine several courses on the same topic into one path. This enables courses to be broken down into digestible chunks which is crucial for learners who can’t attend live training sessions. 
• Reactions and Relevance Scores. The Reactions and Relevance Score features give course creators the ability to keep track of learners’ progress and gather feedback in real-time, allowing course creators to discuss or refine their content.
• Discussion forum. The discussion forum in 360Learning brings to life the social aspect of learning. Learners can start virtual conversations and ask questions, encourage their peers to share information, and provide specific comments or feedback on course content.

Now to the results. How has 360Learning helped Aircall create an impact within the business?

The results: Improved efficiency, relevancy, and completion rates

By leveraging Aircall’s subject-matter experts and encouraging knowledge sharing across the organization, the L&D team has been able to scale their onboarding and wider employee training with impactful, demonstrable results:

• Onboarding 40 new hires with only one full-time employee
• 99% relevancy score on courses created on 360Learning
• 97% completion rate for employee-created courses
• Over 100 courses created on 360Learning 
• More than 1 in 10 Aircall employees have contributed to a course, providing a new opportunity for professional development

Looking forward to upskilling and levelling up

Collaborative learning has enabled Aircall to scale its onboarding and employee training programs with speed while maintaining a quality experience for all employees. 

In the coming year, Aircall will be focusing on upskilling, reskilling, and levelling up. People at Aircall are expecting to learn and grow and 360Learning will continue to support them on their learning journey.

Looking for more great client stories? Check out how Safran achieved 136,000 hours of training in just one year and how Mitsubishi Electric achieved 99% customer satisfaction with 360Learning. And when you’re ready to leverage collaborative learning to scale your training, get in touch with one of our experts and see how we can help you.