How goeasy transformed its digital training, sped up onboarding and ushered in a brighter financial future

The problem: One-time training left critical product knowledge out of reach

The goeasy leadership team knew getting representatives to do their best work every day would lead to better bottom-line results. But, traditional training and enablement didn’t fit naturally into the workflow and left crucial employee needs unmet, so the search was on for an approach that would accurately reflect the day-to-day realities of their work. 

That’s when the leading lender, focused on delivering financial services to Canadians with near to non-prime credit, turned to Axonify to deliver digital training that would make a real difference to its people and the business. 

goeasy helps its customers access credit—specifically supporting those that banks and other traditional lenders have denied—and has a diverse line of brands and options for their clientele.

Through its easyhome brand, customers can lease-to-own furniture, appliances and electronics. With easyfinancial, they can access secured or unsecured personal loans. Point-of-sale financing options are also offered through LendCare. In the end, one-third of goeasy’s customers currently graduate to prime rates. 

But because of economic factors like inflation and a volatile financial market, many are struggling to make ends meet, which has caused a notable increase in sensitive and difficult financial conversations. 

This puts a significant amount of pressure and stress on representatives across the industry who now have to navigate these murky waters. 

Recent research from Axonify revealed that 40% of F&I reps say the increase in working with customers in financial distress has impacted their mental health, and more than 1 in 4 say they need more support, resources and tools to manage these conversations properly. Unfortunately, almost 20% of those who’ve witnessed these changes in customer behavior also say their employer hasn’t done anything differently.

goeasy hasn’t been one of them. 

The solution: Ditch the box-ticking approach

Before launching Axonify, goeasy relied on a traditional LMS and costly in-person training sessions to educate team members.

The company identified several ways these tactics weren’t meeting its organizational learning needs and where there was room for improvement; it was not only expensive for the business and time-consuming for reps, but there was also no efficient way to reinforce the knowledge they learned. Jason Hamade, Senior Vice President of easyfinancial Retail, summed it up best: “It’s just more time, more energy and we’re not getting things done as quickly.”

The first challenge to fix the process was to ditch the one-and-done, box-ticking training. It didn’t refresh knowledge, so reps frequently forgot key learnings; information often went in one ear and out the other with traditional approaches that didn’t prioritize reinforcement. goeasy wanted its frontline workers to be able to remember and recall training topics and guide their performance to the standards set out by the enterprise.

The second hurdle was that training sessions placed too much emphasis on individual tasks that new hires needed to learn eventually, rather than prioritizing the critical business outcomes goeasy was trying to achieve now.

goeasy reps need to gain a lot of specific expertise about products, customer service and even practical financial advice, like building credit, to support customers properly. Although hosting intensive in-person, instructor-led training was a high-value experience, flights and two-week-long hotel stays for representatives from over 400 branches across the country was an enormous cost. And having those same reps return to their branch and still requiring them to complete nearly 140 hours of eLearning meant it took upwards of eight weeks to bring a new employee to competency.

Too-long onboarding times meant the business couldn’t be as agile as needed. The onboarding process left a trail of noticeable knowledge gaps as new hires faced a firehose of “essential” knowledge.