For years, car dealership finance and insurance managers traveled to Chicago to attend Assurant Global Automotive’s popular training sessions.
Participants would interact, learn the latest best-practices selling techniques, role-play and otherwise hone their skills, using the Socratic method of asking and answering questions to spur critical thinking and elicit ideas.
About 20 F&I managers would attend each of the 25 sessions a year. The centerpiece program was so successful, the company, an F&I services and product supplier, renamed its training department to the more academic-sounding Assurant Performance Institute.
“It’s continuing education, and people get a lot out of it,” says Dave Worrall, Assurant’s senior director-global training and development. “Things were humming along – until March.” (Dave Worrall, left)
That’s when the nation began to fully realize the malevolent effects of the coronavirus pandemic. It would take its toll in all sorts of public-health and societal ways. Suddenly, traveling to Chicago to attend a training session in a room full of people became out of the question.
But Assurant wanted to keep its premier program going somehow.
“We had to pivot pretty quickly,” Worrall tells Wards, noting online auto retailing has taken great strides over the years. “The industry was fast-tracking to digital. We figured, ‘Why not us? Let’s do online what we did in Chicago.’”
Enter video conferencing. In quick fashion, Assurant converted its main training program from in-person to online. The company wasn’t new to online training. Its curriculum includes modules for various F&I categories. There’s also a virtual-coach platform that debuted in February.
But switching its main course from in-person to online came with challenges, Worrall says.
Among them: How do you keep the give-and-take that was part of the Chicago training? How do you engage as much as you did before? How do you role-play online? How do you make it interactive?
Assurant addressed those issues by relying not only on video conferencing but also virtual chat, polls, whiteboards and breakout rooms where pairs of F&I managers can role-play.
“It’s working,” Worrall says with a combination of relief and satisfaction. “It really is.”
There are drawbacks, he acknowledges. “It’s not 100% like it would be in Chicago.” For example, for the role-playing breakout sessions, “the instructor can’t be in all rooms all the time.”
The first class was April 6. Forty people attended, twice the usual number of the Chicago sessions. Survey feedback includes comments that the new setup saves time and travel costs.
Assurant is adding and scaling up additional training classes for the foreseeable future.
In many states, in-dealership sales operations are closed because of COVID-19. It’s slowed auto sales. Despite that, the training marches on. “Dealers are looking at it as a great time to train and to keep skills sharp,” Worrall says.
