We recently had a chance to sit down for a podcast chat with Brandon Hall Group and our 2024 Customer of the Year, NTT DATA. Joined by CYPHER Director of Solution Marketing, Caitlin Bigsby, the conversation dove into how NTT DATA is delivering personalized, engaging learning experiences at scale and achieving amazing results.
If you want to learn more about NTT DATA and what their path with CYPHER Learning looked like, you should check out their customer success story. Highlights include:
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93% improved test scores (up from 85%)
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24 days saved a year eliminating manual data cleanup
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96% engagement score (up from 60%)
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100% compliance for 4 consecutive months
Below, we’ll break down a few key talking points about NTT DATA and their experience with CYPHER:
Can you give us an overview of your company’s mission and how learning plays a role in achieving your company’s strategic goals?
“We're part of NTT DATA global, and we're basically a business process outsourcer. Organizations come to us for our expertise in call center solutions, setting up call centers, and being able to deliver value and customer experience, so for us, training is what we do, it's our bread and butter, and we really do have a passion for learning. We think it is central to our mission and our employees.
It's a call center, so it's fast moving, it's technology-driven, and keeping them up-to-date with the latest skills is really critical for what we do. And this includes things like compliance and our best practices as part of our success, or recipe for success.
So for us, it's more than just making sure employees are doing the right thing, but it's making sure to deliver high value solutions to our customers and clients.”
- Daniel Frye, Senior Manager of Training Design at NTT Data
What specific AI-powered features from CYPHER Learning have had the greatest impact on your training program?
“I think one of the biggest game changers for us has been around the automated learning paths and the piece around compliance tracking and gamification.
For us, learning paths ensure that the employees are taking training in the correct order, and this also reduces errors when it comes to even compliance. We have regulators that audit, you know, “Do agents have privacy and security [training]?”, “Are we following AML?”, and things like that. Making sure that those lessons and those training [courses] are completed before they hit the floor and take calls with actual clients is critical.
Before implementing an LMS we had challenges because we just couldn't track it, it was a very manual thing. Trainers would miss it, learners would miss it, so being able to have an LMS automate and track that for us and cut down on reporting has been a huge win. Then, in terms of automated learning paths, before again scheduling training and making sure that learners were in the correct courses was a manual process. We were relying on our trainers to basically do all the leg work, so being able to use an LMS, being able to create curriculum and learning paths, has been a gamechanger for us.”
- Daniel Frye, Senior Manager of Training Design at NTT Data
What was the experience like in implementing CYPHER Learning and, if you can share candidly, were there any hurdles organizationally when you went through all this?
“Well I'm sure your audience will know, big global organizations, multiple systems, and then change. No one likes change, right? But I think for us, there was an adjustment period, and I think one of the great things in leveraging CYPHER was that the tool is very intuitive, and the implementation process and the support helped make it seamless.
We already knew as we were going on this journey that we needed to have our own internal specialization and capability, so we kind of put that in place, but the journey with CYPHER and the CYPHER team has been incredible. They've been a great partner, they've answered questions, they provided additional training, and it's just been a great transformation for us.
I think the challenge before implementing was around tracking, reporting, and compliance. It was very manual, and then, even like we talked about earlier, with our courses and being able to track learner completions and all that stuff was very, very manual, but with CYPHER and the platform there's a lot of automation, so it's been a huge win.
Our learners are happy, our training staff is happy, our administrators are happy, everybody's happy, so it's been a great journey and we look forward to continuing that partnership.”
- Daniel Frye, Senior Manager of Training Design at NTT Data
Brandon Hall Group also had quite a few questions for CYPHER about our specific features and exciting upcoming tools, like CYPHER Agent:
How is CYPHER Learning ensuring that ethical AI practices (like transparency, bias mitigation, security, data privacy) are all taking place?
“One of the revolutionary ways that we've approached our agent creator tool, both for learners and for course creators, is with something called AI crosscheck. Rather than having a single AI generate the course and be like ‘Hey, we're done, you know we're all correct’, we actually have a second independent AI that analyzes the content before it's even presented to the person who's requested it to double check, look for hallucinations, look for contradictions, and then surface those discrepancies to the requester so that they can decide how to proceed with them. So that's one major distinguishing feature that we have which I think is really critical. I saw a statistic yesterday from a KPMG study that said 56% of people who've been using AI at work have admitted to making a mistake based on bad information from an AI, so having that double check is really important.
We also have guardrails in place that the administrators can put in to say ‘these topics are acceptable’ and ‘these topics are not,’ so that's one way of ensuring it's being responsibly used at work.
And then the services we use, themselves, are committed to not using proprietary information and are only using publicly available information or your own information that you have uploaded which also remains proprietary to you. So for example, if NTT DATA uploads their policy and procedures manual to build a course, that's still theirs. It is not getting sent back to the ‘hive mind’ of the GenAI model to fold in. It's still theirs, as is any resulting course material that is being created. Those are some of the guardrails we've put in place to ensure that it's being used ethically, responsibly, and with accuracy and trust.”
- Caitlin Bigsby, Director of Solution Marketing at CYPHER Learning
Every client, every prospect wants you to be ahead of the curve, pulling them along. No one wants to be pulling along their provider. How are you staying ahead of all of this and addressing all these trends?
“Well, we do have a group dedicated just to AI and just getting out in front. We're very lucky that our CEO is exceptionally plugged into all of this. In fact, he heads up most of our AI initiatives. We already have, we'll be announcing it soon, but it is absolutely ready to go. I just did a webinar this morning about CYPHER Agent for learners which is where the learner gets to log in and say, "Hey, you know, how do I do this? How do I learn how to use civil 3D to do something?" It generates not just an answer like ChatGPT, it generates a matrixed concept map of the topics that they can dig into. So we're already kind of getting to the personalized stuff. We're going to continue to build that out. We're always watching down the road of where to go, what people want, and there is a balance between what they want and what is useful and where AI can go. We want it to be helpful and make things happen. We want people to be able to adopt it and use it. We don't want to just make AI for the sake of making AI, we want to infuse AI throughout our systems in areas that will actually make it better.”
- Caitlin Bigsby, Director of Solution Marketing at CYPHER Learning
