The ChallengeBringing the in-person experience to the online classroom
Volvo Trucks North America—a key division of the globally renowned Volvo Group—faced a significant challenge in transitioning its workforce training programs to a virtual environment. With their headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina and additional locations across the U.S., the team needed a solution to maintain the level of engagement and connection that employees experienced in in-person training sessions. Virtual training initially presented barriers to interaction, leaving facilitators struggling to foster a sense of connection and engagement. For Volvo, replicating the hands-on, collaborative nature of in-person training in a virtual setting became a pressing priority.
“Setting up virtual training was different because before I was face-to-face,” says Deitra Dobbins, System Sales Training and Solutions Manager. “The challenge was basically keeping trainees engaged because they’re sitting at home now, and they’ve got everything else around them going on.”
A sense of personal connection also proved elusive in virtual settings. “There’s definitely a level of difficulty when it comes to virtual training, period,” adds Liz Smith, Aftermarket Training Manager. “As a facilitator, it means bringing a lot more personality and energy, which can be exhausting. I’ve had courses where everything’s done through chat, so I feel like I’m essentially talking to myself and reading to everybody what I’m looking at in the chat. That’s probably one of the biggest struggles with virtual learning, is just the fact that you lose that personal connection and personal touch.”
In order to make virtual training a success, Volvo needed a partner that could replicate the in-person experience and increase engagement and connection in an online classroom environment.
The SolutionEmbracing flexibility and increasing engagement
To address their challenges with connection and learner engagement in the virtual classroom, Volvo turned to Class. The platform—built on Zoom and Microsoft Teams, adding robust features to enhance the training experience—was a perfect fit for their needs.
“Having features like being integrated with Zoom and Teams certainly makes Class feel more familiar,” notes Liz. “When you’re using something new, there are things that you look for, but with Class it’s like ‘Oh wait, I do know how to use it.’ The transition to Class with understanding those features and knowing they were there made it really easy.”
For Scott Behe, Senior Manager of Operations, Class offered a more user-friendly experience for training teams. Scott details how their previous tool “wasn’t tremendously user friendly” for a lot of Volvo’s non-technical users. Scott continues, “Class was really the best of both worlds, with better tools and a better user experience built in.”
One of the standout experiences for the Volvo team is Class’s ability to reintroduce elements of the in-person experience into virtual training, according to Zana Abdullai, Learning Designer and Developer. “What I love with Class is that you can almost bring in some of the activities that we normally do in in-person trainings. You can set the activities up as stand-alone and then have the participants come back and use them when it’s the right time. To bring that dynamic of hands-on learning has been a challenge in the past, but with Class, it’s better.”
Whiteboards to enable class participation
Whiteboards to enable class participation 
“What I have been using with Class that I did not use with other systems is definitely the whiteboard. One of the things that I do is when I ask trainees exactly how many years of sales have they had, have they been in the system before, I have them write on the whiteboard. So that way I know, and it’s more interactive,” says Dietra.
Seamless interactive playback
Seamless interactive playback 
“Class Interactive Playback is very important, especially for a system training, because that way learners can go back and look at the recording and follow along,” explains Dietra. “Just like if I was speaking to them again in the virtual class they had missed. I have noticed that it’s very clear. It records everything as soon as I start.”
Customizable surveys to gather feedback
Customizable surveys to gather feedback 
“We’re able to use the survey tool where we can ask attendees toward the end of the class: How did the experience go? How was the sound quality? How was the video quality? What would you like to see next? How were the activities? We’re heavily activity based. So we want to make sure that we can understand if an activity was useful, if it was meaningful, and then how much they want to see again,” remarks Juan Medina, Vehicle Sales Training Manager.
Standardized course templates
Standardized course templates 
“Templates are very important to our team,” says Scott. “It was something that was tremendously important when we first presented templates to the team. That ability to be able to deliver a consistent experience is great because our teams may teach the same class once a month or twice a month, 12 months a year. And that learner in May needs to be able to have a similar experience to that learner in October.”
The ResultA better learning experience with a more powerful platform
With Class, Volvo has been able to create a more connected and impactful virtual training experience for its dispersed workforce. Class’s ability to replicate elements of in-person training has bridged the gap between traditional in-person sessions and virtual learning, fostering stronger engagement among participants. The platform’s ability to integrate tools like polls, gamification, interactive playback, and whiteboards has enriched the experience for both learners and facilitators.
Scott highlights the importance of maintaining connection in virtual training, and the success the team has had in this area with Class, noting that, “Our team, their personalities and their uniqueness, when you talk to them, it shines through. And I think Class gives the ability for those personalities to show, whether someone sits in a class with Juan or they sit in a class with Dietra, or they get both over time, they get two completely different personalities. That connection they build at a personal level is pretty amazing.”
With Class, Volvo is:
Increasing engagement with interactive tools
Liz remarks, “I have a lot more engagement through Class than I have in previous platforms. Having working microphones makes it a lot easier to really show personality and react to what’s said. Having the reactions button where they can do a thumbs up, trainees get really into. Especially after eight sessions in one course, they're starting to select the coffee reaction when they need to walk away or a little celebration emoji. So the extent of emojis for reactions that are offered through Class is really nice.”
Showing value with powerful analytics
“The deeper analytics that Class provides are extremely helpful—being able to get reports about attention and interactivity,” adds Scott. “Our boss and our boss's boss at the executive level love to have those dashboards to be able to measure return on investment on the tools. So being able to have a lot of data that we don't have to mine ourselves—because they're already built into the tool—is just spectacular. We love to look at numbers and pie charts and see how we’re doing, because it gives us good feedback on interaction and how our trainers are doing as well.”
Embracing flexibility with built-in integrations and customer support
“It was very user friendly to launch because Microsoft Teams is what we use every day. So a lot of those tools are embedded,” concludes Scott. “I think Class is a big enough company to deliver a really good tool, but still small enough that I can pick up the phone to talk to a Class rep and say, “Hey, this is going on, something's not right.” And they either answer the phone or they email back within minutes, and that response time is great. They also ask for our feedback, and usually within, I don't know, 60 days, 90 days, I'll get a note saying, “Hey, that thing you mentioned, we're working on that.”
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