Rollins Maximizes Service Consistency and Compliance Worldwide

For more than 130 years, Rollins Inc. (NYSE: ROL) has been a leader in pest control, growing to become a global company that now serves 70-plus countries via its subsidiaries and franchises. Today, through leading brands, such as Orkin and Critter Control, Rollins delivers world-class services to 2.8 million commercial and residential customers.

Rollins requires service professionals across its subsidiaries and franchises to complete extensive training, which the company documents to ensure both quality and compliance with government regulations. By moving from a largely manual training approach to the MadCap Create learning content management system (LCMS), Rollins has streamlined training delivery, enabled greater consistency, and facilitated accurate tracking and reporting of employees’ learning progressions. Let’s look at how Rollins utilized MadCap Create to modernize its training to achieve these results.

Quality and Compliance: No Room for Compromise

Companies in the pest control industry need to compete for quality customer service. If a consumer in Ohio has a bad experience, that person may influence the buying decisions of friends and family in Colorado and Maine. Consumers don’t know or care whether the pest control company has multiple offices or franchises; they expect service will be the same regardless of location—good or bad.

At the same time, to legally operate, pest control companies have to comply with a range of local, state, and federal regulations, such as the US Environmental Agency (EPA), and Federal Certification Standards for Pesticide Applicators. For international businesses like Rollins, multiply that by any number of countries and the regions within them, each with slightly different rules. And all these regulations are continually evolving.

In a nutshell, training within the pest control industry needs to ensure service consistency while providing the flexibility to accommodate nuances in government regulations worldwide and adapting quickly to change. It’s a tall order that Rollins takes seriously.

The Need to Move Beyond Manual

Rollins provides a blended approach to learning anchored around The Rollins Learning Center. Based in Atlanta, GA, the multi-million dollar 26,000-plus square foot training facility is the pest control industry’s state-of-the-art distance and hands-on training center. Training environments at the center include an outdoor pavilion, a full-size house, and a range of commercial scenarios that help trainees acquire an integrated pest management (IPM) approach to service delivery. This ensures that pest damage is managed by the most economical means and with the least possible hazard to people, property, and the environment.

However, in the past, much of Rollin’s distance learning was provided via massive binders filled with printed PDFs, which were expensive to ship to new employees. The training wasn’t interactive, and the materials were often immediately dated. Moreover, because all pre- and post-class training was self-paced reading, Rollins had no reliable way to properly track each employee’s learning journey and progression. This left the company open to legal and compliance jeopardy.

Recognizing the need to improve distance training experiences and minimize learning downtimes, the team began looking at how to modernize its approach. After evaluating a range of industry solutions, Rollins chose MadCap Software, formerly Xyleme.

Modern, Accurate Interactive Training

Utilizing the MadCap Software platform, the Rollins team has converted over 3,000 pages of training content into MadCap Software-created digital courses that include the mobile device accessibility required by many of the company’s field technicians. This upgrade has enabled Rollins to deliver consistent, modern, interactive training experiences to employees regardless of location.

The company uses MadCap Create to author, reuse, review, and publish content. Because content objects can be linked in Create, content automatically gets updated everywhere it’s used, helping to ensure information is accurate and timely. Additionally, the review process has greatly improved and has increased reviews with subject matter experts (SMEs) and operations.

Content MadCap Create is published to MadCap Syndicate, which delivers actionable content from a single source of truth. By pushing courses from MadCap Syndicate to its learning management system (LMS), Rollins can obtain better analytics and track learner progress.

Consistently Meeting Customer and Regulatory Demands

Since implementing the MadCap Software platform, Rollins has been able to empower teams to deliver consistent, high-quality service worldwide. Not only does Rollins make sure employees have access to the same e-learning opportunities; the team can also track whether individuals have completed required courses and how successfully they have retained the information.

Additionally, the ability to track and measure learners’ progress—combined with access to detailed version histories for content operations via MadCap Syndicate—has facilitated the team’s ability to document regulatory compliance and conduct audits if needed, helping to minimize the company’s legal risk.

Rollins has seen direct cost savings as well. Since converting to the MadCap Software platform, the company has saved an average of $250,000 per year over the past six years in printing and shipping costs alone.

And Rollins is just getting started. As one team member noted, “All of these things helped move us into a new realm and helped improve the employee experience. In keeping with our compass and trying to focus on continuous improvement, we’ve started asking ourselves, ‘What else can we do with MadCap Create and Syndicate?’.”