“Change is increasing. Farmers are more connected. They’re literally monitoring and optimizing their machines from their phones. They are becoming more connected and they’re looking to us for more.”
Curwin Friesen, Greenvalley Equipment
Cultivating a new approach to training at John Deere dealerships
How farming equipment retailers are leveraging Axonify to plow through knowledge retention barriers
97%
participation rate at launch
$16K
cost savings in compliance certifications
90%
decrease in time required to complete compliance training
The problem: Managing an “explosion of information”
Every specialty retailer has product knowledge top of mind, but for farming equipment retailers, there’s a level of complexity and specificity that takes things up a notch.
When you’re selling tractors, bailers and harvesters, you need staff with next-level knowledge of product specs, maintenance processes and safety standards.
And for John Deere dealerships, that product knowledge needs to be increasingly diverse to match the changing needs of their clientele: some looking to get their 15-year-old tractor serviced, and others looking to embrace John Deere’s latest high-tech innovations.
“We continue to have an explosion of information at John Deere in terms of new products and new technologies,” says Curwin Friesen, President of Greenvalley Equipment, one of the John Deere dealerships that’s recently implemented Axonify.
Case in point: John Deere is now one of the top-visited booths at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and has won innovation awards for five years and counting. “John Deere is positioning itself as a leader of technology,” says Friesen.
“Change is increasing. Farmers are more connected. They’re literally monitoring and optimizing their machines from their phones. They are becoming more connected and they’re looking to us for more.”
There’s no shortage of training content to deliver the authoritative, seamless experience customers are looking for and the company prides itself on; John Deere regularly sends information through John Deere University. If a new tractor is being released, John Deere will send 50 slides breaking down what it is, how it compares to older models and ways that it measures up to competitor models. Sales staff will take the online training, do a quiz at the end and they’re done. “But that’s when the retention starts dropping off,” says Friesen. On top of the new info, staff still need to remember critical details about older models.
An additional challenge? John Deere dealerships face a seasonality that means there are key times when teams need to be experts on many things.
“We’ve got harvest, we’ve got planting, we’ve got spraying, we’ve got seeding, we’ve got harvest again… and then we redo that on an annual basis,” says Friesen.
“So we’re trying to deliver that information at the right time so it’s front of mind for a period, and then we know it’s going to drop off and we’ve got to re-engage it again next year with updated information.”
Between the ever-constant flow of new product information coming from John Deere and other training providers, the need for periodical refreshers and the time and money constraints caused by compliance training, the dealerships were ready for a change.
“There’s just been this surge of information coming through and we’re trying to get our staff on the frontlines, in parts and services, in sales, to keep up with all of it. We needed tools to help us do that better because it’s not going to be going away anytime soon.”
Enter Axonify.
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The solution: Focusing on what needs to be top-of-mind
Greenvalley Equipment, Premier Equipment and other John Deere dealerships adopted Axonify’s learning and reinforcement solution to streamline compliance and repackage their product training into bite-sized, need-to-know modules that could be more easily retained, accessed via mobile devices or throughout the day on company computers.
At Greenvalley, they started with a soft launch involving select senior leaders to get buy-in. When they were ready to launch to all staff, they let the platform speak for itself. “We didn’t do a lot of initiatives,” says Friesen. “We just said, you’re being inundated with information and this is going to help a bit.”
Premier Equipment is also leveraging Axonify’s Content Marketplace for off-the-shelf learning modules and delivering compliance training through Axonify, reducing their reliance on third parties. Plus, they pair hands-on training sessions with reinforcement questions in the platform to ensure that all types of training get retained. At Premier, they’re even offering bonus points in Axonify that are redeemable for rewards to staff who attend in-person training.
“The fact that we’re getting more and more employees engaged just so they can get a leg up on their points over their co-workers… that’s showing good results,” says Jesse Free, Training Manager at Premier Equipment. “But we’re also seeing that people are learning more and are participating more because there is that additional incentive.”
Premier also uses Axonify to communicate with its staff, sharing information on the workshops and other company-wide announcements and using the platform’s robust reporting function to track who is reading the messages and who is not.
“The interactive style of the platform appeals to every generation of our workforce right now—even people who grew up without technology. They’re in Axonify because it’s more convenient and they can find information quickly.”
Jesse Free, Premier Equipment
The results: A sustainable, cost-saving initiative
Both Greenvalley and Premier have seen massive benefits since launching Axonify.
“Having Axonify allows us to immediately push information out, and appeal to the many different generations that are in the workforce now.We have farmers now who are using technology in their operations and equipment. In order for us to properly support our customers we need to make sure our teams understand and are well versed on it first. And having something like this that allows us to do rapid training implementation to complement what John Deere is [delivering to] us, it allows us to quickly stay current and more uniform across the business,” says Free.
“The interactive style of the platform appeals to every generation of our workforce right now—even people who grew up without technology. They’re in Axonify because It’s more convenient and they can find information quickly.”
The competitive game-style format of the reinforcement questions has led to buy-in far beyond Free’s expectations–a 97% participation rate upon launch. “I turned questions off during the weekends and I got a lot of pushback. So now I need to turn it back on,” he joked.
Compliance is also faster, and more cost effective. “What used to take an hour and a half we’re doing in 10 minutes,” said Free. Other compliance certifications, like AODA, PPE and forklift training that used to cost over $16K through a third party can now run through Axonify.
Another bonus: less time spent manually tracking and then chasing down staff to complete their compliance training.
“We had probably about 15 or 20 different spreadsheets tracking employee training and chasing people down. It was time-consuming. That was the biggest complaint we had before signing on with Axonify: time wasted chasing people to get them to finish their training or get them to recertify on something. And it’s all automatic now.”
“We’ve got to reinforce better. We’ve got to train better. We’ve got to change faster and this is one of the tools that we feel is going to be critical in being able to do that.”
Curwin Friesen, Greenvalley Equipment
But most importantly, the staff at these John Deere dealerships are getting the training and reinforcement they need to deliver the service that their customers expect.
“We’re getting 70% correct answers and in three or four, five weeks, we’re getting 90% correct answers. So we’re definitely seeing the lift,” says Friesen.
“The theory that Axonify is built on is working for us. We forget things and we have to be reminded of them at certain times when we need to—because we have yet to have an employee that remembers everything that they’ve learned forever.”
Axonify’s data also helps Greenvalley and Premier measure the effectiveness of their training at scale, and quickly understand what resonated and what missed the mark based on how the reinforcement questions get answered. “We get a pretty quick glimpse into how effective training was,” says Friesen.
“We’ve got to reinforce better. We’ve got to train better. We’ve got to change faster and this is one of the tools that we feel is going to be critical in being able to do that.”
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