How 3 L&D teams are supercharging their learning strategies
Finding fresh, effective ways to train and enable frontline teams is an ever-moving target. The most successful organizations constantly reevaluate how to optimize and improve their processes.
Andrew Jackson, Axonify’s VP of Customer Experience, sat down with 3 Axonify superusers from organizations of very different industries, workforce sizes, cultures and levels of experience with the product at AxoniCom 2023 to learn how they’re squeezing the most out of our platform on their teams.
Some tried-and-true tips and tricks from Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits, DFI Retail Group and Lowe’s to inspire your own learning experience:
1. Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits calendarizes content to send the right info at the right time
If you’ve tried Josh Cellars, Yellow Tail or Redemption Whiskey, you’re already familiar with some of Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits’ brands!
The problem: TOO MUCH CONTENT. The wine and spirits producer and importer has a small but mighty team of 400 employees, half of whom are field salespeople who need to be informed about upcoming promotions and other important updates.
“So, who here has a lot of content in their system?” asks Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits Instructional Designer Erin Frank. “So much that you almost wonder if people ever get to a topic anymore?”
“There’s just so much in there. The other thing is that we’ve had the system for multiple years, so we were looking at some users who have taken everything, but we also had users like new hires who hadn’t. All of these things came into play when I was sitting there thinking, okay, how can we make this content a little bit fresher and make sure everybody’s getting these important topics? Also, getting them when they need them because we do different pushes. In the holidays, you’ll see a lot more commercials around Josh because there’s a big Josh push around the holidays. When you get to the New Year, we push champagne and things with bubbles.”
The solution: To prepare its teams with the campaign and product knowledge they need to sell products, Axonify has been an essential tool for pushing content to employees based on priority at the correct times. Prioritizing content starts with inserting topics into a calendar labeled with the company’s priorities for more visibility and understanding about what people need to know and when.
“We figured out that if we can calendarize our content, schedule when we push it to people and move it up and down in the priorities you can set, it will give them the information they need more directly. They’re prepared and have the things they need while in the field. It’s fresh in their minds, and at the same time, it feels new.”
“I went from getting multiple emails a month from my older users who were like, I’ve seen these questions a million times, to them stopping emailing me. And everything was a lot fresher.”
“We were seeing an increase in knowledge, and that is being applied out in the field.”
Erin Frank, Instructional Designer at Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits
2. Standardizing and scaling an in-depth hybrid training program at DFI Retail Group
Pan-Asian retailer DFI Retail Group boasts over 10,000 stores, including supermarkets, hypermarkets, health and beauty stores, convenience stores and home furnishing stores.
The problem: DFI Retail supports a diverse workforce of 60,000+ employees who speak seven languages, with an extensive six-month customer service standards program. Its Wow Customer Service program includes a blend of digital and in-person training touchpoints, so the organization needed to overcome the challenges and complexities of a hybrid approach. Plus, as the brand’s first-ever mobile learning platform, the team needed to secure Axonify’s buy-in at every level of the company.
“Each time we want to push down certain initiatives, people will just push it away, and there’s a lot of resistance because they always feel, what’s in it for me? Is this another HR project? I have enough already on my plate,” explains Ai Lin Loh, Country Lead of Talent Development at DFI Retail.
The solution: The company uses Axonify as a one-stop shop for the entire training process—from scheduling and delivering digital and in-person training sessions to measuring and reporting who’s completed training and where additional help is needed on the service journey to launching new resources and communications via Discover. Transparency about Axonify’s value continues to ignite continuous transformation.
“We identified our top 10 super learners, and we recognize and reward them separately. So we will invite them to our head office, where the CEOs and the head of functions, their immediate managers, will present the prize. Then, we will do a video and photo and put all of that into an Axonify broadcast message.”
“Where I come from, we’ve never had a mobile learning platform. So we’re switching our entire way of doing things, consuming learning and acquiring knowledge. People will only be totally on board if they know this is not another company or HR project. This is for us. It’s to help us right now, and we can continue to reskill, upskill and grow our knowledge at the touch of our fingertips.”
Ai Lin Loh, Country Lead, Talent & Development at DFI Retail Group
3. Lowe’s avoids scope creep through (automatic!) content prioritization
Lowe’s, one of the largest home improvement retailers in the U.S., has a workforce of around 300,000 associates, enabling around $18 million weekly in customer transactions. Paul Turner, Manager of HR Systems, says one of the team’s biggest challenges they’re managing with Axonify is the constantly increasing content volume.
The problem: The Lowe’s team continues to migrate content into Axonify, and soon their entire onboarding process will be in-platform. That’s a LOT of content.
“The content volume just continues to increase,” he says.
“We’re beginning to ramp up and plan in 2024 to migrate our entire onboarding into Axonify. At which point, pretty much the majority of the organization will interact with Axonify fairly frequently during their first couple of weeks on the job. From a course perspective, we averaged around a million training activities per month, and that was pre-Axonify. When we add questions and topics, those numbers swell to the 3 million type number. So the volume is massive, and we do a lot with a small team.”
The solution: Focusing on scope creep and content volume by managing asks from different parts of the organization, Lowe’s also automates and scales the auditing process with features like content expiry, so its training and compliance content remains valuable and relevant for associates.
“Something very important to us is managing the scope creep that occurs, as different parts of the business are always saying that something new and exciting is now the important thing that must be delivered to associates across the organization. Part of my team’s responsibility is to do governance to say, okay, you’ve deployed content for X period of time, and there are some things out there that may need to be removed before we can deploy that new content.”
“We’ve built some internal controls around content expiry, a feature that Axonify is adding, which will make our lives easier. But one of the things we do is make sure that the content, when it goes live, only sits for a maximum of one year or even six months before it comes up for a content lifecycle review.”
Paul Turner, Manager of HR Systems at Lowe’s
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Maliyah Bernard
Maliyah Bernard is an academic writer turned copywriter. As a former frontline worker, she loves writing about all the ways organizations can support these essential workers smarter.Read More by Maliyah Bernard