How a consumer goods company transformed their retail training using RapL
Executive Summary: A multinational consumer goods company in India struggled to keep up with the training needs of their retail workforce. Then, they found RapL’s digital training and productivity solution. This blog discusses the challenges faced by this company in training their retail workforce, and how RapL’s platform helped solve them. The company struggled to provide consistent and effective training to their geographically dispersed retail employees. This made it difficult to identify knowledge gaps, and resulted in low productivity levels. RapL’s customized training materials and ease of use contributed to improved employee knowledge and skills, higher productivity levels, and increased employee satisfaction. The digital platform also provided analytics, which made it easy to identify and bridge knowledge gaps. This allowed the company to strengthen their retail operations across India.
A multinational consumer goods company based in Mumbai provides a wide range of products and services in the health and beauty-wellness industries. It has a strong presence in 20+ countries across Asia, offering high-quality consumer goods to customers in these regions. With its focus on innovation and customer satisfaction, the company has established itself as a major player in the consumer goods market. This company constantly strives to improve its offerings and expand its reach. Its commitment to quality and excellence has made it a globally trusted brand.
Home to some of India’s most-loved brands, the company reported over 1 billion dollars in revenue in 2022. This is a testament to its strong performance in the consumer market. With a vast network of employees across India, this company is committed to driving growth and creating meaningful impact in the communities it serves.
In the face of challenges posed by a constantly progressing business world, this leading multinational consumer goods company recognized the importance of investing in their retail workforce to ensure success. Their capability teams worked closely with employees and distributors who spoke 20+ languages to maintain consistent product knowledge. This consistency was maintained across hundreds and thousands of product lines, cutting across clusters and depots. They also faced the challenge of ensuring that capability development initiatives had a positive ROI when classroom training became a logistical nightmare. To continuously measure knowledge gaps in an industry fraught with rotating doors, the company utilized innovative and comprehensive approaches for employee training and development.
Of the several business challenges in a Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company with a national footprint, people productivity is perhaps the toughest nut to crack. Let’s take a look at the most pressing capability development issues at this firm.
People forget nearly 90% of what they have learnt within just 7 days, unless the concepts are reinforced. That’s why employees swamped with documents, presentations, and classroom sessions are not likely to learn much.
However, time constraints make it difficult to reinforce vast concepts.
What can you do instead? Arm your employees with one concept at a time. Studies show the human attention span is only 8.25 seconds, so keep your training concise.
RapL is your software for that.
Challenges in capability development - A deep dive
- Expensive and cumbersome to conduct physical training: Expenses for training facilities, trainers, and travel added up quickly. Co-ordinating sessions across multiple locations was also time-consuming. Furthermore, employee work schedules and travel arrangements made it difficult to ensure consistent attendance. These were some challenges to conduct training for their large and distributed workforce.
- Difficult to engage off-roll parties: Engaging off-roll parties, such as multi-brand retailers and distributors, with information about the company’s brands and products was challenging. Retailers or distributors should be well-informed about the brand, its products, and any new developments, to maintain a good business relationship. These parties work with numerous brands and products, which make it difficult to capture their attention and maintain their interest. The company also faced communication barriers, as some retailers and distributors were in remote or rural areas.
- Difficult to track training completion across all end users: Ensuring proper training completion is essential for employee development, performance, and compliance. However, the sheer scale and diversity of the company’s pan-India workforce made this challenging. Language and cultural barriers posed communication hurdles, and made monitoring compliance with training requirements difficult.
- Difficult to identify knowledge gaps: Due to the vast size and diversity of the country, managers struggled to get a clear picture of each employee’s skills and training needs. Language barriers, cultural differences, and varying levels of education further complicated the process. These challenges made it difficult for managers to ensure that every employee receives the appropriate training and development necessary to succeed in their roles.
To address these issues, the company was looking for an efficient training soluthttps://getrapl.comion. That’s when they heard that RapL checked all these boxes and approached RapL.
RapL checks all the boxes
RapL’s digital training and productivity solution is designed to help companies create a smooth and seamless training program for their employees. RapL’s AI-based learning model helps managers identify knowledge gaps in their workforce. It also provides training to fix those gaps. With only a 0.3-0.5% investment in learning, RapL can yield a 3x-10x ROI.
By addressing specific business problems, RapL’s platform helps companies improve their workforce’s skills and knowledge, ultimately leading to increased productivity and profitability. With its comprehensive dashboards, custom reporting, and gamified learning approach, RapL provides an engaging and effective learning experience for employees, which results in better business outcomes for the company.
RapL enabled a customized and co-branded application for this company in October 2021, and this was soon integrated into their existing systems. Through some of RapL’s unique features, we helped the company tackle their problems deftly. We also created customized content for specific topics, such as brand knowledge, objection handling, stockist coverage, etc., that were deployed through our platform.
How did RapL solve the company’s problems?
- Digital platform to streamline learning across many locations: Using a digital training solution streamlined the learning process for this company’s widely distributed workforce. Through RapL’s mobile application, all training materials were available on employees’ mobiles. This eliminated the need for in-person training arrangements, travel, etc., which significantly reduced costs and saved time. Employees could easily access the materials from anywhere at their convenient time, making training smoother and more efficient. Training is delivered via easy-to-use Android and iOS applications for use on any device.
Admin Releasing Quiz to Multiple Locations
- A mobile platform made training easy to deliver and access: Off-roll parties, such as multi-brand retailers and distributors, can be difficult to engage with. They often work with multiple brands and may be located in remote rural areas. Using RapL’s online training platform, the company could easily create and distribute training materials, making it accessible to everyone at their convenience. This increased the reach of training programs and improved the engagement of off-roll parties. It became easier to keep retailers and distributors better informed about the brand and its products. This strengthened their relationship with the company.
New Quiz Notif and Scenario
- Hierarchy-based settings made tracking easier: RapL enabled hierarchy-based settings that structured the company into smaller units. The company could create several levels and assign specific monitors to track the progress of each. These could be made into area-wise or role-wise clusters in well-organized levels. By organizing the company into these smaller units, it became easier to monitor the progress of employees. The assigned monitors could track and ensure that training requirements were completed at their respective levels. This allowed the company to easily improve the overall skill level of their workforce
Group Report + Hierarchy Report
- Custom dashboards and analytics provided complete visibility: RapL offers comprehensive dashboards that provide insights and analytics at a glance. For this company, RapL delivered customized dashboards that offered insights for different hierarchies, like user-level, group-level, and role-level. This provided managers complete visibility into the training program, which made it easy to identify knowledge gaps. Daily reports were also generated and delivered to hundreds of trainers and first-level managers. These reports were used to identify areas where employees were falling behind and needed more assistance.
Dashboards provide complete visibility
Dashboards for easy tracking and monitoring
How did the company scale their use with RapL?
The company piloted with 100 users over the course of eight weeks. It was evident that employees who had mastered all RapL topics performed well in sales. After the pilot, the company concluded to eventually lay the foundation for a larger partnership.
The company customized the platform to their specific needs and branding requirements. This flexibility meant the company could deliver a training program that aligns with their values and culture, while providing their employees with an engaging and effective learning experience.
RapL also integrates with the company’s existing platform to access and track employee progress seamlessly, without having to switch between multiple tools or platforms.
In addition, RapL brings an exciting and engaging element to the company’s existing training program through gamified learning. This approach makes training fun and interactive, encouraging employees to engage with the content and retain what they have learned.
The company has reported high activation and usage rates, which have consistently been above 80-90%. This shows that employees embrace the platform and find it valuable for their professional development
Current state and future developments
The company’s implementation of RapL’s training platform has been a success. Their training sessions are smooth and seamless. The platform is well-received by users, with high levels of satisfaction reported. Employees gain in-depth understanding of the company’s products and brands in a time-efficient way. Leaders get daily and timely insights on usage, employee progress, and knowledge gaps. Leaders and individuals can act quickly to learn and refresh the essential knowledge and skills when required.
Here are some statistics and key metrics from the company’s usage of RapL. These metrics provide a deeper insight into the different aspects of the platform’s usage.
- Activation rate: >90%
- Usage rate: >80%
- Scenario completion: >80%
- Tests passed: >50%
- Training files accessed: >70%
- Quiz completion: >85%
An important feature of the RapL platform is that it supports multiple languages. This is particularly useful for this company, as they have content in Hindi, Bangla, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and more languages. This allows the company to provide training to employees in their own native languages across India. This customization contributes to the success of the training program, making it more understandable, accessible, relevant, and engaging for employees.
RapL’s platform has multilingual capabilities
The integration of RapL with the company’s internal rewards system is another positive addition. Employees who complete the training modules are eligible for incentives like cash rewards, which provide additional motivation to improve their engagement, knowledge and skills. The managers leverage the daily scheduled report to monitor employee progress, and award incentives.
The company is currently in talks to add more features, such as personal dashboards and complete API integration.
To conclude, RapL’s solution helped this large Indian multinational consumer goods company improve the training and productivity of their retail workforce. The company was able to monitor the progress of employees and improve their skill levels. The use of a digital training solution streamlined learning across many locations, eliminating the need for in-person training arrangements and travel. The online platform made training easy to deliver and access, even for off-roll parties such as multi-brand retailers and distributors. Custom dashboards and daily reports provide complete visibility, making it easy to identify knowledge gaps and areas where employees needed more assistance.
RapL’s training and productivity solution enabled a major consumer goods company to succeed, demonstrating the effectiveness of our platform. For businesses looking to streamline their training programs and increase productivity, RapL’s customizable and engaging platform is the solution. By tailoring the platform to your organization’s specific needs and integrating it with existing systems, you can improve employee engagement and knowledge retention while driving business success. Contact us to know more.
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