A Pet Care Retail Adopts Continuous Training to Dominate the Indian Niche Market
This pet care startup extended to be a strong market player, with an unwavering focus on building the competence of its people and increasing productivity. With its retail footprint expanding across 12 cities, this company has established itself as a challenger brand to be reckoned with. To further strengthen its position, the company increased the frontline employee headcount from 350 to 450.
Naturally, it was then host to the regimen that accompanies the hectic activity of getting the frontline workers to capacity. Inconsistent customer experience, varying degrees of product knowledge, dynamic standards of operating procedures across stores, etc. were just some of the several challenges they faced.
Here is the story of how RapL ensured that every new and existing frontline representative presented a uniform standard of customer delight across all their pet care stores.
The mechanics? Microlearning. It enhances learning and performance in the most efficient way through short, engaging content. It is focused on empowering workers with the right product knowledge and soft skills required to provide an exceptional customer experience.
‘Pawing’ Their Way Into The Indian Pet Care Story
The founder of this leading pet care brand always believed that
“(sic) pets are family. And family deserves only the best. Pets are at the heart of everything we do, and all our offerings are a celebration of who they are and our relationship with them. Every day we work toward and in tandem with our vision statement – ‘For every home to experience the joys of raising pets as family’.”
With a mission driven culture, the brand lived and breathed the highest form of care that could be demonstrated towards pets. A key ingredient in this pursuit was an obsession with rewarding customer experience.
It is gratifying to delight customers with an experience that stems from domain knowledge and behaviors. Customer experience is of course a vital cog to persuade brand loyalty. The challenge, however, is to execute this contrastingly challenging endeavor across 12 highly diverse cities in India.
This idea of expansion across the country led to an increased need for frontline sales personnel. These staff were from different backgrounds, with different levels of education and limited knowledge of pet care. Managing the storefront with such staff became the ultimate challenge for the brand.
That’s when they connected with RapL.
Enter RapL
“It’s time for an LMS” is the default response to most circumstances, similar to the one faced by this brand. And that’s definitely for good reason! An LMS allows learning teams to collect, create, organize and distribute learning content from one central platform with the motive to serve the enterprise.
But the pet care brand knew that the strengths of an LMS are also the Achilles Heel, especially in the context of their business.
The following are some reasons why they felt a traditional LMS would not cut it for them.
Training Delivery
The pro-desktop LMS was highly unfavorable for day-to-day usage for both their customer care and retail sales staff. This is because staff were constantly pacing the sales floor or on the phones, busy attending to their customers.
Learning Format
With aggressive product launches, their business context was turning increasingly dynamic by the day. Their Learning and Development team did not have the luxury of time to create elaborate learning content modules LMS allows for.
New Hire Ramp
With multiple product offerings for different breeds of dogs and cats, the new hires need to be ramped up quickly and efficiently. They need to be experts in domain knowledge to execute their mission, “pets are family”.
Analytics and Insights
Traditional systems did not have a metric to measure employee knowledge gaps. This was crucial to understand the employee bandwidth and learning speed. This helps companies arrange relevant training at frequent intervals, to increase retention and productivity.
RapL was a powerful solution to all the challenges of a traditional LMS with its already existing pain points.
Light weight for users
A light weight mobile microlearning system that is simple, convenient and personalized to employees was exactly what this pet care brand needed. With this new system, employees learned at their own pace, without disrupting their work schedule, ultimately resulting in improved performance and better customer service.
Business scenarios streamed in real time
Chunking the old ways of elaborate slides and classroom lectures, the domain knowledge and soft skills pillars were broken down into bite-sized scenarios. These scenarios were easily digestable and fun to learn.
Using RapL, learning teams can comprehend various business scenarios at the speed of business evolution.
Detailed Analytics
The learning and development team now feels liberated. This feeling comes from quantified evidence of all skill gaps across their employee footprint, broken down to the last mile representative. They know exactly the topics each employee has mastered and the ones that need intervention.
Such an elaborate analytical landscape has empowered the brand to drive personalized learning programs for employees to excel in their craft.
Gamification-led Usage
RapL provides a real time leaderboard with details of points earned. This encourages transparency, friendly competition, and motivation among employees to adopt and use RapL. Besides individual leaderboards, there is also a team leaderboard. This highlights the points earned per team.
Sidenote: RapL has garnered rave reviews over the Play Store. Take a look.
The Way Forward
It started as an initiative for customer service and retail sales employees. Now, it has spread its wings to the brands’ Franchise Owners, Product Managers, and Content Marketing team
All teams are expected to be domain experts on various aspects of pet care. This involves details starting from dog breeds to complex topics, like the right way to massage pets for instant relaxation. This reinforcement across multiple divisions proved to be the only way this pet care brand could realize its core mission “pets are family”.
A happy note to end with:
Happy pet care staff; Happy pet parents; Happy pets.
