Background
Carolina Lemke (CL) is a retailer of sunglasses and other optical products; they have a global presence, spanning the US, Mexico, Spain, the UK, and Israel. Liad Yeoshua, VP of Business Development at Carolina Lemke, first approached Bites in 2019, after seeking a remote training solution for sales enablement and onboarding his frontline employees.
The need
Based on his experience, Liad was confident that he could increase sales at his retail locations by at least 30% just by providing his frontline sales team with the right training and management support. However, frontline employees have been notoriously difficult to train in an effective and efficient manner. They’re almost always on-the-go and logging into the intranet or reading a long email is not part of their natural work process. As a result, frontal in-person sessions or traditional learning management systems tended to be ineffective, incurred high labor costs and capital investment, while still not delivering impactful rates of engagement.
CL has always taken pride in the fact that they are an innovative and forward-thinking brand. It was therefore important that CL engage with its employees in a manner fitting the core brand beliefs. Given his experience, Liad knew that any training solution would need to meet the very different set of needs of both frontline employees and managers. The solution would have to be engaging and effective for employees, and comprehensive yet agile for managers.
Execution
The tipping point in favor of Bites came after Liad met with two of the Bites’ founders. He appreciated the innovative approach that Bites brought to engaging and communicating with frontline employees: it was the first time he had seen a solution that took into consideration employee preferences for short engaging videos and use of existing communication channels. Despite the reality that the product was still in its early days and had not yet implemented all the features Liad would have wanted, he foresaw that he could work with the founders as a design partner to help impact the shape of the product roadmap. He was confident that with Bites he could achieve his vision of implementing a mobile-first training process that enabled his team to reach their goals.
The first project CL tackled was creating a set of content for onboarding new employees. This was especially important to Liad because he wanted to make sure that every new hire received a top-quality training experience irrespective of location. Since proper training can have a significant impact on an employee’s experience and performance, one of his goals was to institute a routine process which ensured quality control globally.
They created their onboarding playlist with Bites including a string of Bites, each one covering part of a greater topic. They took their existing training and onboarding materials (mostly in PDF and Word form) and quickly created short videos using Bites intuitive content creation app. CL was now able to create this content in-house, quickly and efficiently, as opposed to being dependent on an external supplier.
Bites becomes go-to solution for all frontline needs
“Bites is now fully entrenched in our organization and it reaches employees at every point of their training journey, from onboarding, to sales enablement training for launching new products” and the completion rates approach 100% on key training units. With initial local success, Liad then decided to work with the local CL branches to deploy Bites globally, and has had Bites translated and launched in Spain, Mexico, and Panama.
CL also uses Bites for compliance purposes, where they can embed forms for employees to complete via Bites. The Bites are delivered to employees via WhatsApp, the preferred IM channel in the regions the company operates in. “It’s just the most effective way to reach our staff. They’re already on it [WhatsApp] and we can see who completed the training and who didn’t on the manager’s dashboard”.
“It gives me a lot of confidence that the key messages are being delivered to our salespeople in the right way”, which is not the case when regional managers conduct training at their discretion.
Sales and visual merchandising
According to Liad, Bites’ content creation app makes it a great choice for sales and visual merchandising. Being able to shoot a short video on a smartphone to demonstrate the right way to set up a product display, or demo a new product, is a great asset. Once the video is filmed, it’s easy to build a training unit around that content. Ask a question, summarize with flashcards, or even request employees to take an image of their display and submit to management for verification via the dashboard.
“Blended learning”
Blended learning (a mix of digital and frontal training sessions) is also part of CL’s training process for certain aspects of sales enablement training. For example, using a frontal session to demo the sales process for a customer-favorite pair of sunglasses, and then using Bites to support and test employee understanding is an approach which has also been implemented. However, due to Covid-19, blended learning has been challenging, leading to an increased reliance on Bites as the primary training tool.
ROI
Liad estimates that the ROI of Bites has a significant impact on his bottom line, since there are high costs associated with face-to-face training (e.g. transportation costs, labor costs, opportunity cost of time spent away from the shop floor, etc.) For every day of training which is conducted via Bites instead of via frontal training, Liad estimates he saves 100,000 NIS (~ 30,000 USD) in total.
Conclusion
From starting with onboarding, to adopting Bites for sales enablement, compliance, and professional notifications, Bites has become the go-to solution for Carolina Lemke’s frontline needs. Reaching completion rates close to 100% on key trainings and a significant ROI resulting from digitizing frontal sessions, Carolina Lemke shows how impactful an innovative solution such as Bites can be. Being able to see that staff are receiving the best information and measuring their progress with the dashboard is just one reason that this strategy is really working. Additionally, at a time when contact with one’s team is limited due to social distancing, Bites enables managers to connect with their frontline employees and share engaging training content to help them master core competencies and reach their potential.