Target Training
How Equip Outdoor Have Scaled & Personalised Their Training Through Myagi
Equip Outdoor Technologies specialise in the design and marketing of technical outdoor equipment. Their experienced and enthusiastic team develop innovative designs, manufactured to the highest standard and brought to market throughout the world. They have been using Myagi to train sales associates in their key UK accounts about their brands Rab & Lowe Alpine.
The Problem
Like many other companies selling into multi-brand retailers, Equip Outdoor were becoming increasingly worried about the amount of staff turnover in the industry. Delivering live training was, and still is a core focus for Training Manager Gemma Dyer, but the frustration for Equip Outdoor was that knowledge around their products was constantly flowing away from their resellers as sales associates were perpetually leaving the industry.
Retail is changing—shops used to retain their staff a lot, lot longer, and now people are going into retail, and they might only be there for a year, maybe six months. Because the turnaround of staff is becoming greater and the age of the staff is becoming younger, there was a real need to find a way of supporting our live training events in a way that would maximise knowledge retention and amplify the message we were delivering. We may only get the chance to meet someone once or maybe never before they have left the business. We needed repeatable training that was accessible outside of our live training programme.
- Gemma Dyer
Similarly, due to the average transaction value and technical aspects of Equip Outdoor items, Gemma knew that sales associates had to burden a responsibility of knowledge to truly engage the customer. Explaining effectively why each item was so unique and beneficial to their requirements was something that could not be done without frequent and reinforced training.
"A customer may go into an outdoor retail store with as much as 250 pounds in their back pocket ready to spend. They’ll ask a member of staff "What waterproofs should I buy?" And that member of staff is meant to be able to guide them through that process. It’s very, very different than say traditional grocery retail where you just go and grab what you need.
The sales associates on the shop floor have actually got quite a heavy responsibility in order to be able to converse with these customers confidently and provide a level of service that you don't often find in other retail establishments. We wanted to help them with this the best way we could."
Why Online Was The Best Solution For Equip Outdoor
Equip Outdoor were looking for a solution that could house their knowledge base and training materials that was accessible 24/7, and integratable with their live training demonstrations.
"I think people realised in the changing face of retail the need for something that bridged that gap of downtime between people coming in and out of store to do training. We also needed to house content produced by the brands that isn’t necessarily just consumer-facing sales materials, but something truly focussed on the sales associate" added Gemma.
Through Myagi, Equip Outdoor were able to upload training content on both their Rab and Lowe Alpine products and distribute it to relevant retailers that were already in the platform and also invite those accounts that were not. "A lot of the accounts we deal with were already on Myagi, so it seemed a good fit for everybody to be migrating towards a single use platform where you’ve got a bible of encyclopedic knowledge to help that initial setup of the sales associate."
Gemma who came from a teaching background also found that Myagi enabled her to add in the content types and requirements that she knew were most effective for the learning process;
It’s really important that it’s a bite-size program. So whichever platform we chose it had to be something that enables you to go on very, very quickly, with access that is really simple for the sales associates. Making sure that once the sales associate has gone through their initial training video, they’ve got some recap points and questions to test them was also critical. That’s the reinforcement side of things, it means staff actually having to engage their brain to remember what they’ve just seen. That was a really key criteria for us and Myagi ticked all the boxes.
Using Myagi
After an audit of content that Equip Outdoor were already using, Gemma recognised the need to shorten some of their videos down into more digestible clips of under 2 minutes; "It’s got to be snippets. It’s got to be bite-sized. It’s got to be engaging. Over the last 18 months it’s really started to develop." Putting the sales associate front and centre of their content planning, Gemma added, "we wanted to create something that you actually want to watch for a minute or a minute and a half— we picked out the key points that we would always hit home in a training session, and we decided to break them down into modules and then lessons within those modules, and that’s where my teaching background comes in. We always consider what will this look like for a sales associate with no prior knowledge? Why would they want to watch it? What key points do they need to do their job effectively."
Getting that content into Myagi was no challenge for Equip Outdoor; "The actual platform itself, I think it has really, really improved over the three years that I’ve been looking at it. You guys are always really, really quick to respond to feedback as well, so any sort of suggestions that we have to make things better...I think a lot of the suggestions that we made have come to fruition, which is amazing. Distributing training across our accounts used to be a challenge but now I can just select which channels I want it on just from creating one module, which is really easy." There has already been 1850 hours worth of training completed through the Myagi platform, with Rab & Lowe Alpine content engagement and quality score (as marked by sales associates) is consistently in the top bracket amongst competing brands. Gemma has access to all this information through Myagi’s analytics suit.
By being able to track performance of Equip Outdoor content across accounts and individual stores, Gemma has been able to deliver ‘Target Training’:
...the way that we’re going to start to use it now is actually Target Training. So with the sign-ups per door, I can see which people are doing well or which people have left feedback, for example. People that haven’t done quite so well or stores that aren’t performing quite so well, we could ring up and say, “Right guys. I’ve seen that you’ve had to go at this module, but would you like some extra help?” And we can target train in that way, which is amazing!
We're Ready.
If you are a brand or retailer and want to know more about Myagi's online learning network we'd love to hear from you- so let's continue the conversation. Use the small circle chat button at the bottom right of the page to speak to one of our team
