No1 for Customer Care by empowering and engaging the team at Boots UK.
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No1 for Customer Care by empowering and engaging
the team at Boots UK.
In recognition of what was achieved
when a small in-house learning
technology team had a clear corporate
vision but limited resources to respond to
an increase in demand from its 100,000+
users, Boots UK were awarded Gold at
the eLearning Awards 2012 – Internal
Project Team of the year. They are also
one of the top performing learning
companies as defined by the Towards
Maturity Index.
Boots UK responded to the needs of its
21st Century workforce by aligning the
strategic goals with engaging elearning
practices to become No1 for customer
care in its market sector.
Top performing learning company, Boots UK has responded to the needs of its 21 Century
workforce by creating an effective e-learning system that encourages learning and ensures
its market dominance in the UK across 3,000 stores and with100,000 learners.
Starting strong
Boots UK first launched its e-learning program in February 2007 with a small in-house team
of 6 members covering LMS and infrastructure, design and development and the HR
Technology and e-learning Manager. Despite their size the HR Technology & eLearning
Team have had a significant impact on the business and its 100,000+ learners. The scale of
their programme speaks volumes, between 2007 and June 2012 they have had over 7.1
million module accesses and they produce approximately 60 new bespoke modules
internally every year plus updates to existing packages. More importantly, the impact on
productivity, sales and efficiency speak louder still.
Boots’ 21st Century challenges
Boots UK’s business objectives are to be the world’s best pharmacy-led health and beauty
retailer and to champion everyone’s right to feel good, thereby continuing the culture and
ethos first laid down by its founder John Boot in 1894.
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To achieve this, the business laid down five strategic goals to underpin everything it did and
by aligning the e-learning activities with those goals, the eLearning team ensured buy-in for
the program:
L&D challenges
The most important was the fact that unlike many businesses, users do not have
their own PCs. They must come off the busy shop floor into a small back office with a
shared PC.
As the pace of retail business increased, the usual development time of eight weeks
to design, script and build a module proved inappropriate for the requests to support
new product developments (NPDs). With the rapid increase in demand for e-learning,
it was essential to streamline the developmental process.
Keeping up to date was also a challenge. Since starting to produce content in 2007,
tools, learning techniques, content relevance and design had evolved and modules
needed reflect that to ensure engagement.
Although the stores loved e-learning, feedback showed the generic content meant
that staff found it difficult to determine what to focus on each month. It was time to
change to a more tailored approach.
There was a need to put in place a mechanism to support performance development
with a change from formal on-the-job training to self-management and learning from
others.
Overcoming the challenges and making it happen
1) E-learning aligned to strategic goals
The buy-in of senior management and the alignment of all their e-learning activity with their
corporate strategic goals are at the heart of Boots UK’s e-learning strategy. The range of
product knowledge, skills and process based e-learning that they produce is a key
mechanism for engaging and empowering their teams to enable them to become “No1 for
customer care.” Buy-in at every level, not just management, is imperative.
2) Revolutionising content
Boots vastly improved the visual quality and pedagogical
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value of their in-house e-learning content. This was “Moving away from a dated and repetitive
reinforced by a greater variety of visual look and feel we have introduced colour,
interest and variety to our modules. This
styles, striking imagery, unregimented structure, continues to keep our store colleagues
interactions and activities, compared to their existing interested, excited and talking about each
learning material. unique module; helping to create the most
empowered and engaged team.”
The HR Technology & eLearning Team looked to make the learning experience more
relevant to how people learn or find information in their daily lives, using influences from
social networking, blogs, popular entertainment and websites. Suncare 2012 used the idea
of a dating website in which the learner matches their customer with their perfect product
based upon their summer profile.
Before
After
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3) Streamlined development process and timelines
To ensure that they remained responsive to both the needs of learners and the business,
they embraced the goal of being stronger, simpler and more efficient. They devised a new
rapid methodology to produce short, sharp modules with a consistent navigation-structure
which their learners loved. A consistent template and guided scripting document, populated
by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), reduced build time to just one day. These simple but
impactful 5-minute e-learning modules met the need of their most important NPD launches,
equipping colleagues with the information they needed to meet Boots UK’s goals.
Existing processes were reviewed with ‘Lean’ principles in mind and they developed an
eLearning toolkit to ensure their e-learning was based upon learning requirements which
added value to the business. This amplified the learning and enabled faster project
completion.
4) Tailoring the learning experience
This year Boots have focused on moving from a generic approach to making e-learning
relevant to each user’s role which saves colleague time and consequently money. “Profiles”
are tailored to location and business area, e.g. Store Colleague, Support Office. In addition,
an “Accelerators” section (Boots term for the initiatives that support their Strategic Goals) is
part of everyone’s Learning Plan. Assigned modules support these goals to the Accelerators
so that learners can easily find these key modules and any key products/initiatives for the
month.
5) New solutions supporting performance development
A new website, ‘I Can at Boots’, was launched in April 2012 to revolutionise the way
colleagues in their Support Office access learning, development and recruitment, making
their offer feel new and different. Specifically they:
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• Created a different and inspiring look and feel that promotes exploration and
increases colleague ‘ownership’ of their personal development.
• Followed the ‘70:20:10’ framework, with a shift from formal to on-the-job learning,
self-management and learning from others
• Enabled employees to access resources based on their work level and area of
interest to make the experience personal and relevant
• Enabled students on their “Graduate Year In Industry and Work Inspiration
programmes” to access the website before joining to create energy and enthusiasm
for how Boots develop their people - something the company has never done before
6) E-learning supporting the Boots UK & Macmillan charity partnership
In 2012 Boots UK launched the Boots Macmillan Information Pharmacist e-learning. Their
pharmacists volunteer to be trained as a local source of advice and support to people
suffering with cancer. This e-learning is a major part of their training and without it the
scheme would not be possible using a face-to-face approach. This supports a strongly
aligned empowered and engaged team.
Tangible Benefits of Empowering and Engaging the Team
Over the past year Boots UK’s small HR Technology & eLearning Team has had a
significant, positive impact on the performance of Boots UK against its Strategic Goals.
Business Gains
• Boots UK L&D Helpdesk supports 95,000 users and has reduced the call numbers
from an average of 2% of daily visitors calling for support to1%. This is as a result of
their systems being more reliable and easy to use and content is better quality,
contributing towards a stronger, simpler and more efficient organisation.
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• 27,000 of colleagues (30%) completed a No7 e-learning in the month of launch,
which helped contribute towards a significant increase in sales in stores. For a cough
cold product, Boots also saw a significant increase in sales where more than 30%
had completed the e-learning.
Efficiency Gains
• The e-learning content has seen a 19% increase in accesses year on year driven by
users wanting to do more content, feeling more engaged and excited by it.
• The toolkit has enabled Boots UK’s designers to increase their production capability
by 133% compared to last year. The toolkit has enabled the design team to produce
e-learning that offers more value to the business and is more in-line with their
strategic goals. The quality has improved, production timelines have reduced and
stronger relationships have developed with their key stakeholders.
• Streamlined development processes and timelines have allowed an increase in build
efficiency and maximised on internal resource
• Created new training tools to meet the needs of their business more quickly
Staff productivity
• Stores with a tailored learning experience had an average increase of 4.4% in the
overall Customer Care Measure score and a 7.7% increase on the question about
colleagues’ product knowledge.
• The content design has been revolutionised, the learning content tailored thus
increasing user interest and engagement
• To date (July 2012) Boots UK have 186 Macmillan Information Pharmacists after just
a couple of months of the programme being live
In Summary
The learning strategy was aligned to business objectives and supported by key
stakeholders who enabled Boots UK to empower and engage over 100,000 employees
across 3,000 stores to achieve its goals of being No1 in customer care and the provider of
choice in the pharmaceutical retail sector.
The learners at Boots UK are passionate about e-learning, regularly giving modules 5 star
ratings and glowing comments on the LMS with a continuing high demand for new content.
Article written by Marnie Threapleton, Towards Maturity, as part of the e-learning age and Towards Maturity
Good practice partnership. Follow Marnie on Twitter @marniethreap
Developed by Towards Maturity. See www.towardsmaturity.org for more case studies and resourcesTips for becoming a top performing L&D department
• Ensure buy-in of senior management by clearly aligning learning activity
with corporate strategic goals and business needs
• Respond quickly without compromising quality – streamline processes
with clearly defined rapid design methodology
• Design the roll-out of learning to ensure that the learners understand their
role in the overall business – this will help ensure engagement
• Keep learning relevant –harness technology tailor programmes to
individual need based on location and business area
• Keeping content design modern – don’t be afraid to change and adapt to
ensure engagement
o incorporate social media and current technologies into the learning
experience
o Reflect modern life in learning design, e.g. references to current
popular blogs or entertainment
• Measure value against what is important to the business not to L&D –
sales, customer care, productivity rather than completion rates
• Explore how to use learning resources to create energy and enthusiasm
for new starts before joining
• Promote success stories of achievement
Developed by Towards Maturity. See www.towardsmaturity.org for more case studies and resourcesYou can also read
