Villeroy & Boch

Background

Villeroy & Boch (V&B) is the world’s leading ceramics provider, creating both premium tableware and designer bathrooms while employing 8,000 people worldwide.

Challenge

In response to a challenging sales environment and research that suggests 85% of purchase motivation for premium products is emotional, a new sales training program was created, focusing on identifying emotional purchase motivation and promoting the Villeroy & Boch brand throughout the sales conversation.

The core objective here was the creation of Brand Ambassadors; customers that proactively recommend the V&B brand and stores.

Solution

A blended learning approach, combining online Social Learning (delivered via the Learning Pool Platform), face-to-face workshops, webinars and monthly newsletters was conceived to deliver the brand ambassador program.

To ensure the effective application of learning within this format, a variety of training methods were used including short films, role play and simulating real-life sales situations.

Data from the entire blended learning experience was tracked using xAPI. But logistical constraints meant that not every store could receive the full program. This gave V&B an opportunity to run an A/B split campaign – giving some stores just the online social learning component and others the full ‘blended’ approach.

 

Response

“I came thinking I knew everything about selling and customer service. This course has opened my mind to new ways. The course was rewarding and it shows us that we must always challenge ourselves on our professionalism towards the customer.”

Course Participant, Brand Ambassador Program, Villeroy & Boch

“The results prove that the Brand Ambassador Program is leading our stores in the right way to higher customer conversion and sales success.”

Erik Walter, International Retail Director

Results

Using the xAPI, data from both the learning activities and store performance data (held in SAP) was fed into the Learning Pool Learning Record Store (LRS) to measure Customer Conversion and Average Transaction Value (ATV). This was then benchmarked against the previous year’s sales data.

The ‘A’ sample represented stores that took just the online ‘social’ component. The ‘B’ sample benefited from the full blended program.

Whilst both sets of stores improved, it was the B sample that took the biggest leap forward. Stores in the ‘B’ sample performed 5.41% better than the ‘A’ sample stores when it came to Average Transaction Values.

Again the ‘B’ sample outperformed on customer conversion rate; up 1.17% on historical results, an improvement of 0.62% on the ‘A’ sample.

Whilst these numbers may seem small at first glance, they are far from insignificant in a retail environment. Taking into account real sales numbers, the blended program returned €2.5m on the training investment – no mean feat in today’s challenging sales environment.