Villeroy & Boch

Villeroy & Boch - helping create brand ambassadors with elearning

Villeroy & Boch (V&B) is the world's leading ceramics provider, creating both premium tableware and designer bathrooms while employing 8000 people worldwide.
About

We delivered a blended learning approach, combining online social learning (delivered via Stream LXP), face-to-face workshops, webinars and monthly newsletters to deliver the brand ambassador program for Villeroy & Boch.

8,000
UK
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Villeroy & Boch (V&B) is the world's leading ceramics provider, creating both premium tableware and designer bathrooms while employing 8000 people worldwide. Using Stream LXP and Learning Locker®, V&B were able to demonstrate a €2.5m return on their training investment, using the Experience API (xAPI).

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 programme 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 Stream LXP), face-to-face workshops, webinars and monthly newsletters was conceived to deliver the brand ambassdor programme.

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 tracking using xAPI. But logistical constraints meant that not every story could receive the full programme. 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.

“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

The outcome

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

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