Domestic & General

Background

Domestic & General is a market-leading warranty company, with a worldwide presence and a proud 100-year heritage. It works with some of the world’s biggest names, providing them with product protection for a broad range of domestic appliances and consumer electronic products, ranging from televisions, washing machines and boilers to laptops, jewelry, smartphones, and tablets.

Domestic & General’s client base is made up of leading appliance manufacturers and large national retailers who either represent Domestic & General products through ‘introduction’ activity or actively sell products on their behalf. Across the client organizations, there are over 32,000 employees in more than 800 locations who need support and expertise.

Challenge

Previously, Domestic & General had operated a team of five L&D consultants who supported the learning of product knowledge, customer conversations, sales through service and compliance for all third-party clients.

The team offered predominantly face-to-face solutions, which limited their resource capability and as a result, some clients were given priority, using a large portion of the team’s time, leaving other clients with limited or sometimes no support.

With a growing client base, the existing approach simply wasn’t meeting the needs of the learners or the business. The decision was taken to enhance the Client Learning proposition to support clients towards selling the new ‘Customer First’ proposition and demonstrate an investment in clients’ operations.

Solution

Partnering with Learning Pool, Domestic & General created the Knowledge Hub; a highly engaging and simple-to-use platform that is scalable enough to reach their client organizations both nationally and internationally, also supporting the customization and personalization that each client needs.

The system comprises a range of in-house authored content and the annual scheduling of statutory and mandatory learning, including IDD legislation. Both learners and leaders can view their own learning journey objectives and self-registration reduces barriers to learning. The system supports multi-device access and creates a unified learner experience across a disparate client base.

Using the reporting dashboard, the Client Learning Team and the wider organization can access both high-level and granular learner data and analytics to evidence value, compliance, and ROI. It easily and visually tracks compliance of the 15 hours of mandatory training for individual learners, departments, and client organizations overall. The Client Learning Team has been able to use the site data to help identify trends and knowledge gaps.

Response

“Moving to digital learning has been an exciting chapter within a bigger part of our story and has helped us completely change our thinking and approach to our client learning provision.

As well as providing the essential product, compliance, and process resources, we also wanted to give our clients access to engaging and easy-to-use resources, whilst ensuring leaders have full transparency on how their teams are progressing. Our clients have been particularly impressed with the ‘look and feel’ of the site and have commented on how engaging, efficient, and straightforward the site is to use. These are important criteria for us as a business and the value the site has provided our clients is evident.

We are looking forward to continuing to enhance the learner experience with the support of Learning Pool and have a clear strategy in place to expand, develop, and deepen our digital learning provision as our client partnerships continue to grow.”

Dharmesh Chauhan, Senior Online L&D Consultant

Outcome

The Knowledge Hub has had a significant impact on the learning that is now available to the modern, digitally-enabled learners within its client base. Within the first 18 months, the site achieved 16,000 course enrolments across the 23 learning programs. There have been over 20 new clients launched over the first year and over 2,700 new learners registered.

The new digital approach offers many performance improvements and cost savings compared to the old ‘analog’ way of doing things. However, the biggest impact has been Domestic & General’s ability to offer a blended learning provision to their client organizations. Notably:

• Easy deployment of their ‘annual essentials’ program – a set of statutory and mandatory learning resources tailored to their client organizations. Since launch, compliance levels are at an all-time high with a 100% take-up rate across all compliance modules and a 98% average course pass rate.
• Increased focus on leadership engagement – a reduction in face-to-face learning has consequently freed up L&D consultancy resources and enabled D&G to drive blended leadership coaching initiatives.
• Improved onboarding – resources being available 24/7 has negated the need for last-minute site visits to upskill new starters. Updates to product and regulatory content now deployed instantly, ensuring all learners have up-to-date, consistent and aligned materials in a timely manner.
• Clearer data & insight – improved electronic records, saving time with manual record-keeping and sharing of information for QA purposes. Learner evaluations are stored and analyzed which helps identify trends and gaps.