Lotus LearningSpace Starts Famous Footwear Employees Off on the Right Foot
Famous Footwear has a clear corporation mission: create a shopping
experience that always makes the customer feel good. But with 825 (and growing)
stores in 49 states and 8,500 employees, you can't just write that down on a
piece of paper and say, "Do this." If you want to make it happen, you need a
really effective training program.
When I joined the company a little
over a year ago, the training department was poised to update its encyclopedic,
blue-screen reading and testing program. This technology, which was state-of-the
art a few years ago, still has the lingering virtue of being able to provide
self-paced, in-store instruction, but it isn't lively and interactive enough to
engage Famous Footwear's up-and-coming employee base of 18-24 year-olds (the
average age for sales associates) reared on multi-media entertainment and the
Internet. Our program was also expensive to update. Whenever we made changes
in-house, it would take three to six months to release them to every
store.
Lotus LearningSpace Provides Higher Engagement, Lower Cost of
Ownership
We turned to Lotus Premium Business Partner Learning
Innovations - experts in LearningSpace Technology as well as course design - to
help us build a new four-step training course we named Steps to Success. Unlike
the previous generation of text-based courseware, LearningSpace programs provide
a high degree of interactivity and engagement that literally transforms the
learning environment and elevates training to a whole new level. With Steps to
Success , we are able to achieve tremendous strategic benefits
enterprise-wide:
Convey the corporate culture in an exciting and dynamic way.
With its embedded video, audio, and colorful graphics, this course appeals to young,
media-savvy people and often feels more like entertainment than training.
Shift the focus from compliance to productivity in the learning
environment.
By including self-assessment exercises but avoiding
school-type testing, we encourage people to look at their own daily productivity
and determine when they need to re-train for particular tasks.
Present positive role models.
Some managers are great salespeople,
some are great at operations - and this shows up in their staff. The course
provides some consistency.
Create a flexible learning environment.
When you take a
computer-based course, you sit by yourself in a back room, and you're not
getting a chance to observe, practice and get feedback, which are key to the
learning process. So our course lets new employees spend a little time on the
computer, take a break and work on the floor, and then come back for more.
Relieve managers of training responsibility.
Retail has the
highest turnover rate and the lowest margins in the world, so time and funds for
staffing are limited. Some of our stores open with just one manager, who is
usually the top salesperson. Providing just-in-time training for sales
associates was a priority so that we could free up more of our managers' time
for selling, merchandising, and other management tasks.
Get sales associates up and running quickly.
Our stores carry
multiple major brands of men's women's, and kids' shoes, including athletic
shoes. We stock thousands of pairs, plus hundreds of sundry items. So new
salespeople - and keep in mind there's a high turnover - have to pick up a lot
of knowledge in a short time. And we don't just want them to put shoes on our
customers. This course shows them that when someone walks in the door, it's
their job to get the customer excited about our product selection, and to ensure
that the entire sales transaction leaves the customer feeling good about
shopping at Famous Footwear.
LearningSpace Provides Excitement, Ownership
Lotus LearningSpace
technology is a container that you can enhance to create a course as dynamic and
interactive as you want. For example, to teach basic sales techniques in Step
One, the training module for new employees, we play a video clip of a sales
situation, then run text at the bottom of the screen asking, "What did the sales
associate do wrong?" We also have checkboxes that pop up on the side: "They
failed to greet"; "They didn't smile"; "They didn't make eye contact." By using
a mix of media, you can involve all the learner's senses and pull them into the
scenario.
And a big bonus is that we have complete ownership of our
course. Good training evolves as your organization evolves, and with
LearningSpace, it's easy to keep pace with changing business models. In fact, we
regard this technology as a valuable part of our infrastructure. With templates
created for us by Learning Innovations, my staff can develop course material and
update information quickly and inexpensively. Because it's online, we can just
pump it down through our 56KB pipeline and get it out right away to our
networked store PC's. In retail, things change at the drop of a hat, so this
kind of flexibility is a huge LearningSpace benefit.
Supports Focus on Productivity
The launch of Steps One and Two of Steps to Success
coordinates with the rollout of our "Link" system, a comprehensive front-to-back
solution for our stores that includes eMail; end of day, start of day, time and
attendance, and point of sales reports; manuals; an electronic interviewer; and
customer counters. A lot of these are Notes applications, and everything runs
off an IBM AS/400, so we knew Lotus LearningSpace would work well in this
environment.
Once we've rolled out to all 825 stores this summer, we'll
look more closely at productivity. We currently calculate sales per hour and
conversion-to-sales figures, but "Link" enables us to monitor individuals and
see when they need additional training.
Right now, people are very
excited about this new course. They recognize that they're getting a whole new
learning environment with ongoing training to refresh their skills and do a
better job. And thanks to Lotus technology, we can make sure it's always
available when they need it - at any time, in any store!
Susan Pekowsky,
Director of Training and Development
Famous Footwear
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