With 830 Lai Lai convenience stores in Taiwan and more than 9,000 convenience store outlets island-wide, Taiwan is the convenience store capital of the world. The market is saturated, so every month the company launches different promotions and pre-sale activities, but because the promotion period is short and stores are dispersed, the company needs to find a way to increase sales and survive in this competitive sales market.

With the company's convenience store outlets dispersed island-wide, it is very costly to conduct face-to-face training for store employees. As a result, most employees lack the competencies needed to successfully promote these new products, including

  • the skills and knowledge of the promotions and pre-sale activities, such as the Mother's Daycake promotion, Moon cake promotion, or the Dragon Boat Festival promotion
  • the knowledge of Web 2.0 solutions to quickly identify experts, gain the implicit knowledge,and share the experts' know-how
  • the ability to increase the revenue of new promotion and pre-sale items
  • the aptitude to successfully promote new products.

To resolve the issues, Lai Lai needed to:

  • develop a training model that can be quickly delivered, updated, and can lower sales training costs
  • help employees to quickly learn new products, promotions, and selling techniques
  • share "best sales" data with the rest of the employees and stores in the company's database
  • make the courses available anytime, anywhere,and repeatably to increase sales.

Training solution

The company implemented an LMS with authoring tools, rapid e-learning content, simulations, and Web 2.0 collaboration tools to help employees increase sales on new promotions and pre-sale orders. Face-to-face classes were not convenient since the stores are dispersed and only the store managers could attend the training due to the travel expenses and store shift arrangement. To increase training efficiency, shorten time-to-competence, and lower the cost of training - such as traveling expenses, time away from the stores, and classroom expenses - the company decided to implement e-learning in July 2005.

It took five stages and more than four years to successfully implement all phases of the program.

Stage 1: To quickly deliver promotion and pre-sales information to the employees, the company created online e-learning courses in 2006. Through the LMS, all the employees could have access to the information anytime and anywhere.

Stage 2: When the employees had adapted to the LMS, the company purchased interactive rapid e-learning tools to produce e-learning courses, and online testing. It increased the speed of course downloads and course interactivity.

Stage 3: The company implemented a multi-rater assessment system in September 2007 to cover Level 1 to Level 3 evaluation.

Stage 4: The company developed a scenario-based sales simulation in 2008 to give employees the chance to learn in a simulated environment.

Stage 5: To share best practices among the employees, impart knowledge, enrich the company knowledge database, and create an informal and self-directed learning environment, the company incorporated Web 2.0 concepts (Pro Radio - Voice of Experts podcasts) in 2009.

"I share what I learn from Pro Radio - Voice of Experts podcasts with different stores, and discuss ways to improve the sales," said one district manager.

The training solution helped both the employees and the organization. The training increased the company's bottom line while helping the employees learn different sales techniques, be more innovative, share and exchange sales techniques, connect different store employees, enhance personal merits, and increase self-esteem and confidence.

Results

The promotions and key products sales growth increased 5 percent in 2008, and soared to 10 percent between January and August 2009.

The return-on-investment in 2008 was 107 percent, and the ROI from January to August 2009 was 649 percent.

Between April 2009 and August 2009, almost 36,000 employees had accessed the Pro Radio - Voices of Experts podcasts, or 10 percent of all employees.

More than 93 percent of all employees - district sales managers, store managers, full-time employees, and part-time employees - have participated in the company's new product training initiative.