CASE STUDIES

Michael Hill

Clarity in training excellence

Michael Hill is Australasia’s pre-eminent retail jewellery chain with over 250 stores throughout New Zealand & Australia. They also support several stores in Canada and the USA. For many years Michael Hill has delivered its ‘Professional Selling System’ (PSS) program to its sales team as a self-paced program with paper based learner guides and workbooks. It was designed to provide employees with information relating to core operating procedures, product knowledge, selling skills and administration skills.

Challenge
The process was reliant on store mangers delivering training in a timely manner, analysis of answers was subjective and time consuming and there were also difficulties in identifying knowledge gaps. Through mystery shopping, sales analysis and anecdotal evidence from senior staff, it had become apparent that many staff were not following the sales and service standards as outlined in the guides and workbooks. The old method of imparting selling skills to frontline staff had become ineffective so Workstar set about to re-engage and capture the attention of Michael Hill’s sales professionals.

In creating an online version of the PSS course Michael Hill aimed to:
• increase new employees’ confidence levels before they start selling by giving
   them a solid base level of knowledge and expectations
• ensure the consistency of the sales process across the entire network
• refresh the knowledge and skills of all employees in order to ensure uniformity
• identify knowledge gaps
• enable all levels of management to report of training status of each employee

Solution
Workstar created ‘Clarity’ – the cornerstone of a blended learning solution to streamline the delivery of the ‘Professional Selling System’. Key to this new initiative was the desire to improve consistency of delivery, to enhance learning effectiveness and create greater transparency thanks to clear and accurate reporting.

Clarity is the learning and communications platform (LMS) that drives the blended learning approach. It’s an online platform, accessible by all staff members in all markets, and has become the hub of all learning at Michael Hill!

Within this framework Michael Hill sought to engage learners through the use of interactive video scenarios, system simulations, practice activities and a high level of graphical content and design. Clarity utilises quizzes to check and assess understanding, as well as in-store training tasks where sales professionals can apply the skills they have learnt.

Results
Within the first four months of launching the ‘Clarity’ online training platform, Michael Hill has seen the following staff results:
• 11,000 module completions
• 10,500 quiz completions
• An average score of 80% in the quizzes
• 12,000 offline training tasks completed
• An average of 600 unique logins per week

In April 2010 Clarity received the highest accolade in its class, being awarded Platinum status as “Best Sales Training Program” in the LearnX Asia Pacific awards.  This award acknowledges the strong partnership of Workstar’s innovation in instructional design with Michael Hill’s high level of commitment to quality training.

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