Delivering flexible training options to a vast network of BSH UK and Ireland resellers

BSH is the largest manufacturer of home appliances in Europe, including well-known brands such as Neff, Bosch and Siemens. The UK home appliances business is responsible for the sales, distribution and support of those products across the UK and Ireland.

The Challenge

BSH operates through thousands of outlets across the UK and Ireland channels including electrical retailer stores, kitchen studios and merchant outlets; the size of customer organisations varies hugely from small independent retailers to large national chains.

All of these customers are supported by a network of account managers and a centralised training team.

The challenge was further complicated by the fact that not all customers stock all brands, and that some customers have “privileged status”. The requirement then was to create a single online training facility for a population that would, over time, rise to more than 25,000 learners.

This Totara platform needed to be robust and capable of delivering customer-focused learning that included face to face, virtual classroom and asynchronous courses alongside a range of static technical resources.

The Solution

Following initial discussions around the many and various user journeys, focusing on partner types, product categories and various tiers of learning, enabled the team to devise a detailed privileges matrix. For example: Neff “Master Partners” would need to see Neff product training and little else, but they would have access to extra brand related content due to their master partner status. This requirement was repeated across multiple customer types and brands. Above all, given that most learners were accessing the site electively the user journey had to be clear and easy to follow.

Totara learn was chosen as the platform for:

• its flexible and intuitive user interface
• the ability to create audiences and link them to appropriate dashboards
• the ability to segment product training of all types by audience and category.

The first part of the solution was to identify the key audiences and understand which categories of training they should see. By using a combination of hidden categories and audience-based privileges, BSH were able to tailor the user experience for some 24 separate audiences. This, coupled with a set of highly customised dashboards – again assigned to audiences – ensured that every learner category received exactly the training opportunities they needed.

A full suite of learning activities has been utilised to give a rich learning experience, ranging from technical information organised into resource libraries, to virtual and IRL events to self-paced e-learning modules. Many of the courses and programmes leading to the award of badges. Finally, a series of user tools would develop so new joiners would be guided through the site on first access.

Results

Since launch, the BSH Academy has become an exemplar “extended enterprise” site with over 6,000 reseller user accounts spanning across 1,000+ customer organisations and 4,000+ locations. There has been more than 44,000 course enrolments and 500+ resource entries within their feature library, demonstrating the on-mass adoption of the platform.

The BSH training team are now reaching their huge dealer network more efficiently and more effectively and are planning to significantly increase that reach over the coming months.

“We know that the greater product and brand knowledge our customers have the better the buying experience for our end consumer. Our challenge was how to reach customers that are not able to make the journey to our showrooms for face-to-face training and then during lockdown we saw a significant rise in our Virtual Classroom numbers which opened up a willingness to engage in digital training. 

It was time for us to get digitally fit for the future and the decision was made to invest in a new training portal.  The aim was to drive engagement and understanding of our products via a flexible training approach for the UK and Ireland and across all of our sales channels.  Partnering with Cortexa has enabled us to do just this so now no matter the type or size of business or the time our trade partners have to allocate to training, there is something for everyone.”

– Nicola Griffin, Retail Channel Training & Development Manager