World’s Leading Retailer –
QA also provided
training for helpdesk
bespoke application roll-out
staff based in India,
allowing them to
support queries from
the client staff. This
The client is one of the world’s leading retailers, with stores across the UK and Ireland. The company has a
needed to work within
very flexible timings, to
well-established and consistent strategy for growth, which has allowed the company to strengthen its core
take account of the
different time zone, and
UK business and drive expansion into new markets.
as many staff are shift
workers.
The challenge standard of skills. QA took account of the relatively high staff
The client had a wide range of disparate programmes in place for turnover seen in retail stores, and ensured that in some cases
tracking and stock management, but lacked a central system. there was a second coach or champion available, to make sure
Providing this new system was a massive upgrade project for the that skills weren’t lost.
company, made more complex by the inclusion of HR and
QA also provided training for helpdesk staff based in India,
customer service systems, giving staff a single point of access to
allowing them to support queries from the client staff. This needed
IT systems.
to work within very flexible timings, to take account of the different
The company described the scale of change as similar to that of time zone, and as many staff are shift workers. To account for
moving from printed price stickers to barcodes. this, QA included some weekend training.
The client already had an IT supplier in place to implement the QA’s approach to the project management of this programme took
technical change, and approached QA at the end of the account of the different approach to business in the retail sector –
development stages. They had begun to consider training and not just focusing on the core ‘Monday to Friday, 9 to 5’. Our project
had basic materials already in place. However, a process hadn’t team included a point of contact on the project available at the
been developed for delivering training to users of the system. weekend and encouraged short response times. To support our
Up to 1,000 people were to be trained at each store, and
management of the programme, a QA representative was
constraints on both their time and travel budgets meant that they
included as part of the project board.
31
needed to be trained near to their home store. QA was able to QA was able to strongly demonstrate the benefits of training and
map its training centre network to the client’s store list to identify the word-of-mouth report of the courses was so good that
the nearest centre to each store. We were also able to use the additional staff requested training. This meant that the programme
client’s Head Office training facilities for staff based at or near that was extended beyond the original timescales to allow for this to
site. QA’s national capability was very important here, and allowed be provided.
us to reduce the impact of time out of the store.
The project also presented a very short timescale with the first
session due to take place on 21st July 2008 and the training to
be completed by the end of August.
The solution
To ensure that such a high number of staff were effectively
trained, QA designed a ‘cascade’ system, creating a number of
different streams. A lead group of 40 people were chosen to be
coaches, responsible for a group of stores. A further 950 people
were selected as ‘champions’ of the training and system.
QA first trained the coaches, and they had responsibility for
making sure the champions attended the training. Staff at Head
Office were also going to be using the back-end system, and
needed a clear understanding of how this worked.
Champions received a full day of training, including hands-on practice
with the systems, with exercises. This took a very practical approach to
ensure they were able to immediately start using the system. The
afternoon of the training day included an understanding of ‘what does
this mean for you’, delivered by instructors with experience in
customer services skills. This helped to ensure that the team gained a
positive approach to the system introduction, which would be passed
on to other staff.
End-user training was delivered to the 980 staff at Head Office, in a
three-hour, classroom-based course.
Providing a consistent level of skills was very important, as
successful introduction of the system relied on everyone using it
properly. All staff were trained to the same level – and particular
care was taken to make sure that Head Office staff met the base
“QA was able to strongly demonstrate the benefits of
training and the word-of-mouth report of the courses
was so good that additional staff requested training.”
Contact us on: 0845 757 3888 info@qa.com www.qa.com
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