Crutchfield pushes training to call center reps in new e-learning effort
Online training for retail employees is a Holy Grail-–in theory, it can save retailers time and cost over classroom training for associates on products, procedures and policies. But does it always? In the experience of automotive and consumer electronics retailer Crutchfield’s, which supports both online and catalog sales with a web-enabled call center, the answer may depend on who’s bearing the cost of e-training development and deployment.
This month, Crutchfield is making online product training courses provided by some of its manufacturer partners available to its sales associates. On top of their regular classroom training, Crutchfield employees volunteer to take the courses on their own time. At the end of the month, Crutchfield will track any correlation between completion of the courses and any change in that associate`s sales performance.
Crutchfield’s call center sales staff, which numbers about 90, must complete an intensive 12-week classroom training course as new hires. When Crutchfield investigated putting that training online in an e-learning format a few years ago, it proved to be cost- prohibitive, technology training manger Peter Logan tells Internet Retailer. “At that time, the cost was something like $10,000 to $20,000 per finished hour of training, and our new hire training goes eight hours a day for 12 weeks,” Logan says. “It was really expensive for us to get all the information to the vendor and then hand-hold them through the process to get the product we really want.” Logan also points out that materials already developed by Crutchfield internally, its catalogs and its web site, are valuable reference sources for trainees. “We’ve already got that content so there is no sense in trying to recreate a lot of that product training," he says.
But with new products and product enhancements rolling out so frequently in the consumer electronics industry, Crutchfield also gets visits at least once a week from manufacturer reps who take to the road to explain new product features and keep call center agents up to date. Crutchfield has now started making some of that training available to its agents, on their own time, through links to manufacturer-sponsored online courses on a new internally-facing online resource page. “The manufacturers are thinking they can streamline their own training costs and that maybe they don’t have to deploy an army of trainers,” says Logan. “They are just as curious as we are to see if, after people take an online course, there is an increase in sales.”
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