Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 47)

Provost said Whirlpool relied heavily on Vuepoint’s (now CERTPOINT Systems) learning solutions to educate both sides on products that only recently had belonged to the competition. The tools helped the company track the kinds of learning consumed and assess associates’ comprehension of the content. “Early on, there was an urgent need to educate Maytag people on Whirlpool products and Whirlpool people on Maytag products,” he said. “One of the challenges for us is that we have a large brand portfolio and then a large product portfolio in each of those brands. Conservatively, any individual channel could have six brands and nine categories per brand that it has to be up to speed on. “Tailoring the content to the right audience and tracking the people who had taken certain courses and their scores was a big part of that early integration work. Beyond that, it was a matter of management understanding how Vuepoint was being used for employee integration. We primarily use [our system] for featureand function-benefit training on products. Brand knowledge would be second. Then, it would be service training and installation.” In terms of delivery, much of the learning has been moved to a virtual format to reduce expenditures incurred from travel to live educational events, Provost said. Although the salespeople coming over from Maytag have benefited significantly from this development, the initiative began before the merger. “Like so many, we had high costs associated with face-to-face training,” Provost said. “It was so expensive to have teams of people going out and bringing people in — we had to find a better way to leverage the money we had for training. I remember one of Vuepoint’s original pitches was about speed and frequency. We could touch so many more people so much faster with a tracking mechanism that told us who had taken the training and who hadn’t, as well as how they scored, what the pain points were and what issues needed to be revisited. “That brought a level of accountability to our investments that we had not experienced before. It was a wonderful solution at a time when we — David Provost CASE STUDY continued on page 52 47 August 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer “Like so many, we had high costs associated with face-to-face training. It was so expensive to have teams of people going out and bringing people in — we had to find a better way to leverage the money we had for training.” http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - August 2007

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