The New Zealand Outdoor and Adventure retail juggernaut, Kathmandu have 165 stores in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, and a team in North America.
That means an employee network spread over 4 continents.
In June 2018, Kathmandu went looking for a new reliable LMS to host over 2,000 users and over 100 courses — they found RedSeed!
“Our vision was to have face-to-face coaching and practical learning, in addition to traditional online learning. Our existing learning management system (LMS) was just not capable of that. And our own Learning and Development team didn’t have the resources to develop this internally.” explains Kathmandu Learning and Development Manager, Kelly Hopkins.
“We needed consistent training and reporting for our team spread across the globe.”
Hopkins and the team decided they needed to take a blended learning approach. A method that would provide consistent training content across all locations via online video, while fostering a culture of in-store one-on-one coaching after modules and giving full transparency of training engagement.
The decision
“We loved the look and feel of the RedSeed platform. We’d only ever experienced great customer service from the team so we knew the merge would be fairly stress-free.
We also saw how RedSeed’s core training content was designed specifically for retail teams and incorporated online video learning, long answer questions with coaching and feedback, and in person practical coaching activities to provide an engaging and effective blended learning experience. This was what we were after. So being able to house that on one platform, in one place, with one provider was really attractive.”
KELLY HOPKINS — Learning and Development Manager, Kathmandu
The transition
“We transitioned over 2,000 trainee user accounts 100 courses from their previous LMS. In under 6 weeks, we had completed the user data migration and successfully integrated with their custom payroll system.
One of the most valuable things was connecting the RedSeed LMS directly to their payroll system. This meant that Kelly and his team could know their user details were always in-sync and any new employees or employees recently promoted were automatically enrolled in the right learning pathways. No need for manual enrolling on their end!”
MARIUS WIUM — Senior Developer, RedSeed
Hopkins says the entire process was extremely smooth. “The RedSeed developers were quick to respond to any questions throughout the process and always kept us up to date. It was as smooth as it could have been. We even had our IT team come to us at the end of the transition to comment on how seamless the RedSeed LMS transition was.”
The launch and results
“Not only have we seen significant monetary savings but we now spend far less time following up system errors or bugs. The onboarding of new employees and enrolling them in their training is streamlined now too. As soon as an employee is hired, our payroll system speaks with RedSeed and that new hire is automatically enrolled in a learning pathway. Such a streamlined process.”
Not only have engagement levels soared, but they can now track and see a direct correlation between a stores revenue and engagement with the training platform. Stores with high engagement in the training see this reflected in their sales results.
The Kathmandu L&D team can now focus their time on strategic projects and exciting new initiatives.
Add to that, the fact that they can monitor country, regions and individual stores training performance at any given point on the LMS - their day-to-day workload has changed dramatically!
