InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Friday, March 18, 2005

InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Friday, March 18, 2005

CompUSA gets up to 25% jump in sales thanks to e-learning program

At 10% of the cost of off-site training classes, computer products retailer CompUSA Inc. is teaching its employees selling and customer service techniques with web-based educational courses that have led to a 10-25% increase in sales for the product categories featured in the courses, Tom Labadie, director of team member training and development, tells InternetRetailer.com.

The training courses, part of the CyberScholar Retail Learning Network from Creative Channel Services, are making it easier to distribute the right kind of training at the right time to the people who need it most, Labadie says. “When a new product comes out, we have the training out before it hits the market,” he says. “So as soon as it’s in stores, our employees are trained to sell it.”

Employees are also learning how to better cross-sell products within a category. In some cases, Labadie says, sales of products featured in online courses did not increase following the training. “But then we saw that sales throughout that product category were immensely higher after the training, because employees were learning how to sell the complete line,” he says.

In addition to saving on the costs of traveling to off-site training courses, the online system offers more flexibility in presenting multiple types of training that cater to the different learning needs of employees, Labadie says. At an off-site event, for example, there are usually some employees who have difficulty learning in lectures. The online courses provide these employees with a chance to learn in a more interactive training session at their own desktop and according to their own schedule.

But CompUSA is also careful not to rely too much on the web-based courses, Labadie says. It tried offering only online courses for a while, but then realized that employees would benefit from a mixture of training environments. The retailer now offers the most technical training, including demonstrations of new product features, in the online courses. Sales techniques are often presented in TV broadcasts in classroom settings. And major announcements of new product lines or technology are still presented at off-site events.

The CyberScholar system is now also being rolled in a new version at Good Guys Inc., a unit of CompUSA that sells home entertainment products as well as computers. The two chains expect to learn from each other how to best utilize the online training system, Labadie says.