Bally offers personalised, localised learning to engage 86% of its workforce in 5 months

Bally is a Swiss luxury Brand selling shoes, accessories, and RTW for men and women.

Founded in 1851,today, Bally’s significant retail channel comprises a global network of stores, including flagship and franchise stores, outlets, duty free and wholesale channels, in key retail locations all over the world, such as Paris, Milan, London, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo.

It has been in operation since 1851, is present all over the world.

The Challenges

Bally needed a new learning experience for its retail and over heads staff.

As Bally has grown globally over the years, so too has its need for top-quality learning to ensure it remains ahead of its competitors.

Bally wanted to ensure that all employees were able to access courses via a user-friendly, on-brand platform.

The Solution

Having evaluated multiple alternatives, Bally decided to work with Totara Partner MediaTouch, owing to their flexibility, extensive customization work and previous work with another luxury retailer.

For Bally, the most important thing was creating a simple interface with responsive mobile design in mind. The challenge here was in designing a great interface while maintaining all relevant functionality, including programs and completion. Bally and MediaTouch worked in close collaboration to define the look and feel of the Bally Portal to fit in with Bally branding whilst ensuring an effective experience for all learners.

To ensure a customised learning experience Bally and MediaTouch decided to implement the Audiences functionality within Totara Learn to make sure that people with different job roles saw different parts of the LMS. This meant that all employees saw only the most relevant information to them. For instance, managers saw different resources to salespeople, creating a more targeted, tailored learning experience. Contents can also be filtered according to course progress (not started, in progress and completed) to help learners identify target areas to continue their learning path.

The Bally Portal is configured to increase access according to training completion. Once new starters have completed the Bally Brand presentation training, they gain access to the other sections of the Bally Portal, nurtured by interactive eLearning courses, videos and PDFs.

They access product information, catalogues and courses about ‘the Bally way to sell’ and more retail focused contents, giving them a comprehensive learning experience with everything they need to know to succeed as a Bally employee.

As a global brand, Bally has learners in multiple countries. For this reason, learners can choose the appropriate language in which the LMS should appear, including English, German, French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. This ensures content is available in the language the learner is most comfortable using.

Bally also requested a way for managers to access reports based on seniority. MediaTouch used the Hierarchies functionality in Totara Learn to give managers access to staff reports, with increasing levels of access for the more senior managers. This ensures all managers have access to the exact level of information they need.

The Results

The Bally Portal was launched in June 2016, and there were already more than 1,300 active users in the first five months after launch – more than 86% of Bally’s employee base.

During the project, Bally decided to extend the project for all of their employees, not just their sales staff, thus recognising that Totara Learn would be the ideal learning platform for all employees.

Bally is especially pleased with MediaTouch’s visual customisation of the platform, which now looks ‘virtually unrecognisable’ as Totara Learn. Bally and MediaTouch spent a lot of time getting this right, and all the hard work has paid off with a beautifully branded platform which reflects the luxury Bally brand. In a user survey, learners reported that the LMS meets their needs very well, and that it is very user friendly.

Bally is currently working with MediaTouch on a ‘home stream’, similar to that found in Totara Social, to push new information to the front page of the LMS for each learner, giving them a constant stream of up-to-date news.

Any future updates will be very easy, as MediaTouch made all of its specialist customisations using plugins without editing any of the core code in Totara Learn. This ability makes Totara Learn the ideal choice for organisations looking to expand their platforms in the future, and has proved an excellent choice for a global retailer like Bally.