Coty Professional Beauty is a global business with iconic brands including Wella Professionals, Sebastian, Nioxin, System Professional, Sassoon, GHD and OPI.
The Challenge
Coty Professional Beauty believes that opening the mind is as important as developing skills and that ‘intelligent play’ (and the flipped classroom) is a proven, modern way to encourage learners to step out of their comfort zone and live up to their potential. It wanted its online learning solution, Wella Education, to look and feel like a best-of-breed website, be easy to access and to provide stylists with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.The solution needed to:
- be fully responsive (optimized across smartphone, tablets and desktops)
- support learners with different learning styles and levels of expertise
- deliver product-knowledge learning (via interactive SCO content and how-to videos)
- support e-Booking and interface with SAP for order and invoice management
- support 20+ languages
Coty Professional Beauty had explored several LMS solutions but found them all too limited, until it found Kineo and Totara Lear.
The Solution
Wella Education is built with Totara Learn, providing fantastic core capabilities, but crucially for Coty Professional Beauty, allowing for considerable design flexibility, with the ability for Kineo to add custom features and functionality.The solution uses responsive and adaptive layouts, delivering an elegant and optimized user experience across all devices; smartphones are the primary device for their target audience, so a cellphone-first design approach was crucial to the design process.
The target audience for Wella Education is hair stylists and salon owners, who work with (or want to work with) Wella’s superb range of professional hair products. The products used by a salon are at the heart of its service, with Wella being at the premium end of the market, used by top class salons and stylists. It offers them a CLOSE destination within their digital eco-system, completing their Digital Communication Strategy of Catch, Connect, CLOSE & Continue.
Wella Education is designed to look and feel like a premium contemporary website, with a fully responsive interface optimized for smartphones, tablets and desktops. The focus of the platform is to provide product knowledge and enable online booking for Wella’s extensive and highly respected face-to-face training seminars. The product knowledge content comprises beautiful interactive learning combined with ‘how-to’ videos with all content optimized for all devices (the majority of its audience uses smartphones as their primary device for accessing the internet).
The learning journey is designed to be user-driven and completely flexible to learner needs by empowering stylists to work at their own pace and to make the learning their own. By breaking the learning down into smaller units, stylists can complete learning in bite-sized chunks and easily pick up from where they left off.
Learners can filter content down through a variety of filters across ‘Brand’, ‘Category’, ‘Level’ and/or ‘Status’. Salon owners can also order and assign learning for their team to support and mentor their staff’s development.
Wella Education is available in 21 country/language versions, each with its own translated and market-specific content.
As part of the solution, Kineo has also developed an iOS App for Coty Wella (which interfaces with Totara), for use by Wella sales representative to manage their clients’ education plans and allow for ‘e-Booking’ onto instructor-led (face-to-face) training.
The Results
It’s well understood by Wella that stylists who are knowledgeable and confident with their products are better able to recommend and use them with their clients, in turn driving Wella’s business of selling product to salons. This philosophy (‘an educated salon is a successful salon’) underpins Wella’s engagement strategy and services, to deliver education at the heart of its business; Wella’s Education services have been shown to accelerate salon business growth by 9% on average.
With Wella Education, stylists and salon owners have the resources they need to be at the forefront of latest hair trends and techniques via this elegant multi-lingual, multi-device learning platform. Business Intelligence (BI) reporting is achieved through a combination of custom Totara LMS reports and Adobe Analytics to provide Coty Wella with the vital insights they need.Kineo’s design skills and huge experience (being a Totara Platinum Partner) in developing the customizations, combined with Totara’s powerful functionality and extensibility, allowed for the creation of an exceptional learner experience and to achieve Coty Professional Beauty’s vision for Wella Education.Totara Learn gives Wella:
- Freedom to innovate with the ability to tailor the platform to meet the project’s vision, including integrating with SAP invoice and order management
- Freedom to save through reducing back-office admin and process automatio
- Freedom to choose with the ability to customize and tailor learner journeys and introduce new custom capabilities over time
As a result of this, Wella now enjoys the following benefits:
- #1 marketing opt-in contributor for Wella, providing 4.5% more opt-ins than wella.com
- 400,000+ unique visitors
- 120,000+ user registrations, representing a 3x increase year-on-year
- 65%+ learning completion rates
- 100,000 seminar bookings by sales reps using the new e-Booking iOS app
- 5.25 minutes average time on page
- 62% of users accessing the responsive platform via smartphone
“It has been very exciting to discover this new and innovative world that will give even more value to our education proposition. Today our customers are fascinated and once again Wella makes the difference!”- Annamaria, Technical Education Trainer, Wella Studio Roma
Customer
Connected Partner
Customer
Region
Switzerland
Sectors
Retail
Industry Sizes
Large
Topics
Career Growth, Employee Experience, Learning & development
Solutions
Learn
Connected Partner
