Bridgestone is a global leader in tire technology and innovation. Bridgestone engineers performance-driven passenger and light truck tires for virtually every vehicle and application.
The Challenge
With their tires being sold by over 2500 independent dealers, Bridgestone Americas strives to stay at the forefront and give their products a competitive edge over all other tire manufacturers.
Their market is saturated with training that has dark designs alongside a lot of dry, technical information on tires. Bridgestone strives to stand out against the dark backdrop of their competitors and so wanted to refresh their site to be light, bright and clean, fun and very easy to use.
They want independent dealers to be confident in Bridgestone’s products and for their tires to be front of mind when selling to customers. That means their learning platform needs to be the go-to place over their competitors’ solutions.
While their learning has always been at the forefront, as Brian Degen, Education Program Manager at Bridgestone Americas said: “If you’re staying in one place, you’re falling behind. We felt like we were out in front but if we rested on our laurels people would pass us by so it was a time to redesig.”
With the redesign of their Totara Learn platform, Bridgestone set out to incorporate new ways to improve the user experience and bring people back to their learning platform time and again.
“We were looking to create – and will always be working towards – a website where there is a real ease for the user.”
The Solution
Bridgestone’s Totara Learn platform is always evolving. Driven by a desire to tweak and perfect their learning platform, Bridgestone’s platform strategy incorporates new technologies and ways of doing things.
Because Totara Learn is an open source learning platform, it offers Bridgestone the ability to constantly build upon what they have already achieved and thus stay ahead of the competition.
Totara Learn is regularly updated with new features, and Bridgestone has been through several updates of Totara. This has been crucial to Bridgestone because as Brian stated: “While we continue to grow, we feel like Totara doesn’t stand-put either. It provides us an opportunity to refresh with new features to take advantage of with every update.”
Bridgestone’s latest update has been one of their most successful by incorporating gamification, a new look and feel, and a better user experience for navigating their course offering.
Bridgestone believes learning that is fun is crucial because, as Brian put it: “You learn more when you’re having fun. It goes hand in hand with what we are trying to do and it keeps people coming back and seeing what’s new.”
So with that in mind, Bridgestone worked with Kineo to integrate a leaderboard plugin and competition functionality. Kineo collaborated closely with Bridgestone’s multiple agencies to ensure information seamlessly passes back and forth between different systems.
The integrations enable their agencies to generate reports; conduct and track face-to-face training sessions and events; and ensure the leaderboard and competitions are always up-to-date. An algorithm was created so that different points are awarded for activities such as competing in a monthly quiz, participating in forums, and undertaking a course.
The new quiz functionality is tied to certain educational courses and, by incorporating a monthly drawing, is designed to get dealers to go back into the learning to increase knowledge on Bridgestone’s products and gain selling skills.
Bridgestone’s ultimate goal is to drive their independent dealers to the website. That’s because the better sales skills and product information Bridgestone provides, the more comfortable their dealers are talking about Bridgestone tires to customers.
With over 100 courses and videos on their learning platform, it has been crucial for Bridgestone to make navigating their course offering effortless. So in the redesign, Kineo developed a sleek accordion, improved navigation and incorporated learner journeys to customize the home dashboard.
The accordion has enabled Bridgestone to streamline all their offerings and events in one place with headings and tabs that open to reveal more and explore further. And taking things a step further on the home dashboard, Bridgestone was able to take advantage of Totara’s learner journeys and create personalised learner experiences for every user that visits the website.
With dynamic blocks on the homepage to make it specific to each user, users can see what they’ve completed and receive prompts on what to do next.
The Result
Bridgestone has multiple agencies working together to drive their website and how it works.
Because Totara is open source, their agencies are able to work together with Bridgestone to drive the learning platform forward. Bridgestone has been able to remain agile and evolve their solution. This has enabled Bridgestone to stay at the forefront of their market, not only by being the largest manufacturer of tires but also in terms of the quality of their learning solution to outpace the competition.
“You may have award winning courses, but if no one can find it they will give up. Totara and Kineo have provided us with a platform where we can take all our information and a new user can come on and easily figure out how to navigate through our website. Totara is our base and at the end of the day from a functionality point of view, that’s our building block that we build off from there.” – Brian Degen, Education Program Manager at Bridgestone Americas
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