• Customer: BWS
• Industry: Alcohol retail
• Location: Australia
• Staff: 9,500+

🤔 The challenge

BWS, part of Australia's largest alcohol retail and hospitality business, Endeavour Group, has a job on its hands. One of the ways it measures the health of its customer-facing operations is through “voice of customer” scores – a set of numbers generated internally from shopper surveys.

"Usually VOCs are very hard to shift" 

Dan Young, BWS State Manager 

With nearly 1,600 stores and 9,500 frontline team members, maintaining – let alone improving – these VOCs is a real challenge. Dan Young, State Manager for BWS in Victoria & Tasmania, says the company rarely sees large changes, particularly on “knowledge of teams” (a sub-category within the overall VOCs).

"Usually VOCs are very hard to shift, particularly at stores in city centres like Melbourne, where customers have higher expectations,” explains Young. “In one Area with 35 stores, they were flat for the eight months up until March 2022. And historically, in March or April, when stores recruit new team members for Easter, all the scores drop." 

👩‍🔧 The solution

But despite these headwinds, from the end of March through April 2022, the opposite happened across his 35 stores. “We saw a two-point increase on ‘knowledge of teams’ – which is the highest it’s ever been. And the rest of the VOC scores stabilised.”

Young attributes this rise directly to Small Batch Learning. The online training platform – which has been delivering category education, customer experience and product training to BWS store teams since September 2021 – enabled him to launch a new initiative across his area, starting in March.

1. “I set an expectation for all staff to complete two lessons on the platform per shift” 
2.  “I then asked team members to create product recommendation cards based on their learning and display these around the store”

Giving the initiative this framework helped link staff learning to commercial outcomes. “Store managers could see it was driving success,” he says. 

The platform’s user leaderboards and reporting of training data back to store managers also helped generate competition within the area, further increasing engagement, and enhancing product knowledge. "The overall feedback was great – the team found Small Batch Learning easy to use and learn from.”

"Store managers could see it was driving success"

Dan Young, BWS State Manager

🍾 The opportunity for product knowledge

In collaboration with Small Batch Learning’s in-house beverage experts, BWS has now designed a full training programme – featuring over 300 lessons to date – using both the platform’s existing training library and BWS’s own custom content.

The programme includes product lessons from both BWS’s sister company Pinnacle Drinks and third-party alcohol companies such as Campari Group, Brown-Forman, CUB, Bacardi, William Grant & Sons, Lion, Fever-Tree and Accolade Wines, whose brands retail in the stores.

"Small Batch Learning has demonstrated their tech delivers succinct product training in a digestible and engaging way,  at scale – something that has been a challenge for us to date"  

Simon Wilson, Capability & Learning Partner, ALH

Small Batch Learning has already delivered over one million such lessons this year.

This unprecedented engagement in online training has also been critical to the success of BWS’s annual range reviews, with close to 170 new product launches trained on the platform.

“One of the biggest opportunities in enhancing customer experience is building our team’s confidence through product knowledge,” says Simon Wilson, previous Learning Partner for BWS, and now beginning to deploy Small Batch Learning at Endeavour's hospitality arm, ALH Hotels. 

“Small Batch Learning has demonstrated their tech delivers succinct product training in a digestible and engaging way, and a seamless experience for our teams at scale – something that has been a challenge for us to date."

🤝 The future

Small Batch Learning’s successful boost to staff confidence prompted Endeavour Group to expand the relationship to its hospitality brand ALH, Australia’s largest on-premise operator. With a portfolio of 330-plus venues and 15,000 team members, Small Batch Learning has now started to onboard this cohort and and train them with the relevant product knowledge to help drive on-premise sales.

🔢 Endeavour Group’s key Small Batch Learning stats (BWS & Dan Murphy’s)

• 38.5% monthly active users (12,000+ on-boarded staff)
• 38 lessons completed per active Endeavour user per month
• 97% of learners more confident in selling a product after completing the product lesson on Small Batch Learning
• 76.92 (excellent) Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• 4.6 / 5 rating for effectiveness of SBL’s product training format
• 81.8% of learners rate SBL better than other learning platforms they’ve used
• 82.5% of learners rate SBL training content better than other training they’ve participated in

📝 Feedback from store teams

• “The training from Small Batch Learning has helped me expand my product knowledge for the benefit of my customers in store” Luke Bunworth, Customer Experience Manager, Dan Murphy’s
• “Very user friendly, interactive and fun. Small Batch Learning’s short-format product lessons are perfect for our store teams to help in customer interactions” Sharon Sampson, Store Manager, BWS
• “I love the way Small Batch Learning approaches training – by simplifying technical terms and focusing on key product information, the app makes customer conversations so much easier” Sharee Senior, Retail Associate, Dan Murphy’s

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