Resource Saving E-learning, by and for Employees
The UNIQA Group is one of the leading insurance groups in its core markets of Austria and Central and Eastern Europe.
It has around 21,000 employees and exclusive sales partners serving over 16 million customers across 18 countries.
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Wanted: A sales training course that’s learner-focussed and quick to deploy
In the past, training at UNIQA was very hands-on and traditional. The training documents were created by individual employees who were experts in their fields. These courses often took many weeks and months to create. In most cases, they were too long and inflexible and they offered UNIQA’s teams nothing in the way of modern, digitalised learning.
The company needed a way of harnessing the knowledge of its experts and getting this to its sales teams. This was no small ask, given the employees in question are spread across 18 countries and many work remotely. The solution had to be fast, readily accessible, dynamic and highly efficient.
Rapidly deployable, modern e-learning courses – created by employees and trainers themselves
As a trusted provider to UNIQA for over 20 years, imc was the obvious partner for building an online training campus. The campus is a digitalised platform that makes sales training and development programmes more accessible and efficient for employees. Digitalisation of these programmes means that employees can now engage in learning at any time and from any location.
To fill the online campus with content as quickly as possible, UNIQA implemented the imc Express authoring tool. With this tool, anyone can create training content quickly and easily. It was an instant hit with the test group (sales employees and trainers):
“imc Express helps us make learning mobile”
“The tool is very time and resource efficient”
“With imc Express, content can be created quickly and easily using AI”
imc Express: an easy-to-use authoring tool that streamlines learning
“imc Express is self-explanatory, interactive and multimedia-friendly. It’s actively helping us achieve our goals around voluntary and independent learning,” says UNIQA digital learning specialist Mario Kopic.
It does this by taking the hard work out of creating learning content and by delivering modern, interactive learning experiences. The resulting content, which can be accessed from any device, caters to different learning styles, whether visual or auditory.
In addition, imc Express allows course authors to collaborate on content – during the actual content creation process. No more time-consuming coordination and feedback processes.
The successful implementation of this project in Sales made people elsewhere at UNIQA aware of imc Express. Consequently, departments like Group Operations, Learning & Development and HR are now also making extensive use of the tool for their digital training needs. And what do these departments see as the main benefit of imc Express? Its intuitive usability. imc Express is easy to use, enabling experts to spend more time imparting their knowledge and less time thinking about the tool itself.
Find out why customers worldwide rely on imc solutions and products.
Ensuring high quality across global operations
The Hansgrohe Group is a major player in the bathrooms, kitchens, and wellness industries, generating €1.4 billion in sales annually. The company lives and breathes premium quality and design. It needed a best-in-breed learning platform to ensure the highest quality delivery across all its global operations with over 5,400 employees in 34 companies and 20 sales offices.
How to achieve a consistent delivery worldwide
The Hansgrohe Group is committed to top quality. Delivering on this commitment entails communicating the quality message to all employees at multiple locations around the globe. To that end, the company needed to guarantee the same high level of expertise in all its divisions, whether in the USA, Europe, or China.
Face-to-face professional development was another challenge: shift workers in production had few options for attending courses held at remote locations during their normal working hours.
A top-tier distributed learning system
In 2006, Dynamic Media GmbH (later merged with imc) developed an LMS for Hansgrohe. Since that time, all employees have been able to learn independently, free of time constraints. They have access to industrial safety courses, fleet training programmes, and diverse learning offerings for topics in IT security, quality management, and staff development. More recently, the company introduced its employee app, giving its production workers easy access to the learning platform and relevant training content.
But that’s not all. In 2021, Hansgrohe adopted the imc LMS. This opened up a whole new category of learning to its installers, resellers, designers, and others. These users can now access a wealth of e-learning content and information on the company’s entire hansgrohe range and its AXOR luxury range.
Each division of the Hansgrohe Group is able to design its own training content. The company uses imc’s content authoring tools – Content Studio and imc Express – to create engaging e-learning content. Hansgrohe chose Content Studio because of its impressive user-friendliness and wide range of options for interactions.
Thanks to imc Express, the company can now automatically translate user-generated content and integrate it directly into the LMS. This is possible because imc Express is browser-based. The system also includes approval workflows to ensure that only approved high-quality content gets shown to learners.
Flexible corporate training a big hit with employees
During the pandemic, Hansgrohe hit on the smart idea of using their imc LMS as a vaccination booking tool. The platform gave employees and their families an easy and convenient way of booking appointments, enabling them to take advantage of the company’s in-house vaccination offer.
The project manager in charge, Jasmin Gargano, is pleased with how the system worked.
“Our main criterion was to give our employees a fast, bureaucracy-free booking system so they could protect themselves and their families. And the imc Learning Suite seemed the perfect choice for the necessary central administration capability. Our employees were already familiar with the system, so they found the booking process very easy. The resulting personal data was deleted from the system afterwards. Needless to say, the offering was very well received by our workforce.”
At Hansgrohe, learning ties in with the company’s core value of mutual appreciation and respect. A key tenet of the corporate culture is for all employees to be empowered to learn independently. Thanks to the adoption of the imc Learning Suite and imc authoring tools, this is now a reality at all the corporate locations.
The company also continually expands its learning paths and optimises internal processes with regard to skill and competency level. Hansgrohe plans to focus ever more closely on the needs of its employees to provide them with even better training.
Find out why customers worldwide rely on imc solutions and products.
The new digital brand training at imc Learning: Understanding through experiencing
Using gamified brand training to reach and lastingly inspire a highly diverse target audience
In business it’s generally a good idea to stick with what you do best. And that’s precisely our approach to internal brand training here at imc Learning. We have taken our expertise in learning, something we normally offer other companies, and used it to help our own employees.
At imc, we’ve been working with digital learning for about 25 years. We strive to make learning better by redefining how learning happens. Experts in technology, e-learning content and strategy work hand in hand to offer holistic and tailored e-learning solutions – worldwide.
Having started out as a spin-off from Saarland University in Germany, we now work with more than 1,300 companies and public and educational institutions from all sectors and of all sizes, providing them with holistic support in the planning and implementation of digital training strategies.
Enabling employees worldwide to understand and engage with our values and purpose amid the demands of hybrid work and new onboarding methods
imc has changed a lot over the years, both in terms of our brand image and the core values on which it is built. This change in culture is reflected in all areas of our company and therefore needs to be understood and actively supported by all employees – including new hires, who need to be able to connect with and internalize our values.
Achieving this outcome requires learning in the following main areas:
- Company history: What defines us as a company? Where do we come from?
- What are imc’s goals and vision?
- What are the values that shape us, and how do we communicate those values?
- What is our business purpose, and what can each and every employee do to further that purpose?
- What does the imc brand feel like?
We needed a learning solution that could both impart this knowledge to all new hires right from day one and make it available to all existing imc employees on an ongoing basis. The obvious approach was to create an interactive, digital training course that was fun while still getting the imc brand and culture across.
The challenge in designing the course was not just to find a way of disseminating the informational aspects of the training content. The main challenge, in fact, was to give the content emotional power and authenticity, but without overdoing it, so that the very diverse target audience here at imc could identify with it.
A brand experience that invites engagement using a dedicated mascot
No sooner said than done. Kerstin Steffen, Director Brand Strategy at imc, initiated the training course and helped with its implementation. Teaming up with experts from our Content department – people who normally create digital learning content of this type for external clients – she set her sights on developing a training course that inspires all imc employees.
“It was extremely important to develop something that did more than merely disseminate information,” she recalls. “People need to be able to understand and ‘feel’ the brand. New employees should be able to instantly understand what drives us here at imc, what our values are, and what kind of cooperation and collaboration we practise and expect of others.”
Oliver Steinhilber is an instructional designer at imc and provided support for the conceptual design of the training course. “We’re currently seeing strong demand for training courses of this type among our clients,” he says. “Onboarding, change, new work and the like are a big deal at the moment, and managers in HR, marketing and internal communication are looking for ways of communicating these messages with authenticity and emotional power.”
So, it was immediately obvious what we needed to do. But we had to make a number of key decisions before we could start with the conceptual design and creation work.
Excitement and engagement among newcomers and old hands alike
The first step was to select a suitable tool for creating the training course. We chose Articulate Rise, and the team undertook two in-house workshops on how to use it.
Next, the team agreed to use storytelling as the course’s definitive stylistic device and to adopt a mascot as the narrator and companion for learners on their learning journey. Max – that’s the mascot’s name – looks a little like a ghost and emerges from the dot on the “i” of imc. He starts out very pale but gradually takes on more colour as the learner progresses through the course and learns more about the imc brand.
Max features in all elements of the training course. For example, in the history section, he reads from a book telling the story of the company’s founder, Professor August-Wilhelm Scheer. As the training course progresses, Max draws the learner deeper and deeper into the imc brand experience. The course also includes quizzes at regular intervals to gauge comprehension of the learning content.
The result is an entertaining and explorative 25-minute training course, split into four chapters, that teaches the learner everything they need to know about imc.
“We’re really pleased with the result, and the initial feedback from users is extremely positive,” says Kerstin Steffen. “The newcomers are engaging enthusiastically, plus it has sparked the interest of the old hands, who feel inspired to do the course right away. The time invested – it took about three months from initial idea to implementation – has well and truly paid off!”
Find out why customers worldwide rely on imc solutions and products.