Wickes: "The solutions of TCG completely matched the expectations of Wickes England"

Wickes operates 176 Home Improvement Centres throughout England, Wales and Scotland with a geographical presence skewed towards the Northwest and Southeast, which makes Wickes the second largest DIY in the UK. Emma Smith: Master Programme Training Manager: "IntraStore is an intranet-based application that simplifies the information flow between the headquarters and the branches of retail organizations".

Matching e-learning solution
Emma Smith: "Many retail organizations face the same challenge regarding the knowledge and skills of their workforce: do they meet the expectations of the customers? What if the customer has a specific question about a product? Will the employee have the appropriate answer? How can you test this? How do you measure the current level of knowledge?". This was the challenge facing Wickes. Regarding this challenge, the e-learning solution of The Competence Group (TCG) completely matched the expectations of Wickes England.

BTEC-certification
There were multiple objectives to be reached. On the one hand: to ensure a specific level of skill and knowledge for new employees. On the other hand: to increase the knowledge and skills of the existing workforce, with the added difficulty of BTEC-certification. BTEC is an independent institute with high quality standards regarding certification. Trainers, trainees as well as course material must meet a whole range of high-level requirements and criteria. Emma Smith: "By choosing BTEC-certification, Wickes certainly aimed high. This had a definite impact on the different deliverables to be made. In constant collaboration and deliberation with Wickes, TCG developed course material that met these high standards. TCG also provided of the technical and functional aspects as well as the required detailed training management and progress-reports. All this needed to be done in a very tight time-frame".

Meeting the expectations
The initial objective to increase the product knowledge and skills of the employees has been met beyond all expectations. Adding the BTEC-certification to the training, resulted in employees being highly motivated and eager to train and learn. Indirectly, the success of the training has also been confirmed by a poll amongst Wickes' customers that revealed a higher level of customer satisfaction. Emma: "The management is completely convinced that the desired quality level had been reached. The efforts of the Wickes' workforce have therefore been adequately rewarded".

Real results
When implementing a new approach, it is very important to create support on different levels, to inform and to introduce the changes step by step. Wickes took care of this part of the program, resulting in a 100% attendance at the preliminary workshops: a first in Wickes' history. An initial phase involved only a limited group of regions. Yet, after 2 weeks, over 300 employees have already earned BTEC-certification. Without doubt, this proves that the combined efforts of Wickes and TCG were met with great enthusiasm by each and every employee. The management too had every reason to be pleased. The high-end reporting possibilities provided an instantaneous, online overview of progress and results on a corporate, regional, store and individual level.

How complex is certification?
It depends on how customer-friendly and how professional your organization wants to be. The standards set by BTEC required a lot of changes to TCG's usual approach. Within its Learning Management System (LMS), TCG developed tests for 11 different function-profiles. Emma Smith: "A database of over 1.000 questions for a total of 9 skills was built and made randomly accessible per test. Besides this already massive achievement, built-in 'rules behind the questions' were created, resulting in a highly flexible and powerful solution. Restrictions in the number of attempts, forced delays between attempts, intelligently generating sets of questions through metatags, specific requirements on passing scores, profile-bases reports (to name but a few): it was all part of the game. A game that was played professionally and successfully"!

About Wickes
The chain employs circa 5.500 employees and its Head Office is in Harrow (Northwest London). As well as unique showroom displays (kitchens, conservatories, bathrooms and bedrooms) Wickes has a distinctive, no-nonsense heavy side offer, with the lowest prices in the sector, which commands high customer loyalty. The Wickes stores are serviced not only by full loads direct from suppliers, but also from three distribution warehouses and a home delivery centre.Wickes plans to open new stores at the rate of 10 per annum.

Quote: "The end result is absolutely fantastic, and better than we originally asked for! This system has provided the 'WOW' factor in the launch of our programme out to stores".