How De’Longhi optimized resources to fulfill more training needs

De’Longhi is one of the world’s leading players in the small domestic appliance sector dedicated to the world of coffee, cooking, air conditioning and home care. In addition to its historic brand, DE’LONGHI, the Group’s brand portfolio includes global market leaders such as KENWOOD, ARIETE, BRAUN, and Capital Brands.

Today, the company distributes its products in more than 120 markets worldwide and employs over 9,000 people. Given the diversity of products, brands, and languages, there are a variety of learning needs that De’Longhi HQ needs to fulfill on a company-wide level.

As Customer Experience Manager, Tatiana Petrushina and her team are responsible for bridging the gap between HQ and local markets to ensure consistency of communication about products across the different regions. They needed to find a way to optimize resources so that both HQ and local training teams could fulfill learning needs more quickly and easily.

De’Longhi has all the training challenges of a thriving global company: a large portfolio of brands, multiple product launches throughout the year, a presence in many countries with their own regional training teams, and high employee turnover of shop assistants and product demonstrators.

Traditionally, De’Longhi preferred to conduct its product trainings and demonstrations in-person using PowerPoint to create training materials. The HQ presentations were shared with the local teams who adapted them for their region and carried out the trainings face-to-face. This was a time-consuming process, however, and didn’t allow De’Longhi to ensure proper and timely coverage of all its learners.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this became an even more urgent challenge to solve as all in-person trainings had to come to a sudden stop. This was the moment the company switched to a fully online learning strategy and started using a global e-learning authoring tool that allowed it to train local market teams, partners, and resellers on new product launches more quickly and efficiently.

After trying different e-learning tools, De’Longhi came across Easygenerator and were quickly convinced by the tool’s flexibility and user-friendliness. It was easy for trainers with no prior experience in e-learning to start developing new courses and customize existing global trainings.

The fact that Easygenerator is available in 30 different languages also ensured that local training teams were able to use the tool from start to finish in their own language – a big advantage to keep employees engaged and motivated to develop their own training content.

Once trainings were created, it was also much easier to share them with all relevant stakeholders as Easygenerator courses are compatible with over 200 LMS.

Before the pandemic, De’Longhi relied mostly on face-to-face meetings and PowerPoint presentations to conduct their product trainings and demonstrations. While Easygenerator was part of their training toolkit, it wasn’t widely used and only 70 authors were registered company wide.

In a few years, however, that number doubled to 150 authors who have created over 4,350 courses to train product teams on a global and local scale.

Today, De’Longhi is able to better optimize their resources and maximize ROI – all while ensuring a much wider coverage of their training needs on a global scale. Even after the pandemic, the global and regional teams at De’Longhi continue to develop courses in Easygenerator to meet their training needs.

When De’Longhi first came across Easygenerator, they decided to start using it at HQ level to create e-learning courses for their product trainings with Easygenerator. The global team then shared these courses with regional teams so they could adapt them to their local learning needs.

At first, regional teams continued to create their own trainings outside of Easygenerator. As they became more familiar with the tool, however, they realized that updating trainings and creating new courses in Easygenerator saved them a lot of time and money. Simultaneously, at HQ level, Tatiana and her team trained local teams on how to use Easygenerator to create engaging e-learning and how to customize global product trainings to the specific learning needs at local level.

Today, De’Longhi uses Easygenerator at a company-wide level for all product training. They continue to carry out internal initiatives and organize dedicated webinars to keep local training teams interested, motivated and up to date on e-learning best practices.