Ace Hardware: “Video is a Better Way to Train. And We Can Prove It.”

Steve Stevlic, LMS Manager at Ace Hardware, gives evidence on why video is a better way to train employees and sales teams.

You mentioned that Ace Hardware had a banner year last year. Tell me about that. What were you doing right
We had a record year last year. While we were celebrating our 90th anniversary, we had our highest level of sales and profits. You don't do that when you're a 90-year-old company unless you're doing something right. One of the things that we did really well last year was deliver more training to our retailers than ever before.

Why is retail training so important for Ace Hardware?
Our experience was that stores that trained more, sold more. It all started with our brand “helpful.” We provided Helpful 101 training, which was the foundation of everything that we're doing here at Ace. We have the men and women out there in all of our stores helping our neighbors and providing that high touch, high level of customer experience that they can't find in the big box stores. With training, the store associates can learn the helpful behaviors that are key to providing an amazing customer experience to every customer every time.

Tell me more about Helpful 101 training. What is that exactly?
Helpful 101 is the foundational level of training here at Ace. It's around providing helpful behaviors to associates to provide the best possible experience to customers. The standard we have at Ace is not just good customer experience; it's to provide an amazing customer experience for customers every time. That's a really high bar. It takes really talented men and women at stores across the country that are really well-trained and knowledgeable to do that.

It sounds like the Helpful 101 training is not just about how to sell. It also encompasses organizational learning and brand values?
There's a few key behaviors that we teach people through our Helpful 101 training. It's what we want to build on here at Ace. It's what sets us apart from the big box stores and the other guys. What we teach our associates to do is approach our customers rather than wait for them to come up to them. We want them to ask questions of the customers rather than just answering the customers’ questions. We want them to be confident in their product knowledge rather than reluctant to talk about products in projects. We want them to build relationships with our customers rather than just conducting transactions because when it comes to relationships, there's a lifetime value of a customer. When that customer comes in they might be buying just a 25 cent lug nut one day, but if they like the service and they like the feeling they get when leaving an Ace store, they might come back next week and buy a $2,000 grill or buy a $300 power tool. It's the lifetime value of the customer that's important, not just the single transaction you're working on that day.

Why is video strategically important to teaching those values and behaviors?
When it comes to teaching those behaviors, video is key because the best way you can learn a behavior is by actually seeing it in action. All the words and all the pictures we can use to describe a behavior aren’t as effective as showing a video. There are video scenarios throughout the courses that help associates recognize what the key behaviors are to satisfying customers. Then we're also using video with our mystery shopping so they can see live customer scenarios that really happened and are able to use that as training tools as well.Your CEO, in particular, seems to be very supportive of your video training initiatives.
One of the things that's nice about Ace Hardware is that we have such great support for training from our executive level. We have a CEO that's gone on television and when talking about the record success of Ace Hardware, one of the first things he brings up is Helpful 101. Even after 90 years of being The Helpful Place and winning eight straight JD Power awards, we realize that we can do more to be helpful and that we want to set the standard at amazing every customer every time.

Tell me how the success you're having with video has been received by the executive team.
Our executive team has been very supportive about Ace Learning Place. One of the reasons they're so supportive is what they're hearing from retailers. It's retailers that are calling them and saying, "Have you checked out Ace Learning Place recently? Because if not, you should." They're completely aware of a lot of the changes we've made, and the improvements we've made, and just how engaged the retailers are.

Describe the financial impact of video as a training medium.
What we've found is that stores that trained more sold more. In stores that trained ten hours or more on average per associate, saw their sales increase by 5.7 percent. The stores that focused on training saw more dramatic increases in sales even above what they were doing in a record year.

And this is because of the video?
Yes. One of the reasons that we had stores doing more training is because they were more engaged with Ace Learning Place. We had a record number of users logging in, a record number of users completing courses, and a lot of that increased engagement was because we were video-enabled.