The interview excerpt below is the first of a four-part series we conducted with Stevan Stevlic, a Video Leader and Learning Management Systems expert at Ace Hardware focused on Retail Training. Below, Steve describes the positive impact that video-based sales training has had on Ace’s overall retail sales.

 

Tell me about Ace Hardware.
Ace is the helpful place. Our goal is to be the most helpful hardware stores on the planet. We have 4,900 stores around the world. We're in 66 countries and we have around 77,000 store associates. We've been helping neighbors as long as there's been a neighborhood. We are a 91-year-old company. In the last two years we've had record sales and record profits, and you don't achieve those goals without doing something right.

How is Ace different from other home improvement or hardware retailers?
What we're doing is being the most helpful hardware store on the planet. 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.

What does your team do at Ace?
Our team helps our retailers fulfill the Ace helpful brand promise.

Can you describe the strategic challenge you were facing last year?
One of the advantages to Ace Hardware is that our businesses are locally run, locally owned. So, the owners of those stores have their name on the front, their names on the sign, and it's their businesses. One of the challenges that we face with our Learning Management System, Ace Learning Place, is that because our retailers run their business, we can’t push anything from the top down. We have to convince them that the training tools we provide are going to add value to their business.

How did you settle on video as a solution to this challenge?
The strategic priorities we set last year were to completely revamp our learning management system to help make Ace Learning Place more engaging. One of the first strategic objectives we set was to incorporate more video into our platform. Video is always the best type of content because it's so effective. It really tells a story, it conveys a message and video is the best way to do that.

The Ace Learning Place user experience was lacking. Users are used to going on the internet and watching video, and we wanted to bring the video experience that they were expecting into our learning management system. So, video was one of the first things we looked to do.

What was uStudio’s role in helping you achieve your strategic video goals?
Once we realized there was a tool like uStudio out there it was really an a-ha moment for us because the things we wanted to do, uStudio could do. So we wanted to be able to upload our own video easily, we wanted to be able to make collections, and we wanted to be able to track our videos with metatags and descriptions and uStudio let us do all that.

Has video indeed helped drive adoption of your LMS as hoped?
Since we started to using uStudio as part of our strategy to make our LMS more engaging we’ve seen really dramatic results. We had 22,000 associates using Ace Learning Place when we started, now we have over 53,000. So more than 30,000 additional associates are now using Ace Learning Place.

And those new adoptions are attributable to your having added video to Ace Learning Place?
We know that it wasn’t a coincidence. We know that video made a difference because we have the data to back it up.

What has been the business impact of using uStudio within your LMS? How has increased retail training helped overall sales?
We have found that stores that trained more, sold more. For example, we found that stores that trained 10 hours or more on average per associate saw their sales increase by 5.7%. So, dramatic increases in sales even above what they were doing in a record year for the stores that were doing more training.

It sounds like moving to video-based training was a good strategic choice for Ace?
What we’re going to be doing over the next few years is to keep building on our success and to use even more video. Being the helpful place, having those customer interactions, are really important to the future of our business.