Does Your LMS Need a Facelift? Ace Hardware’s Did.

Steve Stevlic, LMS Manager at Ace Hardware, describes the process Ace followed to completely revamp its LMS with video for better training results.

Tell me about your team at Ace Hardware.
An LMS is a learning management system. It's how we deliver our online training. I’m on the LMS team, and we manage online training for our retailers.

Ace is structured as a co-op. How does that affect your retail training initiatives?
Ace Hardware has a very unique structure. We are a co-op, which means that it's a collection of independently run businesses that come together to form Ace Hardware. The challenge with this type of structure is we can't mandate training from top down. We can't just assign courses and say, "Go do this." That's not how Ace is run. Anything we want our retailers to do, we have to prove the value in doing it and convince them that the training tools we provide are going to move their business forward.

It sounds like adoption of your LMS by your retailers has been a problem in the past?
We had to encourage retailers to use it because they weren't using it. It was too hard to log into, too hard to navigate, too hard to find what they were looking for, so they just didn't do it. Since we have a culture where they don't have to do anything they don't want to do, using our learning tools wasn't something that they wanted to do. We had award-winning training content, but the platform it was on was ineffective.

How bad was it, really?
One of our retailers described Ace Learning Place as a beauty queen driving in a 1972 Pinto. That is, we had great content, but the platform it was on was just not good enough, and we had to change that.

What was your strategy for overcoming that challenge?
The strategic priorities we set last year were to completely revamp our learning management system. The user experience was lacking. Users are used to going on the Internet and watching video and seeing images and graphics. We had to bring the experience they were expecting into our learning management system. We knew we had to incorporate video in the right away to get retailers engaged and encourage them to use the system.

Once you made the strategic decision to focus on video, what was the process from there?
Once we knew that video was the answer, we tried a number of things. First, we looked to see if our existing platform could deliver what we needed, and we quickly found out that it was going to be too difficult. Next we tried YouTube. What we found out with YouTube is that even if we set it to ‘private,’ and even if we restricted who could actually watch it on YouTube, we still had problems. For example, if we put an Ace commercial on YouTube for our retailers to see, then after they viewed it, unrelated videos like ‘Elvis in Hawaii’ would pop up. It's so hard to get people's attention nowadays, once you have it, you don't want to lose it. You don't want them to watch a training video and then start watching a video about cats afterwards.

Tell me about the moment that you discovered uStudio. What was that first moment of discovery like?
Once we realized that there was a tool like uStudio out there, it was really an a-ha moment for us because all the things we wanted to do, uStudio could do. It was really a relief for us that we knew that there was a tool that we could use that had all the things that we were looking for and was so simple to use.

Walk me through the adoption of uStudio?
Getting started with uStudio is super easy. I can't describe how easy it is. Our experience was we were able to implement video and enable video on our LMS without even speaking to someone at uStudio. If you're looking for something that's really easy to implement, then uStudio's a good choice.

Can you elaborate more on the broader adoption process within your team?
Adoption of uStudio has been a breeze. All I needed to do was give my team their username and password to get into uStudio. I didn't even need to walk them through how to use it; it was that intuitive. They were immediately able to start uploading videos, getting them on to our LMS without any problems at all.

How important is uStudio’s ability to upload any file format and then magically distribute that out to any device anywhere?
Because all of our stores are independently run, they have the ability to select whatever device they want to use. We have retailers that use Apple products. We have retailers that use laptops, PC's, Android tablets. We can never know what kind of device our retailer is going to use. That's where uStudio comes in. uStudio is very helpful because it recognizes what device you're on, so regardless of what device our retailers or customers are using, they'll be able to watch videos served by uStudio.

Did working with uStudio fundamentally change the way that you're using video or the way that you're conducting learning in the organization?
uStudio was a real game changer for us. If you were to look at what our LMS looked like before and then after uStudio, it really changed the entire perception of online learning at Ace that retailers could, in a glance, look at our system and see that something different was happening. They had to check it out and they had to find out what the buzz was about. That all came about just by using video and uStudio.

What kind of impact are you seeing from the work that you've done so far?
Since we started to use uStudio as part of our strategy to make our LMS more engaging, we've seen really dramatic results. When we started last year we had 1700 Ace stores actively using Ace Learning Place. Now we have over 3700 Ace stores using it. More than 2,000 stores have started using it since we added video.

So video has indeed helped drive adoption of your LMS as hoped?
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. That makes a difference when you have 30,000 associates that are more helpful and more prepared and are more confident in their product knowledge out there talking to customers every day.

How do you know that video actually made the difference? It's not just coincidence?
We know that video made the difference because we have analytics to prove it. We know how many people accessed our system before. We know how many people accessed our system after. We know how many people viewed pages before. We know how many people have viewed pages after. Not only do we have analytics on our own system, but uStudio also provides analytics so you can tell exactly who watched the videos, who clicked on them, how long they stayed and how engaged they were.

It sounds like your retailers are happy.
There's been a lot of excitement with Ace Learning Place since we've made these changes. Before, a lot of retailers would complain about Ace Learning Place and tell us all the things that were wrong with it. Now that perception completely changed. Now we have retailers coming up at the convention and thanking us for making it easier for them and telling us how they've never used it before, but now they are. A lot of it has to do with making it video-enabled.

And has there been measurable business impact for your retailers as well?
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.

What is the reputation of Ace Learning Place now?
I can say by using uStudio in our LMS, it's completely changed the perception and reputation of Ace Learning Place. Now when people see a video-enabled website, their perception of what we do and how it's going to impact them is completely different, and it's completely changed the way they think.

So, no regrets so far?
If we have any regrets, it's only that we wish we would have done this sooner.