Wellness Warehouse has grown to become South Africa’s largest health, wellness and organic food retailer, now boasting more than 40 physical stores in the Western Cape, Gauteng and most recently, KwaZulu-Natal.
Established in 2007 by brothers Sean and Carlos Gomes, Wellness Warehouse is the holistic health destination of choice for conscious consumers wanting to live life well for themselves, their communities and the planet.
The company’s Online Shop has also become a popular option for shoppers, regularly offering great deals and rewards alongside the vast selection of products.
In 2017, Wellness Warehouse established its Wellness Training Academy as a means of further improving the customer experience – a groundbreaking undertaking in the local wellness industry.
The establishment of the academy has been a significant step for the company in terms of raising the standards of product and health knowledge across the business.
According to Wellness Warehouse national training manager Sonja Hindley, having a knowledgeable and confident sales team will always differentiate the business from competitors in the industry.
“Keeping our customers safe, inspired and empowered is only achieved through excellence in training. Information changes very quickly in the health and wellness sector, we have to keep abreast of trends, new research and international developments.”
The challenge
For the Wellness Warehouse team, it is important that the Academy offers a true blended learning and development (L&D) experience.
“Our vision is to develop a world-class online learning experience for our rapidly growing retail and support office teams, which will give us more capacity in the L&D department, empower us with tools to measure our progress and broaden our reach,” Hindley explains.
The solution
The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic required that plans for the academy be expedited without sacrificing any of the expertise needed to make it a success. Fortunately, Wellness Warehouse found the right partner in online learning solution provider New Leaf Technologies.
In the space of a year the number of team members enrolled in the programme has grown from 150 to 300.
Through the provision of the aNewSpring learning platform, which enables L&D professionals to create, curate and deliver blended learning that adapts to each individual, New Leaf Technologes was able to assist the Wellness Training Academy to optimise its training and development offering.
The results
“We started off with the Trainer version of the aNewSpring platform as a pilot project and created our foundational courses on natural health and wellness knowledge with the help of the team at New Leaf Technologies,” Hindley explains.
“We saw that competency rates increased, and we followed up with assessments that tested the operational knowledge of our retail teams.”
What the training team came to realise was that it needed to transition from courses that were solely geared towards content heavy, “in-person classroom-style” training.
“We learned to evolve towards micro learning and will be making better use of the platform’s Memo trainer functionality. We expressed a need for a training intelligence solution which was elegantly provided by upgrading to the Enterprise version of the platform, enabling us to collect data, measure engagement and progress and plan better.”
Hindley could not be happier with the results.
“Our pilot project was to measure current knowledge as a baseline in our two principle courses, and then compare with a final assessment after participants worked through the online courses.
“We saw increases in competency of between 10% and 20% per region, and in some cases over 35% improvement in individual results. We were delighted.”
One of the great benefits of the platform is that its training intelligence dashboard provides clear indications of areas or topics where team members consistently struggle, meaning that facilitators can either redesign training or provide extra learning and development opportunities to deepen understanding of complex ideas.
“It also became apparent that some team members struggle with comprehension and as a result we have created literacy and life skills initiatives to support them,” Hindley says.
Client satisfaction
Hindley says the Wellness Training Academy is incredibly appreciative of the support of the entire team at New Leaf Technologies, “but especially of Paul Hanly (co-founder and director) for building a personal relationship with us and going beyond expectation to understand our needs and challenges”.
“The team is dedicated and always willing to assist us to become self-sufficient in managing our own platform in their friendly, professional and patient way.”
