Q&A: Kirstie Greany, Head of Customer Learning, Elucidat
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’ve been a learning designer and consultant for 15+ years, specialising in how to use digital learning design as well as leading the development of large blended behaviour change programmes and campaigns. I’ve always worked with large, global organisations, including many retailers, on all areas of workplace learning. Since working with Elucidat I have used that experience to coach and advise customers on their approach to developing effective elearning, at scale.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
Elucidat is an award-winning platform that makes it easy for large learning teams to produce effective online learning. We are built for high-scale online learning production, so it’s easy to create different versions, translate, and update your designs.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
Producing training that delivers real-life impact across global organizations is expensive, complicated, and often requires external support. Keeping pace with training demands, while maintaining quality and consistency at scale is a real challenge.
Elucidat empowers enterprise organizations to create and manage their own elearning at a truly enterprise scale.
To do this effectively, Elucidat has three key focuses to its value proposition:
Speed – responding quickly to emerging skills gaps by reducing time to produce, update and to use learning
Ease – unleashing the power of in-house learning by enabling anyone to create it, while the L&D team stay fully in control
Quality – helping customers to consistently produce on brand, people-centered learning that works
What advantage does it add?
Elucidat features have been developed using a combination of customer feedback, input and product research to ensure organizations can easily deliver, manage and maintain elearning at scale. This includes:
- Collaborative cloud-based technology – so projects can be worked on together wherever you’re working from
- Advanced User Management – so you can invite in reviewers, or novice designers, in a different way to an experienced elearning team member to your account
- Templates with baked in learning design, examples and support – to make producing high quality elearning as easy as possible, experienced or not
- Features that enable easy duplication and customization of central courses -to save rework at scale
- Brand Styling – one account can have multiple brand styles set up, so you can cater for subdivisions in your organisation. You simply pick the one you need and it will apply that branding for you.
- Easy in-built translation process – because this is a notoriously tricky area!
By working closely with clients to produce product enhancements, Elucidat continues to evolve – improving workflows and meeting changing needs. This means that clients can efficiently manage everything in-house, while ensuring the quality of elearning remains high.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
Elucidat is a fully cloud-based solution. We offer a free trial for potential customers. Once an organisation chooses to partner with Elucidat we can activate their account immediately and they get a dedicated Account Manager to support them with commercial relationship and a dedicated CSM to guide them on their account strategy, objective setting etc. We measure success by setting goals with our customers, and working towards them with them. We celebrate milestones such as the number of learners reached, projects released, feedback gained and more. All clients get access to our industry leading support team so they don’t have to onboard new authors or support them to use the platform, Elucidat does.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Better L&D across Kingfisher banners: Kingfisher plc is home to five home improvement retail brands across Europe, B&Q being one of them, for example. The main challenge for their L&D team is creating training that’s relevant and translates across their banner brands, roles and locations.
Before partnering with Elucidat, each brand had its own learning creation platform. They used an external supplier to produce large elearning projects, where costs would regularly creep.
With a goal of producing five million hours by 2025, the team looked to Elucidat to take a new approach. They started to produce Own Exclusive Brand (OEB) digital product training centrally, before providing copies to each L&D function across the business to adapt to their banner, localize and learn best practice.
By adopting Elucidat, the team is now able to produce highly engaging content in-house, without relying on outsourcing. Well on their way to achieving their goal of producing five million hours of relevant, colleague and customer-centered learning by 2025, the team have also reduced their costs by over 90% and massively improved learner experience and feedback.
Are there other companies you partner with?
Elucidat partners with other learning technology companies such as LMS providers, including CrossKnowledge, LearnUpon and Docebo, to provide better user experiences. See a full list of Elucidat’s partnerships here.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2021 / What challenges are retailers facing right now to prepare better?
Two key challenges right now are retaining talent (and keeping employees engaged) and continuing to pivot the business and seeing through change management around, for example, shifting to more e-commerce in the business model whilst competing with those already holding that space. Opportunities really sing out in the digital space though both from a customer facing perspective and an internal employee engagement perspective. Now is the time to use robust digital technologies to delivery great comms, learning and development opportunities, and community building experiences, so employees can feel engaged and looked after, despite the changes.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
We support the creation of effective, people-centred, online training at scale, meaning L&D teams can easily pivot or adapt what they are producing and relaunch it in a matter of minutes, to keep up with changes. We also understand that L&D is a key employee engagement tool and a key tool to attract talent. Our Professional Services team partner with many retail customers to help them set a vision and future strategy for their digital learning that puts end users and the direction of the business at its heart.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
Retail is still our biggest customer and a key focus for our company roadmap. Our key themes over the next 2 – 3 years will be on:
- Connectivity – connecting with best of breed tools in the ecosystem.
- Workflow – new workflow extensions to support and speed-up external processes.
- Collaboration – enable ANYONE in an organisation to be able to create GREAT elearning.
- Learner Experience – guaranteeing the quality of the learning experience.
- Automation – removing repetitive tasks across the platform.
We will continue to invest in customer research to inform product development, but also sharing our insights back into the community with initiatives like the Learning at Large Knowledge Hub.
We will be celebrating hitting our 30M learner milestone before the end of the year, and continuing to expand our presence in the US as well as Europe and other areas of the world.
Any final thoughts?
Our hope is that as organisations need to continue to engage employees through challenging and changing times, learning – online or not – will become more people-centred and work with the employees who will use it more and more.
