Cycle & Carriage is Southeast Asia’s leading automotive group and the largest distributor of Mercedes-Benz in the region.
As Southeast Asia’s leading automotive group and largest distributor of Mercedes-Benz, the group regularly provides training, especially in sales, to their employees. But when they defined their new roadmap to create “Exceptional Journeys”, they realized:
Yet another car sales training won’t help us achieve the mindset shift
When Jeslin Lim, General Manager - Human Resources for Cycle & Carriage, came across The Skill Shop’s LinkedIn post stating that we believe that service and sales teams have to work together to create one journey, it spoke to her. The sales team on the showroom floor was great at selling, but needed to understand their role in creating excellent customer experiences. The after-sales colleagues were great at service, but could benefit from learning up-selling and cross-selling techniques. We started by defining the desired mindset for their microlearning journey:
Customer obsession - no matter what role I am in, I am here to serve our customer’s individual needs through a “one-size-fits-one” approach.
One experience - sales & after-sales are one team. Delighting customers and making a sale can happen at any time along the customer journey.
Downstream revenue - I continuously seek opportunities to serve our customer through our solutions, be it during service recovery, through salvaging a sale, overcoming objections or up-selling.
We knew that to achieve this, we needed the learning to provide concrete behaviours, real-life examples and actionable to do’s. After all, a mindset shift can only be felt by customers and colleagues alike through a change in behaviour.
In focus groups with Cycle & Carriage’s team leads, we identified the behaviours that express customer obsession, that create a seamless customer experience and generate downstream revenue.
Then, armed with actual customer feedback, the Cycle & Carriage roadmap, and pages of ideas and notes, we started scripting and storyboarding. We organized the learning content into individual lessons, thought about what service and sales theory would best complete the knowledge puzzle and which elements should be conveyed through text, images, or video. We enriched the content through case studies in the automotive industry, added a future-focused “O2O” module on the “Online - to - Offline” experience and gained buy-in by Jeslin’s team.
When it came to production, it was important to us to have Cycle & Carriage’s sales and service colleagues in front of the camera.
E-learning often contains generic content which is somewhat relevant to the learner’s environment, but leaves the context unrelatable to the learner. This leaves too much room for interpretation. Instead, we created a microlearning series that:
Was written word for word for Cycle & Carriage;
Used dealerships, car workshops and the Cycle & Carriage canteen as our video backdrop;
Had sales and service colleagues introduce each lesson;
Filmed a welcome by each department head; and
Applied actual customer service feedback throughout the course.
This customized approach to learning design ensured maximum contextualization and relevance, increasing the learner’s engagement and interest.
We were thrilled to learn that this course today is part of Cycle & Carriages on-boarding to orientate new joiners, refresh their knowledge and continue to move towards a high-touch customer journey.
“I am impressed by Katharina’s openness to adapt and blend the learning content with very relevant context to our learning objectives, always professional and on time in her deliverables. The Skill Shop guided us on focusing on crucial customer experience touch-points in the modules. It was a joy working with Julian and Katharina!” - Jeslin Lim, General Manager - Human Resources, Cycle & Carriage.