High-street retailer Boots is to use new touchscreen tills to carry out elearning for its staff.
The company has just completed a £350m IT transformation programme, and installed a point-of-sale system that can be used for elearning. Boots is now working out how training will be delivered, before trials begin in the autumn.
If the pilots are successful, elearning will be rolled out to 60,000 staff in 1,400 stores.
‘When we began the infrastructure renewal we did so on the basis that we could exploit that investment for elearning,’ said Rob Fraser, group IT director at Boots. ‘These tills can stream live video and connect together for training across stores.’
Fraser says elearning has huge potential for increasing staff skills. Tills will be used for a variety of training courses during quiet periods in shops.
‘Staff must complete regular health and safety training, but tills could also be used to train them in selling skills and processing certain products,’ he said.
‘Tills are ideal for 10- to 15-minute training modules, but they must be capable of switching back to payment processing when a customer arrives.’
Frost and Sullivan analyst Michael DeSalles says elearning will immediately allow Boots to train more employees than was previously possible.
‘It is not a substitute for face-to-face learning, but it does complement it,’ he said. ‘What you have is a mass media broadcasting tool, and information can be delivered to staff quickly.’
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