Business: Retail
Location: Miami, Florida
The Company
Starboard Cruise Services, Inc., a division of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Inc., is the world's largest and leading onboard retailer. Offering cruise ship passengers world-class brands and exclusive merchandise with tax and duty free savings. Starboard works with ten cruise lines and travel retail stores on 80 ships located worldwide where they operate duty free .
The Challenge
Starboard Cruise Services has over 700 employees, with an average of 300 employees located on ships. A typical employee may be out to sea for six months at a time. Since management doesn't have any access to stores for months at a time retail, training issues may become exacerbated. Training employees who are geographically located all over the world and have little physical access to land can be a challenge.
Traditionally, Starboard held twice yearly training seminars where they flew around 100 employees to their Miami headquarters. This was expensive and limited training on changing product lines. Starboard was looking for innovative ways to provide continual training. That’s when Johnny Candela, a Technical Analyst at Starboard, heard about e-Learning and suggested that they use it to train employees while they were out at sea.
The ReadyGo WCB Solution
Johnny Candela reviewed many e-Learning solutions and chose ReadyGo WCB. “I liked that ReadyGo WCB used standard web technologies. It was very important that we keep our course bandwidth small since we can’t guarantee high speed connections on all of the ships. It would be very frustrating for an employee to take a course that takes forever to download.” states Johnny. ReadyGo Web Course Builder's intuitive user interface made it easy to create courses.
Starboard created their first series consisting of three courses – Jewelry, Watches, and Beauty - in about two months. The reaction has been very positive. Employees like just-in-time access to learning about the product line. They can use the courses as a resource. If a passenger comes in asking details on a specific piece of jewelry or brand, employees can refer back to courses they have taken to give accurate information. Management was very happy with the price tag. It cost $2,500 to buy both the authoring software and management software. “ReadyGo provides us with everything we need. We have created our own little university. We can track which employees have taken which courses and know what they are answering on each test question. ReadyGo has been an excellent enabling technology for our e-Learning initiative,” states Johnny.
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