Bally is a Swiss luxury brand that sells shoes, accessories and ready-to-wear clothing for men and women.

Founded in 1851, today, Bally’s significant retail sales channel includes a global network of stores, including flagship stores and franchised stores, outlets, duty-free and wholesale channels, present in key points of sale worldwide, like Paris, Milan, London, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo.

The Challenge

Bally needed a new learning experience for his retail staff and all his human resources.

As the company has grown globally over the years, the need for high quality learning has become essential to keeping up with the competition.

Bally needed to ensure that all employees could access the courses through an intuitive and highly branded platform.

Solution

After evaluating different alternatives, Bally decided to collaborate with MediaTouch, as Totara Partner, thanks to our flexibilities and thanks to extensive previous personalization experiences, even in the world of luxury.

For Bally, the most important thing was the creation of a simple and attractive interface, designed for the mobile experience. The challenge was to design a sufficiently broad interface to be able to maintain all the relevant features, including programs and completion. Bally and MediaTouch worked closely together to define the appearance of the Bally portal in compliance with the Bally brand, while guaranteeing an effective experience for all students.

To provide a personalized learning experience, Bally and MediaTouch have decided to widely implement the “audience” functionality within Totara to ensure that people with different job roles could see different parts of the portal. This meant that each employee would access, selectively and clearly, only the most relevant information. For example, each manager was able to verify the educational results of their sales resources, creating a targeted and tailored learning experience. A content filtering system was also provided based on the progress of the course (not started, in progress and completed) to help students identify the target areas to proceed on their learning path.

The Bally portal has been configured to condition access to content based on the completion of the training. Once the new participants have completed the basic training on the brand and the company, they can access the other sections of the portal, which contain interactive e-learning courses, videos and PDF.

In this way, staff can access product information, catalogs, courses on “how to propose Bally” and other content focused on retailing, thanks to a complete learning experience through all this you need to know to be successful as an employee Bally.

As an international brand, Bally has employees in several countries. For this reason, students can choose the appropriate language in which the portal should appear, such as English, German, French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. This ensures that the contents are available in the language in which the student is most comfortable.

Bally also requested that managers access reports based on their level. Thanks to the functionality of the “Hierarchies” it was possible to display the reports with increasing levels of access for senior managers, guaranteeing all managers access to the exact level of necessary information.

The results

The Bally portal was launched in June 2016 and registered over 1,300 active users in the first five months, more than 86% of the sales staff.

During the project, Bally decided to extend the portal, not only to sales people, but to all personnel, recognizing Totara Learn as an ideal learning platform for all employees.

Bally is particularly satisfied with the visual customization of the platform created by MediaTouch, “almost unrecognizable” as Totara Learn. Bally and MediaTouch have worked hard on the project and this has paid off with a beautifully signed platform that reflects the luxurious Bally brand. A user survey has confirmed that the portal satisfies its needs very well, making it very intuitive.

MediaTouch and Bally have also developed an “information flow on the homepage”, similar to that of Totara Social, in order to send new information to the portal home page, providing users with a constant stream of updated news.

The implementation of all the specialized customizations through plug-ins, without modifying the source code of the product, ensured an easy update of the Totara versions. This feature makes Totara Learn the ideal choice for organizations wishing to expand their platforms in the future and has proved to be an excellent choice for an international brand like Bally.

The Bally Portal is an absolute asset to the company

Bally Top Manager

Every year Totara awards the best projects worldwide that innovate and tailor learning experiences to specific contexts.

This project has received the Totara official award as “Best Totara Project” in 2017.