Challenge

With over a thousand retail locations, Coles historically trained staff on site at its stores. Shifting to a digital-first approach, of course, was no small task.

“Because we support such a large network of team members, we needed to be sharp on the tools we used,” says Siva Kulasingam, Digital Learning Manager. “Making the content engaging was always part of our strategy, and to do that well, video was the way to go.”

“Not even a few months after I started, all of our in-person events were cancelled due to Covid,” says Genevieve Deschenes, Content & Event Specialist. Calling off events worldwide meant she and her team had to quickly rethink their approach to educating their audience.

The scale of managing a geographically, demographically and technically diverse workforce of over 130,000 team members meant that reliability and smooth streaming were paramount. Initially, Siva and his team used the native hosting tool in their learning management system (LMS), but it quickly gobbled up bandwidth and created a clunky viewing experience. Team members tuning in from retail locations faced slow load times and buffering.

They needed a better way to keep bandwidth low, the viewing experience high, and could scale with the growing number of internal contributors to their video content strategy.

“Video has absolutely helped us from an engagement perspective. Vimeo gives us flexibility to raise our engagement levels, and forces us to be clearer around our investment.”

Siva Kulasingam, Digital Learning Manager