Instilled’s API and Advanced Configuration Options Provide a Customizable Edge to a Liquor Distributor’s Training Needs

A distributor of alcoholic beverages in the United States, with over 20,000 employees between its main offices and warehouses, adopted Instilled By PeopleFluent as a complement to its traditional LMS. With Instilled, the company can have a dedicated environment for staff to create video content quickly and easily distribute it in the field, without the complexity of enrollments and other activities. As a result, it uses its main LMS to assign learning and house all core activities, and Instilled as a simple way to launch and track content that doesn't fit into a core course. 

The Challenge: Adopting a Flexible and Truly Customizable Learning Platform to Deliver Timely Training and Communications

Having a distributed workforce that requires ongoing training and corporate communications delivered in a timely and accessible manner can be a challenge for businesses. This is especially true when thinking about warehouse employees who are not typically accustomed to logging into an LMS on a regular basis. 

Additionally, every business has specific needs in terms of customizations and automations, which often need to work in tandem with other organizational LMSs already in place. While the company’s existing LMS served as a repository for core training, having the ability to distribute content easily and through different devices has been a winning strategy for the drinks distributor, particularly when information has to be consumed as mandated by government regulations, such as OSHA compliance (Occupational Safety and Health Administration).

Regular content creation can also be tricky if employees feel the tools at their disposal are not user-friendly. Hence, ease of use can heavily determine staff adoption. Offering an intuitive interface to create and distribute video content inside and outside of the organization can promote staff adoption and even internal evangelizing, leading to more content being produced and shared.

Solution: Delivering Training That’s Just One Click Away

In 2020, when it was deemed safe for warehouse employees to return to work after COVID-19-related lockdowns eased, the company found Instilled offered a simple and trackable way to distribute return-to-work standards directly to employees.

To deliver the content successfully, the spirits distributor was able to simply send out an Instilled link to the required information via SMS. Through a text message, warehouse employees were able to receive important back-to-work information through their mobile devices with just one click.

Due to Instilled’s interoperability, it was also possible for the company to integrate and access reporting analytics in its core LMS as its single, main reporting source. The team involved then used the analytics link within Instilled to track user viewership, which automatically completed the enrollment in the LMS via the API.

“One employee asked me, ‘What about analytics?’ I gave her a link and told her to save it on her desktop and access it any time she needed analytics. She said she had never used a platform that was so easy to access the information that she needed and thanked me,” shared a company representative.

In addition, Instilled’s API and advanced configuration options have allowed the distributor to execute an array of customizations that fit its unique company needs. So far, the team has worked on a number of integrations and automations that have been incredibly useful for the business, including:

• Authenticating users: By using the Instilled authentication method to secure and identify access to external data sources, the company saves time and cost by integrating all external applications at once.
• Metrics and analytics: Deep linking with Single Sign-On (SSO) allows the team to provide secure access to analytics directly to managers without them having to navigate or build reports themselves on the platform.
• Microsoft Teams integration: Deep links to content are shared in Microsoft Teams and the team has built a search bot that lives within Teams. The bot allows users to search for content from Instilled directly within Teams and quickly launch it.
• Sandbox user-generated content: Instilled data architecture allows the company to easily create ‘private sandbox’ areas for subject matter experts (SMEs) to safely and securely create and load content directly within Instilled. Once it's ready for a larger audience, it can be easily moved or the permissions on that container can be changed. This provides an easy and scalable way to get more individuals within the organization involved in the content creation process and help the training team scale and have the most relevant content from SMEs. “I love how easy it is to scale Instilled out to users if you know what their needs are,” shared the company representative.

“It's that automation every step along the way that is so exciting. I keep finding more ways within Instilled to be able to automate—there are so many options to explore.” – company representative

The liquor distributor is working on building a content intake form that will take users through a decision tree pointing them to either the LMS or Instilled based on their answers. This will help them scale the creation of SME-generated content and help SMEs find the best place and tools to create the content they need to share. The goal is to have two environments that ultimately work in harmony.

Results: Easy Access to One-Off Training Communications and Video Content Creation

With Instilled, the company has found a solution to have its employees complete training videos effortlessly and on the go. What's more, it has found a video learning platform that appeals to headquarters workers who have taken to it to create and share content with little help and supervision needed.

The company reports that content consumed on Instilled has increased from 200-300 pieces per month to about 6,000 per month, in just over a year since adopting the platform. That’s approximately a 2,600% increase in content creation. The surge of content being consumed can be attributed to COVID-19, but the company also expects to keep up the momentum and grow content views to about 24,000 views per month.

Additionally, the learning platform has been adopted by corporate staff who find its intuitive nature appealing to create and distribute video content inside and outside of the organization. With Instilled’s support of user permissions, employees can modify courses and learning materials effortlessly and with no previous knowledge of the platform. Many employees now post videos from Instilled to their social media accounts, which the company believes is a key way to provide them with the necessary tools to easily share online, especially among peers.

“We are giving them that social media accessibility, but now their audience is their workforce—their peers—that are consuming this content. It's just that flexible environment that our employees enjoy so much.” – company representative