Mercury
How Mercury harnessed the power of Chameleon to seamlessly address the training needs that arose from the consolidation of their retail business with Trustpower.
How Mercury used Chameleon to meet training demands when they consolidated their retail business with Trustpower
Mercury acquired Trustpower in May 2022. When we met Mercury’s learning and development leaders at a conference in June that year, they were on the cusp of a mighty brand change project with a significant learning and development component sparked by the coming together of the two teams.
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Shelby Wilson heads up learning and development for Mercury’s customer operations business unit. She explains: “When we met the Chameleon team, Trustpower and Mercury were still operating as two separate organisations and we were about to start that whole journey of coming together. we knew it was going to be a massive exercise requiring a lot of e-learning material.”
“We had hit a bit of a roadblock where our e-learning all felt the same. We were using Rise and we tried to experiment to make it more visually interesting, but it just wasn't doing what we wanted it to do. A few years ago, we created our future learning principles, and when we talk about the future of learning, we don’t see a Rise module.”
“So, it was very timely meeting the Chameleon team at the conference. We had a look at the tool, liked what we saw, and with the brand integration project looming, Chameleon made a lot of sense. We went through a whole procurement exercise, and looked at some other L&D tools, but Chameleon made the best business case.”
"Chameleon has helped us create more engaging learning that’s more future ready. And it's changed the way we make learning."
A vast quantity of learning material
Shelby is responsible for the onboarding and upskilling of Mercury’s Customer Service Hub. “We train our Customer Service Specialists and the people who support them behind the scenes, like our billing and payments team. So, we do onboarding and system training, along with power skills like leadership fundamentals, resilience, and conflict resolution.”
Shelby’s counterpart Amy Lee-Hartnell manages training for their Direct Sales Teams. She says, “My team create learning content for our Sales Agents. It’s a lot of how-to material about how to sell Mercury products, pricing, compliance, and other sales considerations.”
Between them, Amy and Shelby produce learning material for 50 salespeople, 238 customer service specialists, and 200 people supporting that frontline crew. They’ve a lot of learning material to create, even in an ordinary year. But the brand integration project was the driver for them to make the shift to Chameleon because so much additional training had to be done.
Amy says, “In the three weeks leading up to the brand changeover we trained every frontline agent, 880 hours of online training in customer operations. And while the brand integration has been going on, we haven’t slowed down on anything else. Onboarding's still going on. New leaders still need training.”
Chameleon has not only saved us money on our software licenses, but it’s also saved us time transitioning jobs. With Chameleon, all the learning is saved in one place"
Shelby Wilson
L&D Manager
"In the last few months, the amount of content being created in Chameleon is growing exponentially. We used to produce a few modules every week. Now, last week alone we produced 10 modules."
Shelby Wilson
L&D Manager
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Telling stories and integrating visual themes
One of the things Amy and Shelby appreciate about Chameleon is how much easier it has made it for them to tell stories and integrate interesting visual themes.
Shelby says, “The journey of coming together under one brand was called Destination Mercury, and the idea behind it was ‘fit for now’ because when you bring two businesses together, you’re not going to get everything perfect straightaway. We took fit for now as the theme for our storytelling in all the brand change learning material. Everything had a personal fitness theme, showcasing the journey we're all on together. We're going to slowly build up our teams’ knowledge and we’re here to support them the whole way. We even got dressed up in bright yellow exercise gear and posed as the team’s fit for now personal trainers for the launch.”
“Chameleon’s design flexibility has also given us a lot more license to use our brand in a really fun way. Chameleon is a lot more usable than Rise from a brand integration perspective. Rise only lets you have one accent colour, and if you’ve ever seen white text on yellow buttons you’ll know it doesn't work. Now we can use a full suite of brand colours and elements and that makes our brand team happy too.”
Transitioning to a new learning creation platform
At the start the Mercury L&D team had a bit of trepidation about moving to a new tool. Shelby recalls: “The team were all quite familiar with Rise, and they found it easy. They had to change their mindset a bit. Now we don't just pick a template and drop some stuff into it. We need to be a bit more intentional about the way we consider learning design.”
“It takes time to transition to a new tool. But Chameleon ran lots of training sessions for us and the team are definitely getting more comfortable. They've picked Chameleon up, they're running with it, creating some really cool stuff, and now they can't go back.”
“Rise was like having an old comfy jersey, but it got holes, and eventually we had to stop wearing it. Now we’ve put our new jumper on, we think what were we doing in that old thing? One thing we've noticed with Chameleon is if something isn't working quite right for us, we flick feedback through and they're super responsive. They always respond the same day and say, ‘We can see what you mean. We'll fix that.’ And they actually do.”
“Whereas with Rise, we'd send our feedback through, and if it didn’t just end up getting ignored, it’d get added to this big list and be voted on by the Rise community, and then maybe, if enough people thought that change was helpful, it would eventually get built.”
Learners prefer Chameleon eLearning too
We love it when learning designers tell us they enjoy using Chameleon. But the real proof of the pudding is what your learners think. Shelby says, “Before we started using Chameleon, learners never really said anything about our e-learning, and to be fair, it's hard to get people excited about mandatory systems training. But Chameleon has a feedback function at the end of each module, which is really helpful because we don’t have to send out a survey.”
“Uptake is huge, and we’ve had some cool comments that people appreciate the learning experience, as well as feedback that helps us make our training better. The feedback function is also useful for compliance. We’ve got some external sales teams contracted to Mercury, and they go through compliance training for auditing purposes. So having them fill in feedback to verify they've completed the training is really helpful.”
“My proudest moment was transitioning to our new bill. We had to teach our team how to read the new bill, interpret it, and also understand what data feeds into it, so if they see something wrong, they know to raise it. I was sitting at my desk not long after the new bill was released, and a Slack notification popped up asking if anyone had any useful info about the new bill. And one of our agents responded saying, “Go and do the bill e-learning module. It's really cool”. No one's ever said that about our e-learning before.”
The most prolific Chameleon content creators we know
Mercury have only had their Chameleon license for 10 months. But in that time, they’ve created 153 modules, which makes them one of the most prolific Chameleon creators we know. Amy says, “In the last few months, the amount of content being created in Chameleon is growing exponentially. We used to produce a few modules every week. Now, last week alone we produced 10 modules. I logged in today, and I was blown away at what we’ve achieved.”
Shelby expands on the benefits Chameleon brings. “Chameleon has not only saved us money on our software licenses, but it’s also saved us time transitioning jobs. With Rise it used to be, ‘Hey, who's got this module? I need to edit it. Can you share it with me?’ Whereas with Chameleon, all the learning is saved in one place, so you can just go in, edit modules other people have been working on, or copy an existing module and make changes for a new audience. So, when people are on leave it’s easy to pick up their work.”
“Chameleon has helped us create more engaging learning that’s more future ready. And it's changed the way we make learning. Before, we always felt we had to supplement e-learning with tutorials because the Rise modules were so unengaging. Whereas now we can build so much interactivity into Chameleon modules, we don’t feel we have to follow everything up and check it made sense.”
Try Chameleon for yourself
If you need to produce a vast quantity of learning content fast, and you need your e-learning modules to be engaging, attractive, and fun for learners, Chameleon has got your back.
View a demo or get in touch to see how Chameleon can help you create more engaging learning today.