Axonify Shows the True Worth of Microlearning with New Impact Platform
Learning about a customer base and personalizing content or items for them is a huge trend for retail right now—but what happens when companies can learn all about how their employees make decisions?
Axonify has an answer that question with the launch of their new Axonify Impact platform. Organizations can now access insight into why their employees behave certain ways and use that information to improve the business, save money and grow at an exponential rate.
“Impact uses big data and machine learning to take all of the data we gather every day from companies and their employees, apply machine learning to that data, then put us in a position to accurately tell our customers exactly what levers they can pull to impact things like sales or expense reduction—things that come from what an employee knows or does not know in a very specific topic area,” says Carol Leaman, CEO of Axonify.
“We can be very prescriptive now with our customers on what learning topics, subjects and success rates have the biggest impact on moving their business outcome.”
The Waterloo-based company focuses on microlearning within larger companies and the new IMpact platform offers the deepest level of insight Axonify has ever provided. Impact has been in a testing period for a year with about 10 different clients, and employees at those companies are asked a series of questions each day. From those data points, Axonify can recommend changes or ways to grow and shift workflow patterns, resulting in extra money from productivity or lowered overhead costs.
The vision behind the Impact platform started with a single case study featuring the U.S. automotive retailer Pep Boys. They were seeing $100 million in losses each year associated with theft of merchandise (most of which came from workers) and OSHA medical accidents and injuries at store-level. A new head of loss prevention began to work with Leaman and Axonify to change employee behaviour and they designed a five-minute a day experience to gain more insights into the everyday.
When employees had no customers, they would take a quiz asking questions along the lines of “If you saw one of your co-workers doing XYZ, is this suspicious behaviour? Yes or No?” and then “If you saw suspicious behaviour, what is the appropriate next action? Is it A, B or C?”
Those who actually did steal from the company were reminded through that quiz that all of their colleagues were seeing the same questions and being asked about illicit behaviour. This is how Axonify incorporates core cognitive concepts when working with customers to develop their content—it’s even got a name, dubbed “Axonifying” content.
“We deliver the information in a way that is proven to drive knowledge into long-term memory as fast as humanly possible,” explains Leaman. “Employees think they’re having fun and learning new stuff so they can perform better and be recognized for it, but the way we do it all is grounded in brain science.”
Does it work? Well, within a year, Pep Boys saved $40 million in those two areas of loss. Leaman laughs and recounts that the Pep Boys head of loss prevention told her he would have quit his job and come to work for her selling Axonify to other companies.
“If you can effectively drive knowledge that sticks in a person’s brain, they will use that knowledge and change their behaviour in pretty dramatic ways,” says Leaman. “We have used that first instance of results many times over and have proven exactly the same thing across hundreds of thousands of people in different organizations.”
Axonify Impact isn’t just about saving money through reducing theft and oversight though. It is also used to help employees learn how to do their job more effectively, driving their performance up and giving them more opportunities to excel and grow with the company.
If a business target for a company is at-risk, Impact can work to self-heal gaps by recommending new questions or insights to frontline managers. This is all powered by a machine learning optimization that adapts as more data is fed into it.
Axonify now counts massive companies like Walmart, O’Reilly Auto Parts, several South African Banks, Bloomingdale’s and more as premier clients. Existing clients can now use the brand new Impact platform to begin getting deeper insight into how their employees work and function at the ground level.
from Techvibes
May 07, 2018 at 03:23PM
