Creating skincare experts around the world with Rise and Articulate 360

In the beauty industry, trends, products, and consumer preferences evolve rapidly. But one thing won’t budge—the sun. And, like all of us, Supergoop! revolves around it. The mission of the prestige skincare company is to provide multiple sunscreen-fortified products that make it easy for customers to protect their skin every single day.

To strengthen this effort, the company wanted to empower its employees and retail partners with the education it would take to change the way people thought about sunscreen.

“Skincare education is at the heart of our brand. It’s key to our mission,” says Amber Weinfurtner, Vice President of Sales at Texas-based Supergoop! But how do you fluidly pass that evolving education to a growing workforce and the sales associates of retail partners around the world?

With her background in education and curriculum design, Amber believed the answer was an online training system. As a mid-sized company, Supergoop! wasn’t interested in buying an entire learning management system (LMS). Rather, Amber wanted an all-in-one accessible system to create, host, track, and manage training. Her team also wanted to create content that could be posted easily in retail partners’ LMSs.

Following a trusted partner’s lead

Supergoop! first heard about Articulate from its partner Sephora. The beauty retailer uses the Articulate 360 suite of online training tools to create its e-learning courses. Supergoop! wanted to mimic the design and quality of Sephora’s training, making it easier to reach and train Sephora’s beauty advisors, who discuss Supergoop! with customers.

The Supergoop! sales team chose both the Rise online training system and Articulate 360 because of how the systems seamlessly work with each other. The sales team uses Rise to quickly create and present content for Supergoop! employees. Then the team uses the Rise 360 app within Articulate 360 to create training for different retail partners and distribute that content to those partners’ LMSs.

The sales team appreciates the agility that Rise provides. “If we enter a new market in Southern California and need to dig into a particular product or selling concept, it takes just a few moments to create professional-looking training content in Rise,” says Amber. “We can then share that training with the field team almost instantly.”

A modern approach to beauty education

Consumer education is extremely important with prestige products such as those that Supergoop! makes. Beauty advisors and experts at Sephora or Nordstrom, another Supergoop! partner, need to have deep knowledge to effectively explain why a Supergoop! sunscreen is better than a competitor’s product—and worth any higher price.

Traditionally, this type of intensive training in the beauty industry involves lengthy and costly classroom- based role playing. “There isn’t an easy way to reach them when you’re across the country and have a tight team,” says Amber.

With Rise and Rise 360, Supergoop! can train people faster with engaging courses wherever they are— something the company finds helpful as it works with more tech-forward millennials and Gen Zers.

Supergoop! often uses Rise to create new training on the fly, which salespeople can take during lunch breaks. The constant flow of new, easily digestible training keeps salespeople current with the company’s evolution, as well as relevant beauty trends. This helps them connect with customers, boosting Supergoop! sales.

Beyond the online courses, when salespeople run meetings on Zoom, they’ll opt to show content created on Rise, instead of running PowerPoint. Why? They find it easier to use and more aesthetically pleasing. Even Supergoop! sales executives have been using Rise to conduct masterclasses for their teams.

Flexible training reaching from home to overseas

Supergoop! finds Rise and Rise 360 so intuitive that the company expanded its use beyond sales training. When the pandemic hit, Amber had to pivot the firm’s approach, using Rise to share information quickly and at scale with all employees: “With COVID-19, obviously no stores were open and everyone was in lockdown.”

In addition, the company was in the middle of expanding throughout the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Supergoop! needed an easy way to plug in these new partners. “There was no other way for us to get content over to the APAC region,” says Amber. “We knew we had to adopt the system right away.”

Rise and Rise 360 helped the company share critical content in an engaging format with new partners in Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia. Plus, Rise empowered Supergoop! to retain its own people and keep them—and partners’ sales associates—actively learning and engaged.

Beyond sales and into the broader company

Experiencing rapid growth—the company ballooned from 20 employees to more than 50 in a few months— Supergoop! has had to virtually onboard and train many people quickly. The sales team’s success with Rise and Rise 360 made it clear that Rise 360 was the ideal choice to create new employee training content online.

“We took our standard onboarding handbook and built an interactive online onboarding system through Rise 360 instead,” says Amber. “It’s now a living, breathing piece that tells our brand story and gets new employees ready to go.” Supergoop! also used Rise to revamp its customer service and product training.

Amber sees virtual training as a way to keep salespeople with quick learning styles engaged without alienating others. People can complete courses at their own paces, without having to wait for colleagues to finish. And the user-friendly system engages employees regardless of technical ability. “Anyone can use Rise easily,” says Amber.

Informed from the start and educated throughout

Now, new employees are armed with Supergoop! knowledge from day 1. Plus, the company can onboard and train without having to gather everyone in person.

Their efforts have paid off with improved customer satisfaction. Outside customer service representatives went from earning a 2.5-star rating before training to a 5-star rating after they finished training through Rise. And better customer service ratings can only mean one thing—happier customers buying more from Supergoop!

Today, all Supergoop! employees have Rise accounts so they can access internal training and keep up with company changes. “We’ve been really pleased with Rise,” says Amber. “We’ve adopted the program throughout the company and can integrate it into what we do—educate people.”

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