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Retailers Embrace DigitalThink E-learning Services
Retailers Streamline Training and Boost Efficiency with Custom E-learning
NEW YORK CITY, NY - NRF Annual Convention & Expo - January 13, 2004 - DigitalThink, Inc. (NASDAQ: DTHK), the leader in custom e-Learning for Fortune 1000 companies, today showcased the strong momentum behind its custom e-learning solutions and services in the retail market place. DigitalThink now has over a dozen retail customers, including such industry leaders as Circuit City, Jo-Ann Stores, Inc., The North FaceŽ and Rent-a-Center. DigitalThink's retail solutions serve a variety of industry sub-segments, including apparel, consumer electronics, office supplies, toys, copy services, automobile rental and quick-serve restaurants.
Retailers are leveraging DigitalThink's retail-specific e-learning services to increase customer loyalty, drive sales, and improve employee satisfaction. Through DigitalThink's unique combination of retail industry expertise, cutting-edge technologies and world-class custom content development capabilities, retailers are transforming their businesses by empowering their employees with store-specific selling techniques, customer service skills and product knowledge.
"We've been extremely pleased with the business results of our e-learning initiative," said Jeffrey Wells, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Circuit City. "We've been able to positively affect customer satisfaction and employee productivity while decreasing our training costs significantly."
According to the National Retail Federation, the U.S. retail industry is comprised of over 1.4 million retail establishments, more than 20 million retail employees and gross sales of over $3.5 trillion. With so much at stake and competition for customer dollars becoming increasingly cut-throat, web-based learning has become an important competitive advantage for some of today's smartest retailers. E-learning delivers training that can quickly improve customer service while reducing training travel expenditures, instructor salaries and employee training time. Moreover, retailers are discovering that e-learning disseminates product knowledge and company strategy more quickly to their large, distributed populations, thereby increasing employee productivity significantly.
"Our average retail customer sees a significantly positive return on their custom e-learning investment within a few months of launching a DigitalThink solution," says Jeff Marshall, Director of Retail Solutions at DigitalThink. "Retailers, with their large and geographically distributed workforces, are a natural for e-learning. We project that within a few years, a majority of large retailers will adopt large-scale custom e-learning."
Customer Service Training as a Competitive Advantage
As big-box, warehouse retailers continue to drive down prices, many retailers are looking for different ways to compete-they've discovered that outstanding customer service may be the ticket. Research indicates that price only marginally beats out service in consumer's preferences for retailers. Furthermore, it has been shown that when retail employees proactively provide customers with product information, have the knowledge and skills to inform customers of new opportunities, and provide consistently good service throughout a customer interaction, customers are 32% more likely to repurchase from that retailer.
Customer service skills training is at the core of DigitalThink's retail offering, which includes the following essential e-learning components:
- Retail-expert strategy and design services
- 3-D scenario-based simulations
- Custom courseware development
- Self-service content maintenance and creation tools
- Cutting-edge on-demand learning delivery platform
- Just-in-time accessibility to knowledge assets
About DigitalThink
DigitalThink is the leader in custom e-learning for Fortune 1000 companies. DigitalThink provides the right combination of courseware development, do-it-yourself capabilities, learning delivery, and industry-specific expertise. DigitalThink's customers include ADP Dealer Services, BearingPoint, Circuit City, EDS, Kinko's, Mazda, and Red Hat. When learning matters, the proven choice is DigitalThink. www.digitalthink.com
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