How Sana is helping Ankorstore reach its ambitious vision to make learning a cornerstone of the employee experience
by Dora Postonjski, People Development and Experience Programs Manager @ Ankorstore
90%
Faster to create an MVP onboarding course in Sana vs. old platform
1hour vs.1month
How long it takes to create an onboarding course with Sana vs. the old platform
Challenge
The fast-moving scale-up was stuck with an outdated platform initially chosen for sales enablement. But with an ambitious learning agenda that spans the entire company, and a goal of delivering above and beyond for independent retailers, they had to find a new solution that would boost flagging engagement, and offer a better UI to entice staff to stick with the training.
Outcome
Ankorstore now offers an engaging learning experience for everything from employee onboarding to upskilling, and performance development. With higher engagement and completion rates, and abundant positive feedback—Sana has reshaped the learning experience, and is helping Ankorstore offer the employee experience they envisioned.
“I still cannot believe how fast we can create content in Sana compared to our old tool. Before, it took up to three weeks to create a course—and a month for our onboarding courses. With Sana, it takes one hour.”
Finding the modern, end-to-end platform to match a big vision
The number one priority for Ankorstore is delivering on our promise to our retailers. And learning plays a key role in that journey, because it’s not just about standard training and upskilling. We are a wholesale marketplace for retailers, and we promise this smooth end-to-end experience—especially for independent retailers. So having a mindset where we’re aware of what’s happening in the market and the world—and an understanding of how that affects small retailers — is key to giving them the best experience possible.
Our second priority related to learning is encouraging internal adaptability. We are a scale-up with 280 employees; we’re moving quickly, and everyone needs to be able to embrace change. Ours is not a typical “tick off the box” L&D program. We’re making a conscious effort to shift the mindset people have, and how they approach their daily work—with the end goal of supporting the company's mission.
When we chose our previous platform, there was no structured L&D offering at the time. It was just for sales enablement, and people were dissatisfied with it. Content creation took a long time, it wasn’t engaging or interactive, the UI and visual design was outdated, and it was hard to pull the right data or reports. On top of that, you had to go through an academy in order to even learn how to use the tool. It wasn’t meeting our standard of speed and adaptability, or allowing us to scale learning in the way we wanted to.
Sana was at the top of my list from day one because the company is so product- and customer-driven. They share our philosophy of learning overall, and that if you have a tool for learning, it needs to help. It shouldn’t slow us down, it shouldn’t make things harder, it shouldn’t cost a lot of money. It should help us be faster and better at the jobs we’re doing.
Sana is a platform that’s built for everyone, regardless of their level of experience, which was important because of how hard it was to increase engagement and use on our old platform. The UI is beautifully designed, and the user experience is seamless. Anyone can open up Sana and start using it.
Reducing content creation time by 90%
A big priority when we switched platforms was increasing the speed of content creation, and making it easier for our experts within the company to create content. We run a wide range of training, starting with our foundational HR processes and programs like manager training, performance management, upskilling, and skill gap analysis. Plus, we do employee and customer experience onboarding, offboarding, and crossboarding when someone changes roles.
My first reflection with Sana was how quickly we were able to onboard our expert content creators in HR, sales, and customer experience. It took just a few short sessions, instead of the L&D team spending a huge amount of time teaching them how to use a complex tool.
Then, when it comes to content creation, I still cannot believe how fast we can create content in Sana compared to our old tool. Before, it took the HR team up to three weeks to create a course—and a month for our onboarding courses. Now it takes one hour. The same goes for creating live, collaborative sessions. If I’m planning a retrospective workshop, it only takes me about 10 minutes to create and schedule a great experience that’s interactive.
We use Sana’s AI editing features to make content creation easier and help us come up with new ideas. For example, if we’ve got some existing material that’s relevant but a bit static, we can just upload the file, and Sana will automatically transform it into a beautiful interactive course. The AI that’s embedded in the platform also helps us for brainstorming and getting unstuck. Sometimes you get content creator block, where you struggle to come up with ideas. But with Sana, the AI helps you. It’s not there to do everything for you, but it guides you forward or simply gets you moving.
For someone with a specialist L&D background, my brain is always thinking: how quickly can I make the content? How fast can I make it available to the end user? Can I make it bite-sized? Can I make it fun and interactive? Can I blend it with a workshop? Can I create a personalized learning path for just a few people instead of the whole organization? It’s almost like playing with clay. With Sana, I can play and experiment with the experience, rather than only being able to do a few things by the book.
“Having a tool that’s interactive, encouraging participation, and allowing learners to tailor their experience to their knowledge level allows us to offer a much better employee experience.”
Saving time with automation and beautiful reporting features
The HR team are the gurus when it comes to Sana; the preachers. One of the reasons the team loves it so much is because we save a lot of time compared to before. Take the onboarding process for new hires. We have new people joining Ankorstore every week, and we don’t have set onboarding dates. Now we can automate the onboarding process by setting up a trigger once we know their start date, so the onboarding course is delivered on their first day. Before the process was entirely manual.
Another time-saver has to do with the statistics and data we get from Sana on learning across the organization. Now in just a few clicks, I can quickly see high-level data or dive deeper into one team or one manager. I can go down the pipeline of data without getting lost, and screenshot a beautiful illustration of the data for a presentation. If I need to compile a report, it’s easy to play with the data to get the answers I need, and download it without bugs or glitches—which we dealt with before on our old platform.
We also like using Sana’s universal search function to find anything our company has documented. The AI instantly finds documents that aren’t just on Sana, but public documents on Google Drive, and on our internal Wikipedia. We used to waste so much time trying to find and share documents, and now it takes just seconds to find the right information.
Raising the onboarding completion rate to 100%
One of our biggest use cases with Sana is employee onboarding, and onboarding for the customer experience team. We used to struggle to get new employees to complete our onboarding program, in part because of the outdated design of our old platform.
Now we're getting extremely positive feedback—and our completion rate is 100%. At first, I was shocked. I’ve never seen a completion rate that high. Our people partners also get a lot of qualitative feedback from employees, who will Slack them to tell them what a great experience it was. It’s really refreshing to do onboarding through this type of tool.
We’ve also started to blend in live group sessions to the onboarding program—especially when we educate them about our retailers and brands. Sana’s built-in virtual classroom has tons of interactive features, which allows us to give our people an engaging way to understand why we’re here and what our purpose is—regardless of their role.
We have a lot of employees who are joining remotely, and the experience of onboarding through Sana is so much better. Before they would sit by themselves and click through a platform that wasn’t engaging them. Having a tool that’s interactive, encouraging participation, and allowing them to tailor their experience to their knowledge level allows us to offer a much better employee experience. Not just at the moment of onboarding but long term as well.
“Using Sana gives us the flexibility to create training that’s digestible for different types of learning styles. Other platforms only cater to one learner profile. But we all learn in different ways.”
Crafting an experience that meets all types of learning needs
Sana’s virtual classroom is useful for so much more than formal training. It’s brilliant for running team workshops. It helps me engage the audience, and offer more introverted people a way to participate actively in the sessions. They can respond to a chat thread, or answer a poll to check-in and out. We also use the reflection cards, where people can respond to a prompt in real-time—like “complete this sentence.” They can participate anonymously or with their real name, and even show support for each other’s reflections by adding emojis.
L&D recently held workshops to educate the staff on changes we’re making to the reward process at Ankorstore. And we received feedback that they were the best live workshops they’d ever been to. We had the same experience with our performance management retrospectives. Participants said it was much easier to pay attention in the workshop, and having access to the recorded session afterwards was helpful.
Using Sana gives us the flexibility to create training that’s digestible for different types of learning preferences. Other platforms only cater to one way of learning that has become standardized within the industry. But we all have different ways we like to learn. I have ADHD, for example. Keeping my attention focused is tiring for me. But the interactivity that’s embedded in Sana’s platform gets me hooked, and keeps me engaged. And at the end of the day, that’s the real purpose of these tools. You want to reach a wider audience, and you can do that with Sana.
Moving fast and boosting the employee experience at the same time
Everything we do—from the onboarding, live workshops, performance development, and upskilling—is so much faster, more streamlined, and more engaging now. We finally have a solution that matches the speed we are moving at, and the speed our industry is moving at.
When you work in tech, things change so rapidly. The priority of learning at Ankorstore is about teaching and nurturing that mindset of adaptability. With Sana, we have a tool that allows us to deliberately practice this skill. We can offer an interactive learning experience that engages and educates our people in the ways that matter most to us. And we can offer a much better employee experience as a result.