Customer Spotlight
Coles Supermarkets
Founded in 1914, Coles is a leading retailer headquartered in Melbourne. Coles employs over 130,000 team members and operates 1,502 stores throughout Australia.
1,800+
videos on Vimeo
40
team seats
7M
annual views
173K
unique viewers annually
Challenge
With over a thousand retail locations, Coles historically trained staff on site at its stores. Shifting to a digital-first approach, of course, was no small task.
“Because we support such a large network of team members, we needed to be sharp on the tools we used,” says Siva Kulasingam, Digital Learning Manager. “Making the content engaging was always part of our strategy, and to do that well, video was the way to go.”
The scale of managing a geographically, demographically and technically diverse workforce of over 130,000 team members meant that reliability and smooth streaming were paramount. Initially, Siva and his team used the native hosting tool in their learning management system (LMS), but it quickly gobbled up bandwidth and created a clunky viewing experience. Team members tuning in from retail locations faced slow load times and buffering.
They needed a better way to keep bandwidth low, the viewing experience high, and could scale with the growing number of internal contributors to their video content strategy.
Solution
Hosting learning videos on Vimeo and embedding them with a custom player in their LMS means Siva’s team can ensure their colleagues get a top-notch viewing experience. “Hosting on Vimeo keeps our bandwidth lower, and it’s able to adapt and ingest accordingly based on the viewer’s internet connection,” says Siva. “It’s helped us heaps.”
Sid Manay, Digital Learning Consultant, concurs. “Vimeo addressed our concerns by providing a video experience that was accessible, intuitive and flexible for all our team members.”
But Siva and Sid don’t just use Vimeo for hosting their learning content. With stakeholders and contributors across the company weighing in, Vimeo’s review tools and team member settings keep their content production running smoothly.
“Because of our scale and volume, having flexibility to manage users and content is really important,” says Siva. “Vimeo’s review tools allows stakeholders to easily add notes and comments, which helps us when collaborating with SMEs and vendors.”
Outcome
Today, Coles is able to offer high-quality training to team members anywhere, and give peace of mind to stakeholders and vendors that the training content is as clear and reliable as the stream itself.
“Video offers us the ability to maintain consistency around the messaging we’re delivering, versus the variability of an individual providing the training,” says Siva. “You don’t have to worry about things getting lost in translation.”