Eat better. Live better. – that’s what AMC stands for. The AMC Premium Cooking System is designed for healthy cooking without compromising on taste, thanks to the unique time and temperature controlled cooking methods.
Directly selling our products to the customer has been AMC’s business model since 1963. The roughly 12,000 mostly independent AMC consultants in over 30 countries showcase the AMC products during live cooking experiences in private homes, during virtual cooking experiences or public cooking shows.
The AMC consultants mostly work from home and can choose how much time they want to invest. ‘It’s a relevant alternative to traditional employment, direct selling is the original gig’ says Anne Muthmann, Head of Training at AMC International. The permanent AMC staff is relatively small, making it quite challenging to train about 12,000 salespeople. ‘In addition to the local and national field trainers, we now have four e-learning authors who are responsible for creating digital content for all consultants. This requires us to be incredibly efficient as we roll out our blended learning strategy internationally.’
‘There were quite a few criteria that the authoring tool had to meet,’ she continues. For example, it had to be easy to use, allowing our authors to readily create locally relevant content while staying true to the look and feel of the AMC brand.’
‘To make an informed decision, we tested five different authoring tools for several months. In the end, the degree of training and support of the FLOWSPARKS team was decisive. They are always available and very solution-oriented.’
Another criterium was having an intuitive and fun e-learning experience for the users. ‘We wanted to make our digital content more engaging, and we certainly succeeded in that’, says Anne.
‘Of course, we also had certain technical requirements,’ she continues. ‘For example, the authoring tool had to be able to run on our Learning Management System (Moodle). And it goes without saying that we wanted everything to be mobile first. With all our consultants constantly being on the road, it was important that our training courses were accessible and attractive on mobile devices.’
Scalability was also important because AMC International wanted to be able to add other languages easily. ‘This not only meant that the system had to support all languages, but also – and above all – that it had to be able to import, export and modify language versions efficiently and quickly. FLOWSPARKS met all our requirements, so in the end, opting for FLOWSPARKS was a no-brainer.’
In their enthusiasm, Anne and her team immediately wanted to start using all the formats and templates FLOWSPARKS has to offer at once, which turned out not to be such a good idea. ‘It’s better to start working with five to seven templates first until you get to know them more thoroughly. In the beginning, it’s a bit of a search to track down the right format and the perfect template, but the FLOWSPARKS team gave us some great assistance in this regard. Sometimes you also just have to delve deeper and try out the various formats to see what fits best,’ says Anne.
For example, AMC uses the Learning Format FLASHCARDS for product training. ‘This format is ideal for displaying a visual and asking a multiple-choice question. We give immediate feedback and it looks great on a mobile device. All our consultants love this playful way of learning new things. Another format, STORYWISE, is a fitting exercise for sales training, allowing us to use different scenarios to train a consultant, for example, to deal with customer objections.’
