The Carphone Warehouse Group PLC

Website: http://www.carphonewarehouse.com

Contact: TBA - Head of Learning

 “When you’re number one you can’t use the competition to benchmark yourself because you are the benchmark! What we needed was an industry standard for our training community that we could adopt as our own. The Training Foundation was the perfect fit for us.” Darren Bezani, Group Training Manager, The Carphone Warehouse Group plc.

Since it began trading from humble basement offices in London’s Marylebone Road, The Carphone Warehouse has achieved phenomenal growth. Employing 15,000 people
across 12 countries and with 2000 stores, plus call and support centres, the Group is now a highly diverse telecommunications business that includes Opal Telecom, e2save, onestopphoneshop and the hugely successful consumer telephone business, TalkTalk.

The company’s breathtaking rise has been rewarded with two major accolades this year: Retailer of the Year (“a fantastic achievement, when you consider we were up
against the like of Marks & Spencer and Tesco”) and sixth position in The Sunday Times Top 20 Big Companies to Work For.

Staying at the front of this dynamic, intensely competitive and fast-moving industry requires constant product and service innovation, which is encouraged at all levels within the organisation. In turn, this depends on a highly motivated, customer focused and knowledgeable workforce, which is where Group Training Manager Darren Bezani and his team of training professionals come in. “We see training as a serious investment in maintaining that number one position – it’s one of our competitive advantages,” explains Darren. “When people come into one of our stores, they expect in-depth knowledge, impartial advice and great customer service. If our people are not trained to deliver that, then our customers might
as well buy off the Internet.”
 

 “With 140+ trainers spread across Europe, all of whom are under pressure to deliver a huge number of programmes to a very high standard, sharing all this great practice wasn’t happening as much as it should,” says Darren. “To be more effective and efficient and to work smarter across the group, we needed a framework and training standard to promote consistency and collaboration.”  Darren embarked on a search to find a provider that could deliver a robust training, development and certification framework. The Training Foundation was one of a number of companies on his short list.  “I’d already heard of The Training Foundation’s Trainer Assessment Programme TAP®), but what clinched it for me was the speed and time required to go through their programme, compared to other providers,” says Darren. “When you’re operating in an environment as fast-moving as ours there simply isn’t the time to go through a year’s
programme. I wanted a company that could deliver smartly, quickly, efficiently and not patronise our trainers, who already know their stuff and didn’t need to go through the basics again.”

“Having thought they knew it all, they came back so passionate and wanting to change the world with what they’d learned. While they were already confident in their skills, they emerged feeling better equipped to measure the performance of their own teams
of trainers.”   Christian Smith, Operations Training Manager for CPW Retail in the UK says: “It’s fantastic to have a delivery standard in-place to regularly observe and measure the
team of trainers by. Using the TAP standard provides us with a common language to share ‘delivery materials’ across the large training community we have in place at Carphone, whilst bringing this community closer together in the working environment.”

Meanwhile, Darren has been testing The Training Foundation’s Facilitation Skills course, to quantify the benefits of rolling it out to his team.  “One of the things I particularly like about the courses is that they don’t attempt to override your corporate personality with a prescribed way of doing things. You can
be confident that you are delivering to specific quality standards, but you do it in your own unique style.”