How Kantar revolutionized its global account team training

Kantar is the world’s leading data, insights, and consulting company. Active in 100 countries, Kantar has approximately 25,000 employees working with clients in over 90 markets. With their powerful digital data collection tools, Kantar works with local and global brands to provide actionable insights and develop strategic plans.

For its enterprise partners, such as Unilever, Kantar employs an account management team made up of hundreds of employees to continuously collect data and develop insights for a variety of projects ranging from brand strategy to innovation, and sustainability.

With such large and diverse account teams (that are also often spread out geographically) it was important for Kantar to find a way to keep employees aligned and focused on their clients’ specific business needs.

That’s where Mark Whiting comes in. As a Global Insight Planner, Mark had been working on the Unilever account for some years. In 2019, he set up the Unilever University – an internal L&D program for his team of over 1,000 colleagues working on the Unilever account.

With no prior background in corporate training or L&D, Mark developed his training content using PowerPoint and text-based documents. But how could he create a more engaging learning experience that allowed him to also track results with no instructional design background?

Mark’s problem is quite a common one in large corporations: an employee notices a training gap in their organization and needs to fill it rapidly and efficiently – leaving centralized L&D departments and third-party vendors out of the picture.

And without a background in instructional design or prior corporate training experience, Mark set up the Unilever University with the tools and strategies he was familiar with: curating relevant content using PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, PDFs, and other text-based formats. He knew local team members would be able to lead training sessions in person using these materials as a complement.

And while this solution worked well enough, when Mark came across an engaging e-learning session first-hand he knew he needed to find an easy way to improve the digital experience of his Unilever University.

It was in late 2019 when Mark came across an impressive e-learning course developed by some of his colleagues. When he approached them to find out who they had hired to design their presentation, Mark was surprised to find out they had done it all themselves – using Easygenerator.

He quickly reached out to Easygenerator after that and signed up for an Enterprise Pilot plan to begin testing the e-learning authoring tool’s full set of features. With Easygenerator’s personalized onboarding and continuous training support, Mark was able to quickly start developing courses on his own and onboard additional team members to help him grow the Unilever University.

What Mark was able to achieve with Easygenerator was ultimately revolutionary for Kantar. While other global account teams had attempted to set up similar training programs in the past, these projects had ultimately been abandoned as they had been closely tied with one team member’s enthusiasm and commitment to the project.

With Easygenerator, Mark was able to set up an account team training program that will ultimately stand the test of time. Since anyone can learn to use Easygenerator quickly and easily, any team member can get involved in creating or updating the training materials for the Unilever University.

Today, Kantar has over 150 authors creating courses and almost 300 courses have been created with Easygenerator. In the Unilever University – which serves a team of over 1,000 employees at Kantar – there are approximately 250 employees taking courses on a regular basis.

Kantar started its Easygenerator journey with a one-year Enterprise Pilot program – a program especially designed by Easygenerator for large corporations to give them the ability to test out the authoring tool’s full functionality with as many authors as they wish. For Kantar, the Enterprise Pilot program allowed Mark to sign up as many team members as he needed and gave all authors full access to the tool.

Additionally, every Kantar author received an onboarding training and team members were able to request on-going training as the needs of the team evolved. These trainings (which ranged in topics from microlearning to blended learning) enabled Mark and his team to learn about e-learning best practices and ultimately improve the quality of their training content. As he developed the Unilever University, Mark continuously shared about his experience with Easygenerator internally with other global account teams and colleagues from different departments.

He also set up an Easygenerator group in Workplace to facilitate sharing new courses and e-learning materials. This word-of-mouth approach led to a growing number of coworkers showing interest in the tool. They would turn to Mark who then shared recordings of previous Easygenerator onboarding sessions with them or requested new onboarding sessions from the Easygenerator team. The tool’s zero learning curve made it easy for anyone to create their first e-learning course quickly and seamlessly.

Today, Mark’s Unilever University has inspired other global account teams at Kantar to develop their own account-specific trainings for their teams. Additionally, Easygenerator has been used to create digital reporting materials for Kantar’s customers thereby adding value to the company’s service delivery.

When Kantar’s Enterprise Pilot program was coming to an end, Mark realized there were multiple teams within Kantar who were already using Easygenerator. So, he worked internally to gather information about all existing licenses and bring them all under one company-wide Enterprise Plan. Today, Kantar continues to successfully use Easygenerator to fulfil its internal training and customer reporting needs.