The new Wallbox Academy trains installers, distributors and business partners in a global and personalized way.

MIQUEL GÓMEZ, Head of Training & Wallbox Academy; NIKI MAHONA, Training Content Manager of WALLBOX; and MARIO PLANAS, Managing Partner of ACTUA SOLUTIONS

The Spanish company Wallbox, specialized in energy management and electric vehicle charging systems, is growing at a fast pace. From its current 500 external users (installers, distributors and customer service), it plans to grow to more than 3,000 by the end of this year. For all of them, the company has the Wallbox Academy, which, since a few months ago, has switched to the Totara Learn platform with Actua Solutions, seeking to gain in scalability.

How was Wallbox Academy born and what services do you offer through it?

Miquel Gómez: The academy was born out of the need to train our external customers: installers who are not part of the Wallbox network, distributors who purchase our chargers and who have to train both their sales teams and other installers, and both internal and external customer service teams.

How has this academy been transforming?

Niki Mahona: We launched it about a year and a half ago through Learn Upon’s cloud-based LMS platform. At that time, we had hosted certain courses with very technical information, which were not too “affordable” for the end user, for example, 35-minute videos in which only one person was talking.

Miquel Gómez: We saw many limitations in this LMS that did not allow us to grow as fast as we needed, it was not very flexible and very standardized. Our company needed scalability, and so, at the end of 2021, we decided to switch to Totara’s LMS. We access it from a section of our support web page called Learning Center. There, you can find all the information about the platform: how to register, how to use it, the access link, the courses we are offering, etc. Our users enter Totara without knowing what Totara is. We seem to have built the platform ourselves. We started with very few users and now we have more than 500. By the end of the year we expect to be more than 3,000.

How was the process of collaboration with Wallbox and the implementation of this external platform?

Mario Planas: We had already worked with Miquel in his previous professional career, so he already knew the tool. We did a previous work to see how to adapt the entire Wallbox content structure, types of users, etc. to Totara. We supported them in making certain decisions and resolving some very specific doubts they had about certain functionalities. We also trained their teams on the functionalities of the tool to make them autonomous, and we worked a lot on the graphic design part. The implementation was done in a very agile and fast way, in little more than a month and a half.

What advantages have you gained from the platform change at the company level?

Miquel Gómez: One of them is that, nowadays, we can request customized functionalities from the Actua Solutions Development team. Now, for example, we are developing a reporting system that we will only use ourselves and we are also designing our own dashboards for some of our clients so that when their employees enter the training platform, they will see their company image, with their logo and their courses.

In addition, the platform is now open to all users so that they can sign up themselves without us having to intervene, which has allowed us to gain in scalability and reach. For example, we have installers in the USA with an 8-hour time difference, so if we were to authorize their access from here, it would be much more complicated. Now they can come in anytime, anywhere, and this gives us a lot of flexibility.

Niki Mahona: On the other hand, the new tool allows us to customize and modify many aspects that we could not adapt to our needs before. With the previous one, if we wanted to change any process, it was necessary to perform three or four previous steps. Now everything is much more direct. It is true that, at the beginning, we needed more support to launch this tool, because Totara requires a more complex implementation, but it is much more powerful. In addition, it offers predefined reports and allows you to create more complex ones. It is 100% customizable. And it has a keyword search engine to solve any doubts that may arise.

Mario Planas: The platform also allows users to be segmented based on different attributes: country, position, the type of courses they have seen before or have been interested in, etc. With this information, users can be grouped and thus be assigned training, offered a specific catalog, shown specific information on the home page, etc. It offers global and personalized training. It also allows you to assign local administrators so that they can create their own courses, assign enrollments to user groups or create reports.

And at the user level, what has been the reception from your external customers?

Niki Mahona: We have achieved a smoother end-user experience. It is very easy to use and allows you to search in a very easy and fast way, it does not require much time investment. In addition, in line with the company, it has a very important visual load, it is very intuitive, so the user does not get bored with the content, which is easier to digest.

What type of content, methodology and formats does the new platform include?

Miquel Gómez: With the new tool, we have started to use microlearning through much shorter training pills, which are easier to consume and help to achieve rapid learning. It works like a Netflix gallery where you can filter by content type, title, category, etc., and you can choose what you want to watch and what you don’t. We do not force anyone to take any course. There are no programs or itineraries. We offer very specific courses for very specific knowledge gaps.

We use a lot of videos, e-learning, instruction manuals, etc., and soon we will also have webinars. The videos we use, 2-3 minutes long, are very powerful visually, including many animations of the products, infographics, etc., and all with the image and colors of the company.

“We can now request custom functionality from the Actua Solutions Development team.”

In terms of content, our training focuses on hard skills, with very technical knowledge, and on how to sell our products (features, benefits, etc.). In the future we would also like to work on sales and customer support techniques.

Niki Mahona: We are also considering incorporating gamification techniques in the sales and installer courses so that users who obtain the most medals and coins in the training get a prize.

In addition, Actua and Wallbox are collaborating on another project for the internal training of Wallbox employees. What does it consist of?

Mario Planas: Until now Wallbox only conducted certain seminars for its employees and some English training through the tools of different suppliers, but did not have any internal e-learning platform. However, given the company’s rapid growth – it will soon reach 1,500 employees compared to the current 860 – Wallbox considered the need to centralize all this internal training through a tool. The new platform we have developed for them, which was just released in May, is also based on microlearning, has pod-casts, live training, etc., and allows training through Teams and Zoom. In addition, it will integrate language courses, and includes Compliance content, company presentation, etc. It will be used for onboarding and career planning, among other purposes.

Interview by Susana Rodríguez of Factor Humano for the June 2022 issue.