Carphone Warehouse has invested £3million in training staff to sell laptops effectively. The broadband and mobile phone retailer is aiming to sell 1 million laptops a year.
The six-week intensive training programme concludes with an exam. Members of staff who pass the test have been promised an Acer laptop worth £350 as an incentive. Those who fail will not be allowed to sell laptops in a customer-facing role. The company found that while staff members who owned mobiles were able to draw on their own experiences when selling, most sales assistants could not afford a laptop so did not have the knowledge to back up their sales pitch.
“In training we give them real good basic knowledge about the things that make the laptops different form each other, why people might want a particular model, what needs it might solve, which ones have parental control, which don’t, and so on,” said Andrew Harrison, Chief Executive of Carphone UK.
The training programme comes as the retailer seeks to expand its customer base beyond its traditional mobile phone market, in order to protect itself against potential negative consequences of the current downturn in the economy. Mr Harrison said that more and more people require laptops to gain access to popular social networking sites.
“Prices of laptops are coming down, people want to do instant messaging and Facebook and most of them want to do it on a laptop,” he said. “We are about to go through same growth curve in laptops as we did in mobiles and if we are to enter this market we have to knowledgeable, credible staff and that means a huge investment in our people and training so they can give customers advice about which product is best for their needs.”
As part of its Wireless World proposition, launched last month, the company is stocking six laptops within each of its 809 UK stores. Brands stocked include from Acer, Fujitsu Siemens, Toshiba and EPC, and start from free to £249 if purchased with a mobile broadband contract from Carphone’s own brands TalkTalk and AOL, as well as Orange, T-Mobile and 3. Last year Carphone offered a free Dell laptop to new AOL subscribers.
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