Avon, which spans 50 markets around the world and operates in a fast-moving consumer environment, encourages its beauty representatives to continually learn about new products and campaigns in order to help drive business performance. Doing this at scale, with speed and across so many countries, proved challenging, and the Avon team had identified a number of learning-related issues that were hindering business outcomes.

Avon's Digital Experience Manager, Andy Stamps, who led the learning transformation in partnership with Fuse, explains, "We had eleven learning management systems across 30 countries, and they weren't engaging our beauty entrepreneurs in the way we would have hoped. We needed a different, more appealing model - one that would enable us to create positive learning behaviours and then measure the impact of these on wider business performance." 

Commenting on the decision to engage Fuse over other learning tech providers, Stamps says, "Fuse is a very rounded, blended product that brings together informal and formal learning through many different types of content, both business and user generated. The platform also accommodates all manner of learning styles, and we knew that would be vital to achieving widespread engagement across our global network."

The Avon-Fuse partnership began in May 2019, and eighteen months in, 45 of Avon's 50 markets have been onboarded, each offering a best-fit, learner-centric experience. To date, the Fuse platform, known internally as 'Avon Connect', has been adopted by more than 850,000 beauty reps, and more than 200 individual learning communities have been created, accessing over one million pieces of learning content per month (75% of which is user generated).

The biggest revelation for Avon came in June, however, when the team discovered that medium (just three to four visits per month) and high-frequency users performed up to three times better than beauty entrepreneurs who only engaged at a rate of low frequency (the equivalent of one to two visits per month). Commenting on the discovery, Stamps explains, "We analysed different metrics such as completion rates, consumption of content, and levels of interaction, but the data very clearly showed that it was the frequency with which our beauty entrepreneurs were coming back to the Fuse platform that made the biggest difference. This is where we saw the really dramatic uplifts in business performance. It was definitely a jaw-on-the-floor moment."

Stamps continued, "We then mapped the data across all our markets to try and identify what factors were supporting more frequent visits to the platform. The data revealed that leadership engagement, along with having an effective and informal learning strategy, was leading to a direct correlation in engagement levels of beauty entrepreneurs."

Avon Connect has also played a pivotal role in enabling Avon representatives to quickly adapt to remote selling in the midst of the pandemic - a monumental task that involved rapidly upskilling and reskilling beauty representatives located across 50 countries and speaking 30 languages. According to Stamps, it's an undertaking that would not have been possible without the Fuse platform: "The collective focus was on finding new ways to sell in an online setting. Avon Connect was critical to that because it provided an engaging environment for our representatives to learn, connect, and collaborate, and this really helped us to keep going as a business during lockdown."

Steve Dineen, Founder and President of Fuse, said, "Avon is a progressive company that has been able to create tangible top-line benefits by actively engaging its beauty representatives in learning for the benefit of work."

Dineen continued, "The data is undeniable and shows that representatives who visited the learning platform on a medium or high frequency performed significantly better than those who only visited once or twice a month. That's incredibly compelling, and it proves that learning is not about how many courses we consume. What matters most is creating positive learning habits that bring people back to learn at the point of need, and technology and culture sit at the heart of that."