Overview

Great Clips is the world’s largest salon brand with more than 3,300 salons throughout North America and has been an OnPoint customer since 2006. Great Clips uses its highly customized online and mobile Learning Portal platforms to prepare and support franchise owners and the nearly 30,000 stylists who receive ongoing training to learn advanced skills and the latest styling trends. 

Online

Great Clip’s main Learning Portal serves as the central hub for all training programs prepared and delivered by the Great Clips T&D team. A vast combination of regional and local ILT classes, online courses and hundreds of digital resources are accessible by store personnel seeking to become and stay certified. Great Clips was also OnPoint’s first customer to beta test then formally introduce gamification into their learning solution portfolio.

Mobile

The success of the more modern and game-enabled Great Clips online Learning Portal in 2013 drove interest in “going mobile” in salons with the introduction of new Apple iPad tablets that could be shared by salon associates but provide a fully tracked and consistent learning experience. A majority of franchise owners are now investing in in-store iPads for their salon associates making training more accessible and engaging.

Social

Currently Great Clips only uses a few social networking features including social ratings and comments on completed assignments and challenges to work peers using available gamification features.

Gamification

Great Clips has leverage OnPoint’s Gamification Engine since 2012 to drive learner engagement and increase operational readiness for salons across their entire ecosystem. Great Clips helped pioneer many of OnPoint’s gamification features including support for time-specific versus career-based games, points and achievements tied to informal learning practices (e.g., documents read, forum entries posted), and dynamic reporting of game mechanics in a custom UX.

Custom UI/UX

The custom UXs used by Great Clips are among OnPoint’s most sophisticated and visually appealing. The overall UX design is clean and uncluttered but also highly intelligent and flexible featuring automatic season color pallet updates and randomized background images. The UX works through any standard compliant web browser for online learners and is snapped on top of a branded native app for mobile learners working on an iPad even while disconnected.

Integration

OnPoint has worked with Great Clips to integrate their Learning Portals with several different back office systems including connection to Insite (their single sign-on credentialing authority), their ERP to manage ever-expanding location database, and an in-house event scheduling platform (to be replaced with core OPLS functionality in 2014).

Results

The scope of OPLS and CellCast features and services leveraged by Great Clips continues to grow every year and OnPoint platforms now drive training, ILT scheduling, performance support and engagement for much of their organization. And, the introduction of gamification in 2012 drove system utilization by salon owners by more than 900% in its first year.

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