Upgrade and migration of the Garden Centre Association’s Totara site to Hubken’s managed cloud service
Established in 1966, the Garden Centre Association (GCA) acts as a forum and catalyst for communication between its members from the garden retail and supplier communities. Today, there are over 205 full (garden centre) members and 152 associate (supplier) members, who all benefit from exchanging ideas and sharing experiences with like-minded individuals.
The GCA offers its members a range of benefits but at the core of its activities is the garden centre customer experience. Underpinning this is the GCA’s pioneering e-learning training programme for garden centre staff. With approximately 100 courses regularly being accessed by over 11,000 members of staff within GCA centres, the e-learning platform is an essential part of being a GCA member.
- Customer: GCA
- Industry: Retail
- Location: UK
- Solution: Totara Learn
“I think it's fair to say that we were smitten right from our first conversation with Hubken. From what we were hearing and the impressions that we got from the people that we spoke to, it seemed that Hubken was the kind of organisation that we wanted to work with - it just felt like a really good fit.”
Antony Snow
“I’m grateful the Hubken team took the time to ensure our members and learners were set up for success from day one. Totara and Hubken have provided us with a platform we can truly be proud of.”
Antony Snow
GCA key LMS requirements
This upgrade to version 16 allows the GCA to tailor the offering to individual members and provides tenant administrators with access to valuable reporting data. In addition, the GCA and their members benefit from:
- A secure and robust service with minimal disruptions to day-to-day business
- Ease of use for learners and administrators
- Reporting capabilities that enable admins to measure learner activity and progress
- Improved user experience to bring people back to the learning programme time and again
- A scalable LMS that delivers standardised, reliable, and consistent training to learners across their membership group
- Hubken’s responsive and knowledgeable support team
Customer service is a major part of the whole GCA experience for members and consumers. The online learning platform - Garden Retail Online Workshops (GROW) - was developed with two simple objectives; firstly, to help garden centre staff to improve their knowledge and gain confidence and expertise, and secondly (but equally importantly) to improve the quality of the customer’s experience at their garden centre.
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Antony explains, “Our Totara Learn LMS was created around being able to provide members with highly valuable customer experience training courses, along with other elements such as compliance and onboarding. Many of our members use the Certification feature within Totara to monitor and report on areas of compliance and regulation.”
Totara’s multi-tenancy feature is the key to the e-learning platform for the GCA. This enables them to segregate individual member organisations’ data and create multiple dashboards - allowing each tenant to have their private login, and dashboard, customised to their unique brand.
Working with Hubken
Antony describes the Totara LMS implementation process as flawless - from weekly calls to one-on-one training and group training to having every question answered promptly. “I’m grateful the Hubken team took the time to ensure our members and learners were set up for success from day one. Totara and Hubken have provided us with a platform we can truly be proud of,” he says.
The GCA recently entered its LMS in the Association Excellence Awards and was delighted to have been shortlisted as a finalist in the Best Learning / Professional Development Programme category. Although they didn’t win, the GCA team are extremely proud to have been finalists.
When GROW was launched, it had 10 members who represented 25 garden centres using the system and these numbers have grown each year.
To date, the GCA has 117 garden centres from 47 members (of which 8 have been using GROW since its inception) and over 11,000 UK-based garden centre employees are benefiting from the training course on the Totara LMS.
Moving forward, there is plenty of scope for future growth. As well as generating plenty of interest from UK-based members, GCA is also in discussions with its Canadian counterparts to provide access to the LMS for their members – despite there being several Canada-based LMS providers.
And how does Antony feel about Hubken? “I think it's fair to say that we were smitten right from our first conversation with Hubken. From what we were hearing and the impressions that we got from the people that we spoke to, it seemed that Hubken was the kind of organisation that we wanted to work with - it just felt like a really good fit.”
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