Celebrity Cruises (Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.)

Celebrity Cruises Sets Sail with World-Class Learning on Schoox

Celebrity Cruises sails to all seven continents on 15 luxurious ships. The Celebrity Cruises brand offers a “New Luxury” onboard experience to exciting world-wide destinations, onboard programs that appeal to all ages, world-class entertainment, unique stateroom design, and included amenities and shore excursions. To deliver dreamworthy vacations, it requires team members, onboard and ashore, to have a wealth of knowledge in the Celebrity Cruises brand.

In 2016, Celebrity Cruises determined that to provide their travel advisors and employees a robust training program, they had to uncover a learning platform that could meet their needs as the brand was constantly evolving and the training modules had to be updated annually. When Celebrity Cruises decided to launch a learning and development program, its L&D team discovered the Schoox learning management system (LMS) was the ideal vehicle to deliver and help develop the training portal.

Overcoming Training Barriers

Celebrity Cruises is famous for its top-tier customer service—from the travel advisors that help travelers plan their trips to the onboard crew who deliver personalized service, luxury dining experiences, and interactive onboard experiences.

Achieving perfection begins with exceptional training, including both the company’s onboard crews and its network of over 30,000 travel professionals. Its internal employees learn the ropes and stay up to speed on the latest developments in the company’s guest services call center, called Sales University, while travel advisors receive training and their annual certification through the company’s travel advisor certification program, called Celebrity Learning.

However, the company’s previous training program placed several barriers on its capabilities—including a lack of integration between its two training programs. Along with this critical shortfall, it also lacked several other capabilities, like the ability to track employee development and success, deliver real-time reporting, and motivate team members and advisors to complete their training.

Another challenge that needed to be addressed before Celebrity Cruises could commit to a new LMS was data transfer. The team worried they might lose historical training and learner records in the transition from its existing training program to a new, more advanced platform.

Launching Without a Hitch

The Schoox team made sure that transferring Celebrity Cruises’ data was efficient, accurate, and secure. “We never lost any data or our connections to our travel advisors,” said Maria Cronk, Sales Training & Development.

Today, Celebrity Cruises enjoys the many advantages it has gained from launching the Schoox LMS, including the full integration of its guest services call center university and travel advisor certification program. Now the company is able to manage training and development for everyone from one single “port of call.”

Supporting this capability is the fact that in Schoox, the company was able to build out a relational, matrixed organizational structure. “This allows us to report on thousands of learning insights and compliance metrics for our staff and travel advisors,” said Alex Frady, Manager of Learning & Development.

“The reports help us spot gaps in training and learning, and increase our percentage of enrollments and graduates. Now we can send specific messages to groups of people or design campaigns to increase enrollments.”

Meeting All Training Goals

“It’s very important for us to give our travel advisors the tools they need to do their business to the best of their abilities,” said Jessica Suchman, Sales Training & Development, “That means educating them on how to sell our products.”

“We need to ensure that we’re equipping them with the information they need so they can present all of the information to our guests in ways that result in amazing cruise experiences,” said Jessica.

Maria Cronk added:

“A big plus is that Schoox lets us track and measure the success of both our internal call center employees and our external trade audience. We know who graduated, when they graduated, and can easily ensure that their annual certification is up-to-date. After our transition to Schoox, we’ve only received positive feedback from our staff and the advisors. They appreciate that they can now easily access our training programs from any channel—mobile devices, personal computers, tablets, Android, or iOS. Overall, Schoox is instrumental in helping us achieve our ultimate training goal—expanding our Celebrity Learning training program to more travel advisors, while supporting our company culture and brand.”

Training is Smooth Sailing on Schoox

“The extensive training and learning capabilities in Schoox have enabled us to design training for our team and partners that is fast and easy to digest in a user-friendly way,” said Maggie Rodriguez, Trainer.

She continues: “Because the platform is intuitive for all users, we can create and make changes very quickly to the courses. This makes it easy for our advisors to keep up with our latest products, services, and promotions. By having the proper training, our advisors are confident, and confident advisors lead to happy customers.“

“We’ve realized that the impressive reporting potential that Schoox offers our training teams is instrumental in delivering information to all of our advisors. We have found it to be both efficient and effective,” said Alex Frady, Training Manager.

Schoox Onboard with Optimum Support

“With the help of the Schoox customer service team, Celebrity Cruises has always received prompt assistance and exceptional service. From the very beginning, our solution architect and the entire customer support team have been instrumental in helping our team leverage the full capabilities of the platform, including its more advanced functionality,” said Alex.

“Moreover, the intuitive and easy-to-use course creation process with Schoox allows us to create new courses with minimal manual labor, assign training sessions to all learners, inspire our members to feel valued and motivated to complete their training, and conduct in-depth, real-time reporting on important issues, such as user attempts to access training and time spent on the application.”

“We’re happy to report that with Schoox, we have the perfect learning and training partnership,” concluded Alex.