Customer Story: HiKOKI Power Tools

When HiKOKI rebranded from Hitachi in 2018, the name recognition that had taken decades to build disappeared overnight. The product quality was the same. The challenge was getting over twenty thousand retail staff across Australia — people working the floor for major national suppliers — to understand, believe in and confidently sell a brand they’d never heard of.

Face-to-face training across a reseller network that size was never realistic. And many of those suppliers already had their own LMS platforms, meaning any solution had to work within their existing systems, not around them.

Training that teaches, not just tells

The instinct with product training is often to hand people marketing material and hope it sticks. HiKOKI took a different approach. Rather than asking retail staff to memorise specs and recite them, the training focused on how the tools actually work — building genuine understanding so staff could explain the products confidently in their own words.

Using Tribal Habits, HiKOKI built fully branded, interactive modules broken into bite-sized components. Video demonstrations, interactive elements and online assessments brought the products to life in a format that retail staff — many of whom were completing training between customers on the shop floor — could work through flexibly and at their own pace.

Built to work inside any system

One of the most technically significant aspects of the program was distribution. Tribal Habits’ SCORM link technology allowed HiKOKI to deliver modules directly into each supplier’s own LMS — seamlessly, without requiring staff to log into a separate platform or suppliers to manage another system.

This was a genuine differentiator. Suppliers praised the seamless experience. Staff encountered no friction between their usual workflows and the training. And critically, every interaction generated learner data that flowed back to HiKOKI — over 10,000 individual learner responses collected per module.

Iterated over 25 times

That data didn’t just sit in a dashboard. HiKOKI used it to continuously refine the content — identifying where learners were dropping off, where understanding was weakest and where engagement could improve. More than 25 versions of the course were created through this process, with updates pushed invisibly through the SCORM link without any disruption to learners already partway through.

Within nine months of launch, over 4,000 reseller staff had completed the training. Every topic achieved a completion rate of at least 95%. The program won gold at the 2022 LearnX Design Awards.

For a brand that had just reset its identity in a crowded market, building a network of informed, confident advocates across the country’s retail floors was exactly what was needed.