How e-learning fuels growth at Gong Cha

By Jieun Lee, Education Service Team Member

Tea is an international drink, with customs, rituals and brewing methods that vary by culture. But no matter how you drink it, tea must be sourced, prepared and served with care. This is the guiding principle behind Gong Cha, one of the most recognisable tea brands in the world.  ‘Gong Cha’ is a Chinese phrase that means ‘to offer the best tea to the emperor from all of one’s possessions’, and that ethos is steeped into our product and customer service.

My name is Jieun Lee, and I run our international training programme. My team, based in Seoul, educates our franchise owners and employees on how to prepare our tea products, operate and maintain our equipment, provide customer service and manage our shops. I knew we could reduce the cost and improve the quality of our training programme, as well as track progress and provide feedback, by expanding into e-learning. When 2020 hit, we had the motivation we needed to fast track this programme.

The urgency for remote learning meets roadblocks

Launching an e-learning initiative takes more than momentum and a dedicated team of experts. We needed to reduce file clutter, speed up file transfers and streamline our file-sharing tools.

Our team, spread out across offices in Korea, needed to share files and collaborate with contractors who assemble our training materials. Sharing project management docs and massive video and HTML files over email was time-consuming and cumbersome. Backing everything up on external hard drives required a dedicated person to oversee file management and version control. The process was inefficient and complex. We knew moving everything to cloud storage was the best option, but some of the cloud storage solutions felt as complex as our existing workflow. Finally, we found Dropbox. 

An accelerated launch with Dropbox

Dropbox offered everything we needed: high-speed file transfers, robust versioning and commenting tools and comprehensive permission and security management. It had an easy, intuitive interface that our staff could master with minimal training. Here was everything we needed to accelerate the launch of our e-learning platform.

Dropbox simplified content creation, communication and workflows between internal and external teams on an international level. This enabled us to upload and track files several times a day, which increased our teams' focus and efficiency. Everyone could access materials with minimum effort, no matter where they worked.

With the help of Dropbox, we developed an e-learning app that went live in June, 2020. It includes training videos on operations, customer service, hygiene management and the latest drink recipes. The app also provides marketing materials, licence management tools and communications channels that connect our headquarters in Korea to our franchisees. It’s a comprehensive tool that addresses the needs of our employees at the franchise level, from owner-operators down to frontline workers. In 2022, we’ll be adding live-streamed instruction and push notifications to remind workers and franchisees to renew their credentials, certificates and licensing agreements, which will reduce administrative work and potential errors.

Success catches on

The successful launch of our e-learning app attracted the interest of other teams at Gong Cha headquarters and showed them the impact of Dropbox on day-to-day operations. Our IT team now uses Dropbox to collaborate with suppliers on implementation, and our customer service team has embraced Dropbox as a remote collaboration and file-sharing tool.

Gong Cha continues to expand around the world. Our international brand is growing and bringing a global tea culture to competitive markets like Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Australia, the US and 19 other countries. We are building on traditions that stretch back thousands of years by serving modern beverages to tea lovers from every walk of life.