How Samsung grows with its partners

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a major multi-national mobile and consumer electronics and semiconductor company headquartered in Republic of Korea.

Founded in 1969, Samsung Electronics has assembly plants and sales operations in 74 countries around the world with 124,000 employees in Korea and about 290,000 globally. It boasts 230 global affiliates including nine regional headquarters in the DX (Device Experience) division, five in the DS (Device Solution) division, as well as Samsung Display Corporation (SDC) and Harman.

Samsung’s business consists of sets and components. Its DX division covers the consumer electronics business, namely TVs, monitors, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, smart phones, network systems and computers. The component business is run by its DS division and Samsung Display Corporation. DS produces various cutting-edge semiconductor products such as DRAM, NAND flash and mobile AP while SDC produces display panels including small and medium-sized OLEDs.

Samsung is the world’s largest smart phone manufacturer and is well known for its Galaxy brand. It pioneered the phablet market with the launch of Android-based Galaxy Tab collections. Since 2006, Samsung is also the world’s biggest TV manufacturer, leading the high tech consumer electronics market.

Samsung is also the major supplier of lithium-ion batteries, semiconductors, image sensors, camera modules and displays for Apple, Sony, HTC and Nokia. Armed with the highest level of competitiveness, Samsung has solidified its position as the world’s largest semiconductor producer.

Samsung envisions a world-leading company that values people and society. Pursuing the course defined by its business philosophy, core values and business principles, Samsung devotes its talent and technology to creating superior products and services that contribute to a better global society.

Samsung’s core values are people, excellence, change, integrity, and co-prosperity. Its business principles are: 1. Comply with laws and ethical standards; 2. Maintain a clean organizational culture; 3. Respect customers, shareholders and employees; 4. Care for the environment, safety and health; and 5. Be a socially responsible corporate citizen.

Before Cornerstone, Samsung Electronics didn’t have an integrated learning platform and lacked integration with its B2B system (SFDC). Its training certification system was maintained in silos by different divisions and regions making comprehensive partner analysis or support impossible. They considered whether or not to develop a platform in house, but with a wide range of certification processes and systems across different divisions it was difficult to accommodate all the requirements. On top of that there were additional challenges of adopting the latest learning trends and mobile needs.

Such circumstances made it difficult to align training certification program with strategic partners and to link certification performance with sales policy.

Meanwhile Samsung’s affiliated organizations were investing in other learning solutions, and the redundant investment was undermining operational efficiency. In fact, while the Korean headquarter was providing service for about 10,000 store employees, its Customer Support Center implemented a similar learning solution worth 380 million won for its 50,000 service partners.

Cornerstone is the industry-leading integrated learning platform provider that supports global users with regular system updates via software as a service.

Reflecting the latest trend in learning, Cornerstone provides integrated service across training, certification, social learning and webinar. Features currently not available on the platform get defined on the solution roadmap resulting in a very high customer satisfaction.

Cornerstone leverages strategic collaboration with various global and local solution providers to proactively support Samsung’s needs.

Indeed, Cornerstone not only is recognized as the global number one but also continues to have a strategic partnership with SFDC.

The main reasons that led Samsung to choose Cornerstone were wide range of functionalities and processes, different languages supported, system integration and brand recognition.

In addition, Cornerstone is a strong business partner that Samsung can trust with global expertise in learning and focused local partners that can support the project team in the most efficient manner.

Samsung originally wanted to introduce Cornerstone as part of its global B2B learning platform that would be linked to the B2B sales portal (i.e. SFDC) to deliver product training and certification for B2B partners.

Later, at an affordable license cost, Samsung decided to expand the implementation scope as its enterprise-wide learning platform to integrate with other company systems.

In October 2017, Samsung’s Cornerstone system first opened to its B2B partners and executives and then linked to its SFDC Partner Cloud. By June 2018, it extended to VD, Consumer Electronics and Network division. Afterwards, we have improved the functionality and linked it with internal and external systems such as ERP and Webex.

To enhance the competencies of B2B employees in different divisions, partners called for a commercial learning platform. And to remove the silos and enable a comprehensive view across different divisions and partners, Samsung integrated its partner training platform with Cornerstone to standardize learning processes and deliver flexible services tailored to different needs of each business division.

Cornerstone actively supported Samsung with global learning best practices, and based on its experience in different industry needs, was flexible to accommodate the voices of the customer on the field.

Samsung is realizing the following benefits with Cornerstone implementation:

Customer retention: Cornerstone enables different training/certification system tailored for each product. For example, repair engineers need to take new product training and repair/maintenance course to be authorized to perform repairs. In addition, consistent user experience and ease of use for global customers and partners enable easy integration with product training/evaluation/certification system and partner grading policy.

Administrative efficiency: B2B job training history that used to be manually maintained is now tracked in the system to enable customized training delivery and history management per user type. As a result, partners’ course completion rate increased by 15%, compared to 2022.

Customer satisfaction: Integrated service for learning improved user satisfaction across social learning, web seminar, fee-base and expenditure management. With the single global platform, users can easily access and complete the necessary training at any time. It also allows administrator to have global visibility. It received higher than 4.5 out of 5.0 in Customer satisfaction score every year. Integrated VoC (Voice of Customer) management and response improved member registration and login process (and link to SFDC), training history management, alignment with SFDC partner programs and certification process.

Improved cross-sell: Training courses that had been separately delivered per different products are now delivered on a single platform greatly increasing cross-sell opportunities.

With the introduction of Cornerstone, Samsung integrated its enterprise learning platform to save system operation cost. The globally integrated, cloud-based single system delivers global visibility greatly improving efficiency in product training/evaluation/certification for its employees and partners.

To be more specific, the company saved more than 300 million won in operation in 2023. Partners’ course completion rate increased by 15% compared to that of previous year. User satisfaction was over 4.5 out of 5.
What Samsung expects with Cornerstone for the long term are; cloud-based globally integrated single system, expansion of mobile certification program, and continued consolidation of internal/external employee training system for greater cost savings (14.7 billion won in total).

Cornerstone also helped strengthening its partner relationship. The scope of certification program expanded from large corporate partners to small and medium-sized partners with more program content and multi-language support. Also, greater number of online programs stimulated mobile and streaming learning.

"With the implementation of the Cornerstone platform, we are able to operate our learning platform as a globally integrated single system and gain a global visibility. This has significantly saved our system operation cost and improved our efficiency in various training, evaluation, and certification," said DooJoon Hong, Principal Professional at Samsung Electronics." It has also helped us to expand and strengthen our B2B partner relationships as well as our own employee training. We plan to continue our close business partnership with Cornerstone for continued learning transformation."

Samsung Electronics plans to expand the learning audience to the field enabling not just B2B partners but also customers and B2C promoters to leverage Cornerstone solutions. The expansion process continues at present and is linked from B2B partners to B2B/B2C contact centers and customer promotions, portal (SFDC) for partner grading policy.

Samsung will diversify its certification programs (more products and granular levels) with more content. In addition, Samsung Business Academy (SBA, an enterprise-wide learning portal for Samsung business partners) infrastructure will be expanded/enhanced for better learning service (e.g. SFDC operation training program) and enterprise-wide learning portal integration.