How the Vivat Bookshop Chain Automated Training and Established a Unified Service Standard Across 39 Shops
Every book is a world unto itself, yet finding the perfect story requires a true guide. For the Vivat chain, the bookseller on the shop floor has always been more than just a consultant. They are someone who fosters a genuine love for reading, navigates genre nuances with ease, and intuitively grasps a customer’s most subtle preferences. Consequently, the business faces a challenging task: scaling while preserving that heartfelt atmosphere and high level of literary expertise in every city.
This case study outlines how the company maintained consistent standards, automated onboarding, transformed product training into an engaging literary journey, and confirmed a direct connection between tests taken in LMS Collaborator and actual sales in bookshops.
Prologue: The Scaling Challenge and the Need for a Unified Standard
Vivat is one of Ukraine’s largest book publishers, featuring its own chain of bookshops and operating as part of the Factor group. The company ranks among the top three players in the country’s publishing industry. However, the last few years have been marked not only by publishing successes but also by the rapid expansion of its retail network. Vivat opened its first location in Kharkiv back in 2017. Today, the chain has grown to include 39 bookshops across dozens of cities, ranging from Kharkiv and Odesa to Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Vinnytsia.
This rapid growth brought a significant L&D challenge. Book retail has unique characteristics: a bookseller on the shop floor is not merely a cashier scanning barcodes, but a guide to the world of literature. Customers do not come simply for a bound stack of paper. They seek an emotional experience, an atmosphere, and insightful recommendations.
Maintaining high-quality service is manageable when a chain has only a few shops. However, when dozens of new locations open across the country in a short time, service standards risk becoming diluted. The company needed a tool to unite more than a hundred booksellers in a single information ecosystem. So, the L&D team faced a challenge: How to quickly train new staff across regions while ensuring consistently high service in every bookshop?
Anna Zolotarova
Training Specialist at Vivat
Chapter 1. The “Automated Onboarding” Trope
Before implementing a learning automation system, Vivat relied on direct communication between the L&D specialist and the teams. This model worked well when the company operated just two shops, but scaling up required a change.
The training specialist had to run three identical live online sessions each week to accommodate different staff shifts, which consumed all her time and energy. Attempts to organize materials using Google Classroom and Google Drive folders failed to solve the problem: materials went missing, and – most importantly – it was impossible to track actual progress in reading or knowledge retention due to a complete lack of analytics.
Anna Zolotarova
Training Specialist at Vivat
Now, onboarding at Vivat begins even before a new hire steps onto the shop floor for the first time. A week before a new bookshop opens or an employee starts their shift, they are added to the LMS Collaborator portal. Thanks to the platform’s automation rules, the new bookseller immediately gains access to the Welcome Book onboarding program.
Vivat crafted it to feel like a heartwarming Christmas story. With a lively tone, team photos, memes, and humor, this interactive course eases first-day stress and conveys the company’s core values, including respect, openness, and the ability to resolve any conflict through communication.
At the same time, the course provides clear guidance on numerous internal processes, from operating the POS system to communication protocols with the marketing, finance, and accounting departments via Google Chat. It outlines the company’s gold standards for customer service as well.
An embedded survey in the Welcome Book also allows the L&D team to gather continuous feedback from new hires. This feedback led to the addition of a practical “cheat sheet” section titled “Where to Find Answers,” which compiles everything from salary payment schedules to the procedure for transferring books between shops.
Concurrently, the LMS Collaborator automation rules assign a mandatory fire safety test to every new employee and display a welcome message on the portal homepage.
Plot Development: Product Training
While onboarding focuses on company integration, a true passion for books begins with product training. Vivat’s product-related content is organized into logical levels that guide booksellers from the fundamentals to highly specialized genre niches.
Every new employee must complete a mandatory Basic Course in literary studies. It fills knowledge gaps and introduces newcomers to the industry’s professional jargon.
During the course, consultants master terminology such as TBR (books to be read in the future), learn the anatomy of a book (understanding terms like endpapers, binding, ribbon markers, and colored page edges), and familiarize themselves with international and Ukrainian literary awards ranging from the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes to the Book Country and BBC awards.
A significant portion of the course is dedicated to genre theory and plot tropes. Staff members learn that fantasy is merely a subgenre of speculative fiction and analyze the mechanics of popular plotlines such as “enemies-to-lovers,” the “Chosen One,” and “Dark Academia.” The famous Harry Potter series, for instance, falls precisely under the “Dark Academia” trope.
A separate, captivating training module focuses on presenting Ukrainian classics. Moving beyond stale school clichés, the L&D manager teaches staff to “sell” authors like Kobylianska, Domontovych, or Khvylovyi by highlighting passion, human drama, and the era’s context. This approach sparks genuine enthusiasm among booksellers and customers alike.
Since Vivat sells not only its own publications but also books from other publishers, courses from partners frequently appear on the portal. For instance, the ArtHuss publishing house conducts lectures on art literature, with video recordings, presentations, and tests uploaded to LMS Collaborator.
A particular highlight of the training program is the course on Asian comics. Notably, the request for this training came directly from the booksellers themselves, who wanted to provide relevant recommendations to customers interested in the genre. By leveraging internal expertise, the company developed an in-depth course that taught the entire retail network to understand nuances in art styles, age ratings, and genres, enabling staff to offer advice tailored to each customer’s needs confidently.
To keep booksellers from wasting time searching Google or Goodreads on the sales floor, Vivat actively uses the LMS Collaborator Knowledge Base. It features convenient information cards for complex titles and new releases, complete with cover images, ratings, descriptions of narrative pacing and tension levels, and lists of potential triggers. If a bookseller needs to recommend a family saga or highbrow literature quickly, they can simply access the Knowledge Base via the POS terminal or a smartphone to instantly retrieve the necessary information.
Culmination: Performance Review and Correlation with Sales
To assess how the knowledge gained translates into practical customer service skills, Vivat conducts a systematic performance review twice a year. This process consists of three components: a detailed test on the LMS portal, a verbal interview, and an evaluation by the bookshop manager.
Tests on the portal are intentionally built on complex situational cases. Instead of simply guessing a genre, the consultant faces a real challenge: selecting two distinct books to satisfy a visitor’s convoluted request, such as a dark academia story featuring magic and a male protagonist, but set outside the confines of a school. Consultants who demonstrate a stronger grasp of the portal’s content consistently achieve higher average transaction values and conversion rates on the shop floor.
Anna Zolotarova
Training Specialist at Vivat
If the knowledge assessment reveals weak points – such as widespread difficulty in selecting non-fiction titles – the L&D manager creates learning pathways addressing that topic. She compiles step-by-step micro-modules for employees, featuring a practical test immediately after a brief text segment to reinforce the material.
Open Final: Fall26 Campaign in Dashboard and Reports
To prepare the team for the upcoming certification round, Vivat launched a special campaign. All relevant autumn courses were assigned the tag “fall26.” This let the L&D manager easily filter data across dimensions, such as viewing the overall funnel for the entire network, comparing metrics between specific cities, or drilling down into a single location’s analytics. It transformed manual percentage calculations into a few mouse clicks. The system automatically compiles the funnel and statistics, generating the reports management needs.
To ensure no course gets lost in the workflow, the LMS Collaborator team has designed a personal dashboard for each bookseller’s homepage. It provides a clear view of their progress, showing assigned tasks, completed tasks, and tasks awaiting completion. In addition to personal widgets, the portal also features general ratings:
- Top 10 most active users;
- Top 10 best bookshops by average rating.
Employees earn virtual badges for completing training, and seeing colleagues’ progress in other cities adds an element of healthy competition.
Epilogue
Implementing LMS Collaborator enabled Vivat to address three key challenges: establishing a clear, systematic training process, transparently evaluating each consultant’s performance, and seamlessly scaling service standards amid the chain’s rapid expansion. Preparing management reports dropped from days of manual calculation to three mouse clicks, and new bookshops open with the assurance that readers in any city will receive equally professional and welcoming service.
Anna Zolotarova
Training Specialist at Vivat
