The Record - Issue 18: Autumn 2020

74 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om A scensus, an American financial services provider, identified that user adoption was an internal challenge for its staff and wanted to address it. “Adoption is a challenge at many compa- nies regardless of industry vertical,” says Dan Madden, CRM program manager at Ascensus. “It’s a continuous journey to ensure business applications are routinely used to drive efficien- cies and maximise return on investment. We always like to imagine everyone is going to love the solutions we deliver, and they will want to use them right away, but unfortunately, that’s not what usually happens.” In response to this challenge, Ascensus decided to work with ClickLearn – a company that offers a solution for creating user instructions, e-learning, and process videos for business soft- ware – to produce training material. “What would take a typical training resource an entire day now only take us two hours. This allows us to do more, while also creating better training experiences for our users,” says Kylie Kiser, product owner of CRM and Microsoft Business Applications MVP at Ascensus. “In just a year, we’ve created almost 100 training courses. This product is helping us focus on innovation while increasing our speed of delivery and adop- tion. It has enabled us to save at least two full- time hires within the CRM program that would have been dedicated to training. By saving on headcount, we could hire development or front- end team members to help drive additional roadmap innovations faster.” “When there’s a new, impactful feature rolling out, we want to get the word out as soon as pos- sible and immediately begin supplying training materials,” says Kiser. “Our team can proac- tively drive change management and empower our users to effectively embrace change. We’re excited to continue to roll out additional features via ClickLearn and build the training content in the same development sprint. This enables users to seamlessly obtain training materials embed- ded within their applications, so they can quickly get up to speed and begin leveraging new tech- nology wins much faster.” Ascensus is taking advantage of seven different learning formats – visual, aural, verbal, physical, logical, social, and solitary – identified in Neil Fleming’s VARK model to offer the best overall training experience. “It takes about two hours to create each train- ing and that includes planning and recording as well as reviewing and testing to ensure it is per- fect,” says Madden. “This time also accounts for creating it in all the different formats, including web and video versions. We already have over 100 of those training courses and just two team ClickLearn has enabled the financial services provider Ascensus to effectively produce training material that saves time and hiring costs Driving user adoption P ROF I L ED : A S C ENS U S