How IDeaS Increased Engagement and Upgraded the Learning Experience in Just One Year

The Science of Success

Can you imagine...

• ...your learning team spending 80% - 90% of their time troubleshooting your learning environment?

• ...your customers waiting for days or weeks to resolve support problems in your learning environment, delaying their ability to use and see value from their software investment?

• ...a learner engagement rate lower than 20%?

That was exactly the case for IDeaS.

October 2018: Right Vision, Wrong Platform

IDeaS, the pioneer of revenue science and a technology leader in the global hospitality and travel industries, helps their clients transform the right business data into clear and actionable decisions that improve hospitality business performance. What they needed was a learning platform to help them transform the right learning data into actionable insight to improve the learning experience.

Enter Sarah Green Toews, Director of Enablement & Engagement for IDeaS. Sarah’s team of learning experts and analysts are focused on building externally-facing help content and training programs that are designed to help clients understand the IDeaS solutions and assess the health of their clients’ business. While her team shared her passion for learning and world-class client experiences, they were missing the best tools to drive results.

“The team had a great vision for the learning experience,” Sarah explained, “we just couldn’t scale it. We lacked the data to create a focus or a strategy about the learner experience, or even what it should be.” They also lacked a learning platform that was nimble and robust enough to support the changes about to come.

In Search of Experience

IDeaS had implemented a platform they thought would give them what they needed: xAPI and better insight into user enrollments and completions. And while it was purchased for the right reasons, it ended up restricting execution. The IDeaS team was limited in what content they could provide, making the learning paths long, prescriptive, hard to build...and even harder to maintain. Consequently, they were seeing completion rates dipping to 8% - 12%.

“[We] asked ourselves, ‘Why try to cram information into someone’s brain, all in one sitting?’ None of us like that, and it’s an unnatural way to learn. When someone needs information, they just go get it. That’s how learning works."
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Sarah Green Toews
Director, Enablement & Engagement, IDeaS

But IDeaS had more than a platform problem; they had an experience problem. Their existing platform was cumbersome to administer and poorly supported. They experienced upwards of 40 hours of downtime annually, and learning operations were spending 80% - 90% of their time troubleshooting a problem or resolving a support ticket. That left learners waiting on support resolution with little time to actually consume the content.

It was evident they needed a change; and whatever solution they chose had a tall order to fill.

Fast forward a year...

October 2019: Right Vision, Right Platform

IDeaS has a very diverse user base, ranging from highly-specialized hospitality professionals to non-specialized, hourly hotel workers. Being in the hospitality industry means that that user base is also very transient. In fact, every three years, the entire IDeaS user base turns over - it’s completely new. Regardless of position, these user groups have one thing in common: they want an engaging learning experience.

Intellum, a pioneer of the science of customer education and partner training, provides clients like IDeaS with the expertise and best practices needed to grow revenue, improve customer retention and decrease the cost of support. We transformed the traditional, employee-focused LMS into a powerful platform for educating customers, partners and employees. A platform that delivers a more personal, relevant and engaging learning experience.

Engaging the clients of a fast-moving tech brand like IDeaS takes a lot more than old-school courseware and canned content. Real engagement requires a highly targeted and personalized learning experience that incorporates a wide range of formal and informal content, including live learning opportunities, to mimic the way people learn in real life.

IDeaS knew the team was spending an exorbitant amount of time troubleshooting the learning environment. Users were waiting on answers, lost in a lengthy learning path and not actually consuming content. Data showed that, on average, users were expected to complete 68 hours of training, but completed just under six. IDeaS wanted to leverage the flexibility and ease-of-use of the Intellum Platform to build a learning curriculum that was fresh, relevant and inviting. Equally important, they wanted to demonstrate to users that investing a few hours in training would result in little, to no, hours on support issues.

Here’s what happened when the pioneer of revenue science partnered with the pioneer of the science of customer education and partner training, to elevate their learning strategy to next-level success:

“[The data we get from the Intellum Platform] drives really good, insightful questions that we can take back to our greater client-facing organization. We want to use that data to help them correlate learning data to the health of a client’s business, and encourage them to use it during the client quarterly business reviews.”
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Sarah Green Toews
Director, Enablement & Engagement, IDeaS

It’s amazing what happens when two leaders come together. And we’re just getting started. IDeaS recently conducted a survey to monitor their clients’ satisfaction, and initial results are very positive. While the data is still coming in, Sarah noted that “the qualitative feedback has been phenomenal”. In the coming months, Intellum will help IDeaS further demonstrate the correlation between how well a client performs using the IDeaS software to their level of leaning engagement, as well as additional features and platform tools that deliver business outcomes that really matter.