EXPERTUS CASE SUMMARY

Customer Training Portals: It's What's Up Front that Counts

“With an Expertus SmartPortal riding on top of our LMS, we've significantly improved the user experience for customers who visit our website to find, register and complete training.”                              

^{_{- VP Education Services & Productivity, technology product company}}

CHALLENGE

For technology companies, customer loyalty depends on product knowledge. But sharing the right knowledge at the right time is difficult for traditional learning management systems - which aren't designed for occasional use by novices.

With 30,000 customer and partner relationships at risk, one leading technology company realized its LMS-driven customer education portal needed a better approach.

KEY ISSUES:

• The client's customers are technically sophisticated - they prefer online training, and expect well-designed web applications
• Interface improvements had become prohibitive - requiring costly, time-consuming upgrades directly within the LMS
• Self service was cumbersome - only the most persistent visitors completed courses
• The existing portal environment was so frustrating, the sales force steered customers away

TOP PRIORITIES:

• Provide faster, easier access to course information and content
• Improve end-to-end self-service paths - including online payment and course delivery
• Reduce LMS customization costs

SOLUTION

After a thorough business impact analysis, we developed a customer portal based on a flexible service-oriented architecture that extends the intelligence and functionality of the underlying LMS, while shielding learners from the system's natural complexity. Because this approach decouples the user interface from the LMS, it enables faster, easier upgrads with minimal disruption.

IMPACT

The benefits of our SmartPortal customer training portal were immediate:

• Visitor traffic rose 51% during the first full quarter
• Self-service registration surged 55%
• Credit card revenues increased almost 20%
• The average registration path is now much faster
• Support costs are expected to drop 15%

Given this resounding success, our client plans to expand the SmartPortal model to employee training and beyond.

> LEARN MORE: Read about our SmartPortal software-based solutions