Delivering ROI: The Case for a Workforce Communications Center ANCILE ualign. An ROI White Paper

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1 Delivering ROI: The Case for a Workforce Communications Center ANCILE ualign An ROI White Paper Study conducted by: Hobson & Company July 2014

2 Executive Summary Communicating with a global workforce must evolve. Using or social apps to share information within an organization is no longer enough. Too often, these solutions result in over-communication from a flood of messages from supervisors, customers, co-workers, HR, etc. In this information deluge, the most important messages are overlooked, any sense of message priority is non-existent, and critical updates around organizational compliance, product or service changes, and new policies are skimmed or lost. Managers need to ensure that employees receive and comprehend the most important messages, and they require a system of record to validate receipt and comprehension. Traditional learning repositories are too complex to make this a day-to-day reality, especially when the information is urgent. ANCILE commissioned Hobson & Company, a firm that specializes in discovering the key business benefits driving the adoption of new and emerging technologies, to quantify and document the value created by ANCILE ualign. This paper highlights examples of universal use cases where the impact of the ANCILE ualign cloud-based solution, a validated communications solution, is not only strategic and timely but also measurable based on key business objectives validated with early adopters. Research consisting of eight in-depth interviews with ualign customers found that a validated communications solution addressed customer challenges in many departments across the enterprise, delivering a quick and compelling return on investment (ROI) and value. Workforce Communication Challenges Customers interviewed noted workforce communication challenges persisting throughout the enterprise despite existing communication tools. Some of the most universal concerns: Organizational Compliance: Ensuring that all employees are notified of regulatory and safety changes is difficult. s can be sent out, but it's unclear which employees have read and understood these s. Being non-compliant is not only risky financially but, where safety factors are concerned, also presents a significant impact to employee health and welfare. Enterprise Software Adoption: Whenever new software is introduced in the workplace, there is a lag time to employee proficiency and overall adoption. Without a system to reinforce the initial software training, employees are likely to forget features and take longer to become competent in the new solution. Since the software and its use are constantly changing, up-to-the-minute alerts are vital to optimize user productivity. Customer Service and Support: Providing customer support employees with the most up-todate solutions and knowledge is a constant challenge. Customers noted that reducing customer churn was a key goal and that providing excellent customer support is difficult without the ability to deliver consistent, timely, and targeted information. countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 2

3 Workforce Management: Training and onboarding is expensive. Without proper nurturing, employee retention is at risk. Companies are looking for the most cost-effective way to ensure that all employees are engaged, productive, and knowledgeable. Sales Enablement: Sales teams must maintain product awareness, sales process compliance, and high closure rates. All challenges relate back to providing the most up-to-date information to the sales team and ensuring comprehension to deliver the best results. The new employee information I received was specially targeted to me and enabled me to get up and running quickly. Pre-Sales Manager We use ualign to communicate price list changes, new promotions, and sales strategies. We can track who has reviewed the information. Ultimately this form of communication will have a revenue impact and help close more deals. VP Market Development & Channel Sales countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 3

4 Customer research identified ANCILE ualign benefits across five broad business objectives. Organizational Compliance Reduce the risk of regulatory fines. Ensuring all employees are in compliance with regulations can be a daunting task. ANCILE ualign is an easy-to-use system of record to track and validate which employees are and are not knowledgeable of compliance changes. Critical and timely regulatory compliance information is distributed via ualign channels, and managers can generate reports by employee, message, channel, or campaign. These reports identify employees who have demonstrated awareness and understanding of the critical information. Customers interviewed highlighted the reduction in audit risk and regulatory fines to be at least 5% because they could validate that an employee has actually comprehended the message. ualign is more effective than webinars and s to communicate regulations about benefits and compliance and to monitor whether people received, read, and actually understood the messages. Sr. VP, Global Insurance Company Reduce the risk of safety incidents. Communicating timely and critical safety information and ensuring comprehension is vital to reducing the risk of a safety incident. ANCILE ualign channels can distribute information such as weather emergencies, new safety policies, and recalls, and analytics indicate which employees know a given safety standard. Customers interviewed felt that using ualign to validate safety communications could reduce the risk of a safety incident by at least 5%, and was applicable for multiple industries including healthcare, oil & gas, and food production. Enterprise Software Adoption Speed proficiency and competency. With any software adoption, companies run the risk of overloading the employees with too much information at implementation and rollout. ANCILE ualign delivers the right pieces of information, to the right users, at the right time in their learning curve to overcome this overload issue. ANCILE ualign supports mobile platforms and enables easy creation of messages with text, links, audio, video, images, and attachments. Messages promoting content from existing learning repositories can be saved as favorites for easy reference. This allows customers to improve employee speed to proficiency of new enterprise software by 5%. Having an information drip that is scheduled and deliberate helps to ensure that users questions are answered and that they retain and understand implementation information. ualign is more interactive than or using an LMS. Dir. Marketing & Field Enablement, Global Performance Improvement Company countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 4

5 Improve employee adoption to increase ROI of the system. Many studies have shown that one of the main reasons enterprise software adoption rates are low, or adoption fails, results from a lack of change communication, training, and ongoing enablement of the users. ANCILE ualign combats this by ensuring that all employees have up-to-date knowledge as the software approaches "go live" and that they truly comprehend the key new capabilities using targeted, ongoing micro-learning. Business leaders can easily set up discrete, targeted campaigns and quickly track receipt of communications and comprehension. As a result, customers interviewed were able to improve employee adoption of enterprise software by 5%. ualign will help to improve enterprise software adoption and attain higher effective usage by continuously reinforcing key implementation strategies and updates. - Dir. Marketing & Field Enablement, Global Performance Improvement Company Workforce Management Reduce the cost of extending training efforts. ANCILE ualign provides an easy-to-use interface for creating and delivering messages. Business or team leaders can quickly create messages with text, links, audio, video, images, and attachments; and promote and access content from ANCILE uperform or other content repositories. ANCILE ualign reduces training and travel expenses when used in conjunction with free mobile apps to produce content and record sessions. Overall ualign saved companies at least 25% in formal training efforts. We used ualign in conjunction with a free mobile app to produce and record an HR compliance training and saved $50,000 vs. outsourcing the project. Director, Human Resources, Learning and Productivity Software Provider Accelerate onboarding. Getting new employees up to speed quickly was a goal mentioned by the customers interviewed. ANCILE ualign surveys and feedback tools ensure that all employees feel engaged and productive from the moment they begin their employment. Managers can create campaigns to automatically deliver a series of messages in a specific order, with predetermined start and due dates, to allow employees to work at their own pace. As a result, customers agreed that ualign reduced onboarding time by 5%. ualign is used to supplement in-person training with homework and other activities as well as provide employees with introductory training prior to the start of the new hire training session so that employees come prepared for the boot camp, which ultimately sped up their time to proficiency. VP Market Development & Channel Sales, Global Enterprise Software Provider countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 5

6 Sales Enablement Increase close rates with improved sales engagement. Studies have shown that an engaged workforce is a productive workforce. ANCILE ualign helps engage employees with tools to create channels to broadcast messages to specific organizational groups or teams (for example, sales, new employees, finance, and plant personnel). Analytics allow managers and administrators to identify under-performing and disengaged employees based on surveys, campaigns, and assessments. With faster remediation, performance and engagement issues can be more readily addressed to ultimately impact revenue growth. Customers interviewed agreed that using ualign to engage the salesforce would improve sales close rates by 1%. For a global, virtual company like ours, ualign helps employees feel connected to the company and to the solutions. Employees often live in their own bubble, with no other perspective, and ualign helps share best practices and ensure success. We want to keep top-performing sales executives and make sure that they are happy. This happiness ultimately leads to more success. Dir. of Marketing & Field Enablement, Global Performance Improvement Company Reduce risk of lost revenue due to sales process non-compliance. It s challenging to ensure that all employees keep up with rapidly changing sales processes, including changes to order forms, SKUs, contracts, etc. With ualign, key portfolio capabilities, logistics, sales processes, and critical sales cycle changes are communicated in a timely manner. ANCILE ualign mobile access connects users with content whenever and wherever to ensure and maximize compliance with business processes. Employees and managers can view assessments to validate and track responses to ensure comprehension. Customers found that ualign could reduce the risk of revenue loss and related claims due to non-compliance by 25%. If the sales executives didn t know the new policies, they could potentially misquote a customer and then wouldn t be able to deliver on it. This would have an enormous financial impact. With ualign, we can be sure that everyone has the most current business process information which helps ensure compliance with a critical new business process. VP Market Development & Channel Sales, Global Enterprise Software Customer Service and Support Reduce time to close a support ticket. ANCILE ualign ensures that customer service and support team members have up-to-date knowledge on their portfolio and that they truly comprehend key capabilities to more quickly and effectively serve customers. Business users can easily set up discrete, targeted learning content campaigns and quickly validate and track task comprehension and completion for certification. Key messages can be saved as favorites for easy reference and mobile countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 6

7 content is easily accessed. Customers agreed that ualign helped to reduce the time to close a support ticket by at least 2% with its standardized message delivery and validation analytics. ualign s measurable communication to the Global Support team educates quickly on solution fixes. As a result, workers can increase number of tickets closed per day because they are more knowledgeable. This helps us profitably grow our business without adding new employees. VP Global Support, Learning and Productivity Software Provider Reduce customer churn. By delivering up-to-date knowledge, ANCILE ualign helps support team members improve the first call resolution rate and overall customer satisfaction. Because key messages can be saved as favorites and content accessed through mobile devices, customers issues are addressed more quickly, which interviewees felt would reduce churn by at least 1%. In summary, over 15 discrete, enterprise-wide benefits were identified during the ualign customer interviews conducted for this research paper. Below is a sample of a few of those benefits and the Year 1 value to the enterprise: Sample Year 1 Benefits Across the Enterprise countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 7

8 KEY ROI FINDINGS The value of ANCILE ualign as a validated communication solution is immediate and demonstrable. Let s consider a sample organization with: 5,000 employees, Training 200 employees in year 1 on new software, 50 employees every year after With an average of $3M in safety and regulatory fines over 5 years, Hiring 100 new employees each year, Employing 90 customer support employees, And employing 40 sales executives with $2M each in the sales pipeline. Such an organization can realize financial benefits from an investment in a validated communication solution. For this typical organization, annual enterprise-wide benefits can be over $800K per year. For this sample organization, the three-year subscription investment totaling $330K generates a positive return in 3.3 months. The three-year net present value (NPV) and return on investment (ROI) are strong at $1.252M and 470%, respectively. The key financial metrics for the sample organization were calculated by standard methods and are shown below. The NPV calculation assumes a 10% cost of capital. FINANCIAL METRIC Payback (months) 3-YEAR VALUE 3.3 months NPV $1,252,000 ROI 470% The following chart shows the extent to which each business unit focus contributes to the total value of a validated communication system. For the sample organization, the benefits are spread nicely throughout the enterprise. countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 8

9 About ANCILE ANCILE Solutions, Inc. is a global software solutions company specializing in the development and support of learning and workforce performance products. ANCILE empowers companies to communicate critical information, deliver essential knowledge and training, and validate employee performance. As a provider of best-in-class learning and workforce performance software, ANCILE products are used by more than 4,400 customers across the globe to support mission-critical business applications. ANCILE develops, sells, supports, and services ANCILE uperform, ANCILE uperform Express, ANCILE ualign, ANCILE uguide, and ANCILE Info Pak. For more information, please visit About Hobson & Company Hobson & Company helps technology vendors and purchasers uncover, quantify and validate the key sources of value driving the adoption of new and emerging technologies. Our focus on robust validation has helped many technology purchasers more objectively evaluate the underlying business case of a new technology, while better understanding which vendors best deliver against the key value drivers. Our well researched, yet easy-to-use ROI and TCO tools have also helped many technology companies better position and justify their unique value proposition. For more information, please visit countries. All other product and company names referenced herein are the registered or unregistered trademarks of their respective owners. 9