Cultivating L&D Success through Client Community

Members of Wisetail’s Client Success team often preach best practices to establish adoption, boost engagement, and promote healthy user habits for a well-functioning LMS. These suggestions, amongst others, enable our Client Success team to partner with our clients in creating and capturing value within their respective LXP/LMS platforms. I strongly believe our team is one of Wisetail’s largest competitive advantages – providing end-to-end support sets us apart from the competition. The question still remains – while we clearly ‘talk the talk’, do we also ‘walk the walk’ and promote these best practices in our client-facing LXP, The Drop? I’d like to think we do!  

As we always tell our clients: an LXP is a living, breathing platform. It is a creation that demands constant evolution to meet the needs of your user base, and a key piece of guiding the direction for new initiatives is user feedback. Client and user feedback is always top of mind when it comes to improving the experience. It’s important to us and something we take very seriously. With that, we ask: what can we improve of The Drop to bring more value?

Now, let’s talk about how we use The Drop to leverage training and community.

We’ll start with the training aspect of The Drop. We house a wide range of product guides within The Drop for our clients to learn the ins and outs of their Wisetail platform. Need to know how to build a module? You’ll find a guide for that in The Drop. Looking to add permissions to module content? We’ve got you covered. Trying to send a welcome email to a defined group of users? You get the point. Our clients need just-in-time access to these guides as they build out their platform, so we’ve structured these product guides to be easily accessible, quickly consumed, and repeatable.

The Drop also houses a robust Implementation path for our new clients; this doubles as an excellent resource for our new admins, as well. The Implementation path gives a client everything they need from spinning up a site to launching the platform. It has webinars, product videos, branding resources, product guides, a few fun gifs, and a really impressive mock implementation case study. This pathway has been made available in two formats: a structured path bringing a client through implementation step by step, and a “chart your own path” option for clients to navigate content as they see fit. We created Implementation with these two paths to engage different learners and provide a repeatable experience. Whether you’re brand new to Wisetail, or you’re a new admin with an existing client, the Implementation page is a great place to start when learning our product!

Building a Client Community

Now, on to my favorite topic – building a client community within The Drop. This is where some best practices come to mind and where we face the real challenge of creating value and engagement beyond training materials. We are always trying different programs within The Drop to build and foster community – including a couple of new programs I am very excited about. 

One such community building program is our Question and Answer board – specifically our board titled “Client Connect”. The purpose of Client Connect is for clients to seek answers from one another on challenges they face in their day-to-day administration of the platform. Peer-to-peer interaction is a key component of building a client community.

Another program we started in March of 2022 is our Client Office Hours which is a bi-weekly conference call open to all clients and hosted by Wisetail’s Client Success team. The purpose of this program is twofold: First, we want to provide a space for clients to ask us questions that we can answer in real time. These questions can be how-to questions or requests for suggestions on best practices, i.e. how to best roll out a new training path, newsletter, etc. Second, we want to facilitate a meeting space for clients to connect and share live examples with one another. Essentially, we want to remove ourselves from the equation. Before the pandemic, we would host clients in Bozeman, Montana once a year for an in-person conference called Apex. At one point in time, we even went on the road to select cities and hosted a one-day meetup with smaller groups of clients. Through those events we saw the tremendous value our client community can provide one another by sharing ideas, demoing their sites, and soliciting feedback from one another. We’re now striving to replicate that same value and community feel, just in an on-demand virtual format.

And lastly, a third program – that we fondly call The Ripple Effect, is aimed to further client sharing through a user contribution contest. The idea behind it is pretty simple: we provide a new theme each month, clients submit a short video reflecting this theme within their platform, and then we pull the videos into an idea board for voting at the end of the month. If you’re not familiar, Wisetail’s “Idea Boards” are a type of dialog board in which users can vote on user-submitted ideas. The first place winner receives an annual subscription to MasterClass while second and third place winners receive an Audible audiobook. We see this as a fun way to encourage client sharing while using Wisetail’s native platform features to facilitate competition. 

Overall, The Drop’s purpose is to educate and engage our clients via social learning. We’ve made great strides, but we still have some distance to cover. Building a community takes time and we are focused on giving our clients a reason to come back to The Drop, time and time again.