Boost NPS Scores and Build Software Training Faster, Cheaper with dominKnow| ONE

Training for technology and software is a great case study of how training has changed over the past two decades.

Bringing new learners into classroom sessions used to be the norm for teaching software tools. These days, it’s become the exception rather than the rule.

It’s not just the rise of eLearning that is responsible for this shift, it’s also learner expectations.

Learners coming to a new technology or software tool typically already have a strong background in similar technologies or tools, so are better positioned (and even eager) to learn on their own than similar learners 20 years ago.

Software and technology training organizations have also benefitted from this change, reducing their training costs as well as providing better overall results.

We recently had a chance to showcase two of our client teams, CENGN and OpenText, that have built their full technology and software training programs around dominKnow | ONE.

You can hear from these client teams in their own words by catching the webinar replay.

Thriving Through the COVID-19 Pandemic At CENGN

Our first guest was Peter Heath from CENGN.

CENGN is a not-for-profit technology consultancy firm that helps tech start ups commercialize innovative new products in Cloud, AI, and advanced networking.

CENGN works alongside multiple incubators, focusing on start ups that are in the market already and are beginning to grow. CENGN’s training programs help these companies bolster their technologies and help them build the technical skills they need to grow.

CENGN has developed the CENGN Academy program to develop that workforce by building skills so its clients can develop their own products better and faster.

“When our client firms succeed, that is when we succeed,” Heath explained.

CENGN embarked on an eLearning authoring tool search about four years ago, choosing dominKnow | ONE. Besides features to support interactivity and assessment, CENGN recognized they needed a cloud-based authoring solution to support collaboration, review and content security. CENGN’s core authoring team are typically interns and co-op students, who are with CENGN for short windows of time. A cloud-based tool means that CENGN always knows where all its content is, no matter who created it or edited it last. It’s easy to provide authoring access to new team members as needed and control access when not needed.

Using dominKnow | ONE, CENGN has developed a full portfolio of formal training courses in advanced technologies like cloud computing and machine learning/artificial intelligence(AI).

The courses are tiered in terms of technical details from basic to very advanced, and most include hands-on labs. CENGN includes review questions or other interactivity every 10-15 minutes to maintain learner engagement, and at the end of each course learners go through a moderately challenging summary quiz and the results are tracked in the CENGN LMS.

“Everything – content, labs, interactions, quizzes – is developed in dominKnow | ONE,” Heath explained.

One of the key dominKnow| ONE features for CENGN is Capture, which helps authors record and create lessons for software tasks. Capture lessons can be provided to the learner as animated Show Me lessons, as guided practice Try Me lessons, step-by-step Guides as well as used for assessment questions in a test. This sample shows each of these modes inaction.

Peter also talked about other features they’ve come to really value in dominKnow | ONE, including:

• Our scenario builder, which helps CENGN easily create conversation-based branching interactions to explore how different choices can result in different project out comes
• Our centralized Media Library, which allows images, audio and video files to be used across multiple courses and be kept synchronized for updates, saving time and ensuring information consistency

CENGN has also come to value how well dominKnow | ONE supports accessibility standards such as Section508 and WCAG.

From a content creation perspective, using dominKnow | ONE makes it easy for CENGN to get new interns and co-op students up and authoring very quickly. CENGN has created its own templates to reduce development time and make authoring easy, so even though the content topics they are training on are very complex, creating that content is very easy and quick.

Most importantly is how dominKnow | ONE has helped CENGN exceed its learner goals by 20%.

Heath noted that CENGN began its eLearning program just as the world entered lockdown in the COVID-19pandemic. Doing any classroom-based learning became impossible, immediately. eLearning became the only option.

“Without dominKnow | ONE we would have been dead in the water,” Heath said.

In fact, the CENGN program didn’t just survive, it thrived.

“We had a target of 1,000 learners, we trained more than 1,200 despite the pandemic,” Heath said.

Engaging Formal Learning and Invaluable Informal Learning Helps Boost NPS Scores at OpenText

Our other guests on the webinar were K.J. Lodrick and Ed Hjorth, from OpenText, who support OpenText’s Fortify software tool.

Fortify is the leading tool for application security or AppSec. It scans an application’s source code for vulnerabilities in the code and lists out the results or findings so developers can fix them and keep company websites, mobile apps, financial services tools, etc., secure to avoid breaches.

Fortify customers are software developers, and in most cases they don’t want anything to get in the way of delivering code on time and on budget, especially having to take time to learn a software tool.

Lodrick and Hjorth used to approach Fortify training as instructor-led first, creating training guides for classroom-based sessions. This included presentation slides, lab guides, and student guides. Then they would turn their training into eLearning after that. The eLearning was about 50% hands-on simulations with about 10 simulations per course.

This process meant that the team could produce a course every 3 to 6 months and was only able to maintain about four new courses a year.

Moving to dominKnow | ONE has allowed the OpenText team to completely reverse its design and creation process. They now have a digital-content-first approach, starting with eLearning content which they can easily re-purpose as ILT content and as just-in-time performance support using dominKnow | ONE’s features for single-sourcing of content and our wide range of publishing options.

The OpenText team also uses dominKnow’s Convey Dynamic publishing service to deliver content where learners need it.

For formal eLearning courses, the team publishes to Convey which provides a small SCORM “stub” package that gets loaded into the LMS. Once that’s done, the course content is delivered to the learner from Convey through the LMS. Since the SCORM package doesn’t sit in the LMS, the team can publish content updates immediately with no need to move large SCORM packages to the LMS team and wait for the updates to be applied.

“This is a deal changer for updating and fixing courses. Someone finds a typo and boom, fix it and five minutes later it is fixed in the course on the LMS!” said Lodrick, who shared a story of updating content immediately and on the fly during an ILT pilot session as the pilot learner group provided feedback.

Using Convey saves the team up to 90% of the time it used to spend updating content in the LMS.

Additionally, Convey helps the OpenText team also provide help and software lessons right within the Fortify application itself.

In addition to taking a formal eLearning course, Fortify customers can also access lessons under the software tool’s Help menu. The first option in that Menu is a searchable knowledge base, built in dominKnow | ONE and hosted on Convey.

The effort required to create that searchable knowledge base is minimal for the OpenText team.

dominKnow | ONE has content Themes that cover many different learning contexts and needs, so it’s easy to publish not just eLearning courses but also easily-branded job aids and knowledge bases, just by choosing a different theme.

Plus, in dominKnow | ONE it’s easy to share topic-level content like lessons across many different projects, and easily keep that content updated all at once. We call this our single-source synchronized content model – your eLearning courses and job aids can all share the same lesson, and remain automatically updated together.

OpenText is able to easily re-bundle its existing eLearning lessons into a searchable knowledge base, and the publish that to Convey. For this type of informal learning that doesn’t need to be SCORM or run from an LMS, Convey sets up the content as an instant URL that learners can access at any time.

And this made it easy for the Fortify development team to add the searchable knowledge base’s URL as a link under the tool’s Help menu, which the team calls How To Guides.

Their customers can learn how to do a task in Fortify right as they work in the software tool with no need to leave the flow of work or slow down their development processes.

Using dominKnow | ONE, the OpenText team has been able to dramatically accelerate their content creation, even while creating more interactive content.

“We went from producing a course every 3 to 6 months to producing a course within weeks. We had 4 to 6 courses and now we have over 30,” Lodrick said.

And the Capture feature’s ease of use means those courses now contain even more hands-on software lessons. Their previous courses were about 50% software simulations, Lodrick noted.

“Our courses are 90% Show me, Try me, Guides hands-on, a lot of Captures and gamification knowledge checks,” she explained

And the result is a more effective learning process.

“We focus on the need-to-know for a learner since developers just want to get back to their jobs.”

Being able to leverage dominKnow| ONE’s feature set has also led to measurable improvement in learner satisfaction.

The team’s first course in dominKnow | ONE earned a Net Promoter Score (NPS) score of 36, which is in the Good range.

The most recent version of that course, improved as the team learned more about how they could leverage dominKnow | ONE to responds to learner feedback, has an NPS of 62, which is in the Excellent range.

And in the world of software training and support, customers who get started successfully remain successful clients.

Find Out How dominKnow | ONE and Convey Can Help Your Software Training Team Deliver Better Value

There are lots of options for creating software training available, but only dominKnow | ONE combines:

• Great content authoring, including our award-winning Capture feature for software lesson creation
• A cloud-based approach for collaboration and content security
• A single-sourcing model that saves you money and time when using content for multiple purposes
• Convey dynamic publishing with one-click instant content updates no matter if the content is in a SCORM course in your LMS or in a searchable knowledge base that your users rely on in the flow of using your software solution

dominKnow | ONE and Convey make measurable differences for our software and technology training clients – sign up for a free trial today to learn why for yourself.