View a transcript of this video

View a PDF version of this transcript

Introduction

My name is Rebecca Braunert-Plunkett and I am the e-Learning program manager at Watts. Watts is a global leader in water solutions for commercial and residential buildings. Our products and solution contribute to water safety, water conservation, water quality. And the energy efficient use of water around the globe.

We have been using Totara for the past three years to onboard and educate our employees and basically manage all our learning needs through the system. In addition to that, a large part of my role is to ensure a functioning extended enterprise solution.

Outside of your organisation who are you educating using Totara?

So outside of our organisation, we do help plumbing professionals to develop the skills they need for their trade. So that means we’ll help them to understand how to specify, install, use, and maintain all of our products and solutions.

Why is it that you’re educating this group of people?

Extended enterprise really helps us add value to our customers. Through our course materials, we set them up for success in the industry, and this way they become ambassadors for our products and solutions as well as for our learning program.

How do the external users find the platform and get onto the platform?

So our platform is freely available online to anybody who knows where to find it. We do point industry professionals to the platform through various marketing channels like email marketing, newsletters, in-person training, and we also have a built-in functionality that incentivises users to spread the word and tell their friends about our e-learning program.

Going back to the core of your question, actually getting onto the platform requires the user to register via a self-registration signup form. And depending on the information they give us on that signup form, we are able to shape their customised experience and learning journey.

What does the first interaction with the system look like to the user?

So I would like to play a quick demo of how users actually are welcomed to our system. We did turn our Totara instance into a learning experience platform, so our learning is incentive based. We do welcome users with 250 welcome tokens, which is our virtual currency. And users from there on can earn tokens for course completions, which then can be redeemed in our built-in store.

So we are really trying to engage and delight our customers from the very beginning.

Do different groups of users see different things when they log into the platform?

As I mentioned before, depending on the input the user provides us with. We are able to run customised audience-based channels in nine different countries. So this actually means that depending on the audience a user is in, they will see a different regionalised dashboard and have access to custom tailored content.

And the fun thing about this is what looks like different platforms for each country, in reality are just all based on one core instance of Totara Learn.

How do you make the experience personal to each set of users?

Yes. We actually do segment our user base by audiences and then provide a very intuitive and easy to navigate user experience. So besides audience segmentation, we do heavily rely on filtered catalogue searches. And we guide our users through these searches with the page functionality in the system. I would like to show you a couple of different sections in our two channels to basically illustrate what a user in the US would see as opposed to a user, let’s say in France.

We actually, once we segmented our user base by audience, we of course run with the experience, and Totara gives us a lot of different options to really frame the experience and the options we can give to our users. So we do heavily rely on filtered catalogue searches and the page functionality. I’m going to show that to you real quick.

If I click on the course catalogue tile, you see how we are just using a page to further segment and recommend courses, and depending on whether you are a plumber, whether you are a water heater installer or an engineer, you will find pre-filtered content in the system. And the fun part is that it doesn’t just end here, but if we take a look at the French catalogue, it looks totally different, has a totally different segmentation, and really is tailored to customer interest and provides further information and further guidance as well.

What is the learning experience like for the group of users? Do they take courses / Programs or any assessments?

Our platform focuses on completion of individual courses, which the user can really freely pick from the catalogue. We do have a brief knowledge assessment at the end of each course, and that’s kind of relevant because through passing the quiz, users can earn their tokens and redeem their rewards.

In addition to that, we do further try to gamify our customer experience by inviting them to join challenges in which they complete a certain amount of courses in a specific period of time.

Do you do any reporting on what your groups of learners are achieving?

The built in Totara Report builder is actually really great for reporting on activities. So we do run weekly reports to get a feel for what our learners are achieving, where we can detect trends or any customer interests that will help us further improve our customer experience and the extended enterprise base.

How is this helping your organisation?

The external enterprise solution has been extremely valuable to the organisation, especially during the pandemic. The platform was essential in further establishing, Watts as the industry knowledge provider we’re actually known for. From basic introduction to how the solutions work to CEO approved courses for engineers.

We were able to help our learners to confidently use our products and solutions and have fun while learning about them. And to share a little bit of a success story is that, within three years of having launched the platform, we have an external customer completion of over half a million e-learning modules. 

(On-screen note: *Correct figure: 0.25 million course completions, but we’re working on the 0.5 million!)

So it is really an exciting addition to our customer offerings.

Do you have any advice for people wanting to set up their platform to create an extended enterprise model?

The one advice I have for anybody who is looking into extended enterprise is to really get to know your audience. Totara provides a great framework for customising user experiences. If that is done right, it definitely is going to be a game changer for your organisation and for your customers.