May 6, 2011
While Bluewolf’s consultants constantly come up with new, creative ways to solve very common workplace challenges, I have to tell you, some of my favorite solutions are the ones for the ultra-unique businesses. One of our clients is a small business that is a research-oriented, healthcare best-practice educator and information provider. Part of their funding comes from the University to which they are tied and part of their funding comes from membership fees from hospitals and various healthcare providers that utilize our client’s research-based best practices. The challenges that this business faces aren’t going to be quite as common as, say, Ad Sales Quoting. Bring it on. We love a challenge.
- Most of their training and educational services will not be in person
- To get more memberships (read: funding,) healthcare providers have to know, firstly, that this company exists and then be able to understand enough about their services to make an informed decision on whether or not to subscribe to a membership
Bluewolf has helped this client take two strategic approaches to educating their consumer base; one of which was solved by the Bluewolf Beyond team and the other by our Training and Technology Adoption team.
Making Yourself Find-able and The Power of Pooled Resources
After a few key conversations and brainstorming sessions with our client, the first order of business established was to give some TLC to their public website. The Bluewolf Beyond team pooled their collective experiences and expertise including Ruby on Rails development, project management, technology consulting, business process consulting, website and user interface (UI) design, and user acceptance testing to rebuild the roughly 150 pages of our client’s public website to ensure that the site was navigable and important information was easy and intuitive to find.
How might one ensure such things? Ample user testing (our team used a testing firm and targeted demographics most similar to our client’s existing customer base,) a spirited, agile approach, taking tester feedback into account and continually iterating and improving until we saw the kind of results that we were comfortable leaving our client with. Building a sustainable solution and one that fulfilled important functions such as robust searching functionality, the ability to collect Lead information, show conference schedules, collect conference attendee registrations, allow potential presenters to upload their abstracts, and others. Keeping in line with agility and constant improvement, the team also uses Google Analytics to track site usage so our client can evolve as its consumer and prospect base does.
Interactive Virtual Education: The Next Best Thing to Being There
Website: tackled. And ready for inevitable changes as the business moves forward. The other matter of enabling our clients to effectively educate the healthcare providers who subscribe to their information was swiftly and skillfully executed by Bluewolf’s technology adoption team; the same folks who design change management strategies and train our enterprise clients after we deploy new solutions or processes to them. When our team can’t be onsite, when there’s a large group to be trained, and when there will be many new folks to train in the future; these all make for an environment where virtual, interactive eLearning modules are ideal. Bluewolf’s adoption team worked with the client to create a handful of different eLearning modules that can be passed on to the healthcare providers subscribed to our client’s services for a far more engaging, effective, and sustainable method of educating than distributing pamphlets, or by static web pages.
Cheers to both the Bluewolf Beyond and Adoption teams in their fearless seizing of challenges and turning them into opportunities to transform our clients’ businesses. Stories like this one make me increasingly more confident in our delivery processes, methodology, and our ability to really make an impact out there.
