Customer

A rapidly-growing, mid-size training company based in Singapore that runs courses throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Business Issues

• Under pressure to reduce costs without reducing the quality of the training experience.
• They printed the training manuals for each course locally in Singapore, then couriered the manuals to the training location, usually a hotel or function center. Sometimes the hotel would lose the materials and sometimes the materials would get damaged in transit.
• Printing, binding and couriering training materials was expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable. They normally required the training manuals at least 2 weeks prior to the course date to allow time for printing and couriering.  Including staff time, training manuals usually cost $30-100 per participant, depending on size and color requirements.

Concerns

They had already acknowledged that they would have to move away from paper at some point in the future.  When they looked at Prezentt, they were excited by the potential of the platform, but also had some concerns:

• Would participants get distracted if they had Internet access?
• Would participants share the training materials all over the Internet?
• What if there were things in the training materials that the trainers wanted to show, but didn’t want to provide to the participants?

They discussed their concerns with us and spoke to some other trainers who were using Prezentt in their courses.

This is what they found regarding each concern:

Distractions

• Participants often multi-task by checking their e-mails or Facebook, but provided the participants wanted to learn, they rarely did these tasks during the training session unless they had completed an exercise and were waiting for the other participants to catch up.
• Participants appreciated having access to their e-mail and being trusted, as mature learners, to pay attention when the course was in progress. Some trainers explicitly covered this expectation at the start of their courses.

Sharing Materials

• There were no instances of anyone sharing the training materials on the web. Some participants shared some course materials internally with their colleagues, but this occurred primarily when their company had sent them on the training course for this specific purpose.
• Most of the trainers however didn’t include everything in the training materials. This meant that the materials were of limited use on their own.
• Although the PIN option was available in Prezentt, trainers generally only used this at the start of their experience with Prezentt. Once they had a better understanding of the platform and became comfortable with it, they often elected not to use this.

Selective Content

• The trainers they spoke to simply took out the content they didn’t want to share when they created a copy to upload to Prezentt.
• Many trainers didn’t worry about this step at all however.

Trial

Having satisfied their concerns, the company tested the platform internally first, then decided to run a pilot in their own environment.

They selected a trainer who was comfortable using technology and trained both him and their training administrator in how to use the system.

By avoiding the need to print, bind and courier, the company estimated they had saved over USD1,000-2,000 in costs plus at least a further USD1,000 in staff time.  This immediately paid for the cost of their trial!

Since they run hundreds of courses per year, they calculated they would save $200,000 – $300,000 by using Prezentt, excluding the benefits of staff time savings and other efficiency gains.

When they introduced the system to their participants, most of whom worked in an office, they found that most of their participants were very comfortable using the system, as they were used to writing e-mails and posting comments on social media.

Some of their older participants still took additional notes on paper but they found that many of those under 30 never even touched the paper pads provided.

Feedback

The trainer particularly liked the fact that he could share more content with the participants as the course progressed and particularly loved the fact that he could tweak the content in response to the pre-course questionnaire responses the night before the training started.

During the course, a couple of questions came up that the trainer wasn’t expecting.  He used Prezentt to immediately provide all participants with access to some website links that answered the questions perfectly.

The feedback from the participants was also very positive.  They particularly liked that they could save the course notes with their comments then access these at any time.

The training company loved that they could download the attendance list plus the feedback forms (which they could read!) the moment that the course was completed.

Implementation

The company was very happy with the results of their trial so they decided to implement the platform across the organization.

They felt Prezentt wasn’t suited for absolutely every course they ran, particularly those with a high level of participants who weren’t familiar with using technology.  However, they felt it was well-suited for the vast majority of their participants and courses.

They even started using it for conference presentations and marketing functions where they wanted to make content available to the attendees.

See how you could benefit too

To find out how you too could get these kinds of benefits for your organization, just leave your details below.