Customers Continue Employee Training During COVID-19 with Spekit
Businesses and their employees are struggling with many “how do I” questions right now.
“How do I…
…complete onboarding for my new sales team hired in Q1?”
…keep my team up to date on all of these changes we’re implementing?”
…maintain productivity?”
…ease fears and support my team through their individual struggles?”
Suddenly, businesses need to enable employees to be completely self-sufficient.
AppExchange partner Spekit has been there to answer those questions and more. Integrated with the Salesforce platform, Spekit is an in-app learning and contextual knowledge app, specifically designed to make any documentation and training your team has searchable, or embedded, contextually directly in Salesforce.
We spoke with Spekit’s CEO and co-founder Melanie Fellay to learn more on how technology can — and is — helping customers maintain productivity, communication, and training in a work-from-home world.
What challenges are your customers are seeing due to COVID-19?
Melanie Fellay: For many companies, this is their first time training and enabling an entirely remote team while they also revisit priorities as an organization, shift their customer engagement approach, and much more.
Most of our customers have recently gone through digital transformations and invested in Salesforce to remove the requirement of being in the same physical location. That’s the case for Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) Technologies, a team within the larger JLL Fortune 500 global property consultancy company. JLL Technologies uses Spekit for onboarding and continuous training in Salesforce. With Spekit implemented, JLL Technologies was already prepared to onboard, train, and communicate with their team from anywhere in the world. Which is the best possible outcome.
Has JLL Technologies seen minimal disruption in onboarding and training because of Spekit?
Fellay: Ann-Renee Thrash, the Training and Documentation Specialist for JLL Technologies, shared with me recently, “For us, nothing really has changed since the COVID-19 crisis when it comes to how we onboard and train our team. Our entire user base has always been decentralized, so Spekit has always been a critical tool.”
Can you share more on how your customers are using Spekit to address challenges during COVID-19?
Fellay: Our customers have always used the platform to reinforce training wherever their team is working, but it’s incredibly important now to expand on this wherever possible. For example, we encourage sales teams to add any enablement materials into Spekit so that employees can view discovery review questions in Salesforce while prospecting, or operations teams to embed their procedures and policies next to the workflows where their users need them.
Ann-Renee at JLL Technologies shared, “Spekit is essential to reinforcing processes and helping to ensure data integrity. It’s also been a critical change management component to communicate important system updates and changes.” I think that speaks volumes about how customers can use our technology as things change day-by-day.
Another big area we’ve been able to help out is through our marketplace of training content. For many people, they’re having to train their team on tools remotely for the first time. Writing all of that training documentation can be an incredibly tedious task (especially in a short time frame). To help with this, we offer out-of-the-box training, completely free, that you can customize for the most popular tools teams are using today. Instead of taking months to whip together training, this free content helps teams offer training on every single one of their tools, digitally, in days.
What has the response been from customers so far?
Fellay: Honestly, I’ve been overwhelmed with the love and support we’ve received from our customers. We knew our solution would be an asset in a time like this, but it’s a whole different thing to hear the stories from our customers as they fight through this transition. It’s saved them time, helped their team maintain productivity, empowered them to be self-sufficient, and acted as a channel for communicating changes in real-time.
Another customer, MCTLaw, recently told us how much benefit they’ve seen from real-time notifications in particular right now. “Real-time notifications for updates are a game-changer. We make a lot of changes. Instead of bombarding our team with emails, we can send simple notifications any time something new is introduced. It’s been especially helpful as we’ve gone remote over these last few weeks. We can’t easily gather together for announcements anymore so being able to communicate through notifications has made things much easier,” said Walt Bower, IT Director at MCTLaw.
As a founder, it makes me incredibly proud to see the difference we can make in our customer’s lives and of my team for the way they’ve stepped up to tackle these challenges.
Can you share how else you’re working with customers and others in the Salesforce ecosystem in response to COVID-19?
Fellay: Great question. We’ve taken on a few big initiatives.
Both transparency and knowledge sharing are super important right now. We crowdsourced tips and best practices from sales leaders at fast-growing organizations and shared these strategies through webinars, blog posts, emails, and more to help support our customers through this transition. We’re also making a point of sharing everything we’ve done or trying to do internally to help ease this transition.
Also, we’re working with Salesforce and Geneia to launch Theon® Care Management solution In-App Training, which is specifically designed to support healthcare organizations and those on the frontline of the COVID-19 crisis. This free training takes only two minutes to set up, and makes it incredibly easy for any users of Geneia’s AppExchange solution to roll it out, onboard their team, provide guidance in the moment, and communicate with their users. In moments like these, when timing is everything, we focused on designing an in-app training solution that will boost their productivity.
We’re rapidly expanding our free, out-of-the-box tool training. Anyone can sign up for Spekit free, access training on Salesforce Lightning and customize in minutes. Their team can then access this training directly within those applications, beside any defined terms, fields, picklists, and more. We want to make it as easy as possible for teams to enable their organization from anywhere in the world. By offering this free tool training, you can be up and running with comprehensive digital training in hours instead of weeks.
At the end of the day, we’re all in this together. The greatest contribution I believe our team can make is to share what we’ve learned from our own experience operating as a distributed team as well as many of our customers, on how to build a process documentation and enablement strategy that best supports the day-to-day needs of an employee — remote or not.
Learn about Spekit on AppExchange and see what other solutions can help during this time on AppExchange COVID-19 Resources for Businesses.
