CASE STUDY: SOFTWARE
Exterro Meets Onboarding and TTV Goal, Migrating 5k Learners and Critical Data to Thought Industries with No Downtime
Investing in change management helped accelerate Exterro’s onboarding process and ensure no learners were left behind.
Exterro is a leading software provider for data risk management solutions. The company serves a global community of customers and partners, including enterprise grade, blue chip companies in the law enforcement, banking, pharmaceutical, and legal industries. These companies rely on Exterro’s services to keep their critical data safe and secure.
Faced with an LMS that was deprecating its services, Exterro needed a new learning solution who could deliver on three promises:
- Securely and seamlessly transition 5,000 learners in 90 days with no downtime or interruptions in service
- Support the growth and unique needs of their partner community
- Provide the partnership and functionality to create an experience that reflects their brand values, while taking their learning business to new heights.
With no margin for error, Thoughts Industries delivered on all of these promises.
~ Sarah Hargreaves, Vice President, Global Training
THE CHALLENGE
Exterro’s former LMS was deprecating its services, so they needed to quickly move to a new platform without sacrificing any of their brand values or reputation for data risk management.
THE SOLUTION
Exterro found a true partnership with Thought Industries, successfully migrating a complex learning business with no downtime, finding a platform that will help their customers and partners thrive.
Swift, Secure Onboarding
With a looming deadline to transition from their old LMS to Thought Industries, Exterro faced the daunting task of getting their new site live in 90 days. To make things even more challenging, Exterro’s business has unique needs for data security and up-time.
“The Exterro platform is very robust, it’s very reliable, and it’s something that is used on a minute by minute basis by our customers,” said Exterro’s Vice President of Global Training, Sarah Hargreaves. “We could not disrupt the learning of any single student, putting them on pause while we went through a migration journey. That was a really critical thing for us. We didn’t want any downtime at all.”
The Exterro team needed to know that Thought Industries would take their onboarding process as seriously as Exterro treats its own customers. Data risk management is not just something that Exterro delivers to its customers. It’s a requirement in everything that they do. With the types of clients they have, there needs to be complete trust in their up-time and data security management.
After rigorous planning and attention to detail through the onboarding process, the team met its goal to be live in 90 days. According to Ms. Hargeaves, “The onboarding process definitely met our expectations. It was just a really nice and supportive experience.”
The Importance of Change Management
Migrating 5,000 learners with critical up-time requirements can be a daunting task. But the Exterro team found a partner in Thought Industries who was willing to lean in and ensure expectations were met at each stage of the onboarding process.
“We had a huge number of learners…moving anything of that size, it’s going to take some planning,” said Ms. Hargreaves. “Things can be very fast-paced with so many Saas-based solutions to support… There are a lot of moving parts for a lot of people. And those considerations were baked into how we wanted to manage this project.”
With such a high volume of learners and sensitive data to consider, change management was top of mind for both teams. “To embark on a significant migration journey and move onto a new platform with great UX and UI, we needed to be sure that all the people involved were confident that nothing would go wrong,” said Ms. Hargreaves.
At the beginning of the project, the Exterro team was admittedly nervous, as they wanted to be sure the project would unfold as expected. They did significant planning and held regular reviews as they moved through the project. At each step, they stopped to look at how the process was working. They conducted impact analysis as they progressed, as they were constantly thinking about different scenarios that were presented to them.
The Thought Industries project manager that was assigned to Exterro invested time in understanding their needs and listening to the ideas and concerns about the project’s impact on their learners and their business. In the process, it became a relationship built on trust.
Perhaps the most important outcome of any Thought Industries partnership is seeing the success of its customers recognized by their own teams. As a result of Exterro’s successful migration to Thought Industries, their project manager, Vandana, was promoted to LMS Manager.
~ Vandana, LMS Manager
~ Sarah Hargreaves, Vice President, Global Training
Serving a Partner Community
As a global business, Exterro supports an extensive channel community. Making sure those partners can deliver the same level of services that Exterro provides its own frontline customers, is critical to their success.
Thought Industries gives Exterro the ability to create unique learning experiences for their staff, customers, and channel partners using Ti’s multi-tenancy solution, Panorama. Each of these audiences can use their personalized learner dashboards to ‘choose their own adventure’ and decide what training they need in the moment.
When new channel partners are invited into the Exterro Academy, they enter via a partner portal, a place that has been designed for their experience. The content presented on these sites is branded by Exterro, and designed exclusively for the use of certain learners.
“It’s allowing them to have their own very dedicated and personalized learning experiences that starts right from the top of the LMS that says, ‘Welcome to your [company name] training portal,’” said Ms. Hargreaves. “That’s a massive piece of value added support to a customer, to know that you’ve got something that is dedicated for your purposes…They feel that they’ve got something that is exclusive, that they’ve got something that is just for them.”
Ti as Partner, Not a Vendor
Exterro is constantly on the lookout for ways to differentiate their learning business from the competition, and contribute to company growth. They’re always looking for ways to innovate and make things better for their customers. And this kind of vision is only possible with a technology solution that approaches each conversation as a partner, rather than a vendor.
The relationship with Thought Industries’ CSM has been particularly valuable throughout the process, from onboarding to product adoption.
“There’s been an open discussion. It’s been supportive, it’s been thought-provoking and it’s meant that we’ve made really informed decisions about what we can do and what we can’t do. And up to now, it’s never felt in any way to be restrictive…We are learning every day…I honestly don’t think that we’ve even scratched the surface of what the potential is for our learning platform.”
~ Sarah Hargreaves, Vice President, Global Training, Exterro