When software platform PowerDMS launched, the company grew quickly. Within a few years, they knew that they needed to set up a learning management system (LMS) to onboard their customers and teach them how to get the most out of their software.
Director of L&D Patty Costley explains:
“When I first started with PowerDMS, we had no training team. The customer teams were taking calls and repeating the same thing all day, every day,” she remembers. “We were getting ready to grow really quickly and it wasn’t going to work long-term.”
PowerDMS wanted to improve the time it took to onboard new customers and make sure that all customers had fast, convenient access to training.
They also needed to tailor to different user profiles. For this, they needed an LMS with Salesforce integration, so they could automatically define which content was applicable to which type of user.
Unfortunately, the first LMS solution they found fell short of their expectations.
“By the time we built our content and launched, we had already outgrown it,” Patty says.
Course uploads were slow and clunky, and the UX was not ideal.
But worst, their Salesforce sync faced huge delays: the LMS platform throttled the sync at 500 records per 30 minutes.
With over 200,000 users eligible to consume learning, Patty calculated that it would take nearly a year for everyone in her learner base to have access to a course.
Patty says, “Our customers were calling us to say that they couldn’t access their catalog. And when we went to [our previous LMS], they told us our sync was backed up for 27 days. I couldn’t work with that.”
To meet their original goals and reduce new customer onboarding time, PowerDMS needed to find an LMS that could handle their user volume.
And to make their situation even more challenging, the clock was ticking: PowerDMS needed to implement a solution within 90 days, before the contract with their first LMS ran out.
“We had to switch in 90 days. If we didn’t, we would have had to renew our contract with [the other LMS company], and we weren’t willing to do that,” Patty explains.