BlueVolt Embeds Analytics Layer in Online Learning Solution Platform

About BlueVolt

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Portland, OR, BlueVolt is a pioneer in the elearning industry. BlueVolt’s solutions help a wide range of organizations increase sales, build brand awareness, and enhance employee productivity. Along with its learning management system, the company offers a range of client-focused services, including course and curriculum development, strategic support and channel-training innovations that make learning a strategic asset. To learn more, visit bluevolt.com.

Highlights

• Delivered their analytics solution 85 percent faster than building their own
• Enabled customers to increase sales up to 16 percent in 4–6 months
• Allows customers to combine their own data with BlueVolt’s platform data
• Empowers BlueVolt customers to analyze their data and plan for the future
• Differentiated BlueVolt from its competitors

Streamline reporting and discover insights right in the platform

Many companies like BlueVolt are promoting the idea that training is the new marketing. But not all training and marketing strategies are created equal. BlueVolt goes beyond basic learning management systems (LMS) to provide training and networking through the application of strategic channel learning and readiness (CLR) practices. Part of that strategy involves giving customers what they need in the platform to gauge course usage, monitor which courses are performing well, and verify connections between courses and product sales throughout customer channels.

To stay competitive in the CLR space, BlueVolt wanted to provide greater value to their customers. They focused on addressing three challenges with their existing platform:
Limited reporting. Their customers— especially the small to medium businesses (SMBs)—were limited to using spreadsheets for their reporting. They had many questions about their data that they couldn’t answer with their reports.

Lack of insights. Because customers were limited by the platform’s reporting capabilities, their customers lacked the in-depth insights they needed to make more informed decisions about their businesses.

Insucient development resources. BlueVolt didn’t want to pull their development team away from their core business. And it didn’t make sense to hire a team to develop analytics capabilities in-house.

Gaven Singh, Vice President of BlueVolt, said:

Our platform was primarily for reporting. It wasn’t designed for digging into the data. Instead, our SMB customers were left exporting information into Excel and figuring it out from there. As a business, our focus was on our two top priorities: The Sharing Center, which provides seamless access for sharing product training courses to our customer network; and our CLR software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. To better serve our customers, we needed the right solution, but we needed something we didn’t have to build ourselves.

Gain a deeper understanding of products, business, and channels

BlueVolt was determined to enhance their platform from basic reporting functions to providing analytics for greater visualization and insights. Singh explained,

We wanted to help our customers understand their business better and improve how they report to upper management and corporate leadership. We wanted to give them information about the status of their business, programs, and channels to guide their business decisions.

Because reporting and analytics weren’t part of BlueVolt’s core business, they needed a vendor with a capable analytics solution that could fulfill their requirements. The solution had to provide deep insights that would enable their customers to answer their questions about their products, business, and channels.

In choosing a vendor, BlueVolt needed one that offered a flexible, customizable solution. As BlueVolt searched for the right partner, they looked at several possible solutions. When they looked more closely at each one, they found that most of them were focused on reporting only, not adding the analytics capabilities they needed. Then they discovered Logi Symphony.

Get flexible and scalable reporting and analytics in a single platform

BlueVolt partnered with Logi Symphony to provide their customers a better experience.

Logi Symphony offers more of the analytics capabilities that we were looking for, rather than just reporting. Their platform gives us the flexibility and scalability that we needed that the other platforms didn’t offer.

BlueVolt chose the Logi Symphony solution for the following reasons:

• Self-service. BlueVolt’s customers can tailor and configure Logi Composer to match the skill level of their end users, while enabling them to modify and share their own visualizations.
• Automated scheduling. Their customers’ administrators or end users can schedule reports to automatically run on daily, weekly, monthly, or custom event schedules.
• Powerful analytics. Their customers can connect to data at a deeper level for greater visualization. They can gain critical insights into the current state of their business, define trends, and guide future growth opportunities.
• Time to market. BlueVolt can focus on their core business and deliver their analytics solution 85 percent faster than building their own platform. Plus, it works within their existing security infrastructure, allowing them to manage their data security and data privacy.

With Logi Symphony, we want to move away from simply reporting and instead move toward analytics and insights that show organizations how their business is performing, whether it’s growing, shrinking, or staying the same. Instead of sending Excel spreadsheets, they can now show the data that demonstrates how their business is actually doing.

Demonstrated customer use cases

To generate feedback about their embedded analytics usage over the first 4–6 months, BlueVolt conducted a customer survey. The results showed that, since embedding the Logi Symphony solution, BlueVolt customers have quickly taken to creating their own use cases.

Reading trends in the network.

Across the board, BlueVolt customers have noticed the ability to identify and leverage data trends in the network. In particular, BlueVolt University administrators can see which courses are shared, who enrolls in them, and the number of course enrollments and completions. Because of BlueVolt’s ability to integrate this data with customer sales data, University administrators can show correlations in real time between product training course completions and sales growth.

This type of network data offers University administrators complete visibility of their product training investment. They know how much they are putting into training across the BlueVolt network and how much they’re getting in return by their sales numbers.

Merging data to show growth.

BlueVolt’s distributor and manufacturer customers can now merge data to identify trends in the BlueVolt network so they can pivot and change their eorts faster than ever before.

Their distributor customers can identify new opportunities by merging their BlueVolt course data with their sales data. For example, they know the courses each sales representative has completed. With the new embedded analytics dashboard, their distributor leaders can compare the course completion data with the sales representative’s sales records. If sales reps are not performing well, leaders can redirect them to the appropriate training to boost their numbers.

The distributors reported a 3–6 percent sales growth rate. They attribute this increase to their new ability to identify sales enablement opportunities.

BlueVolt’s manufacturer customers have also reviewed their embedded analytics course data against their sales data. Their numbers show which distributor partners sell more effectively.

With Logi Symphony, we want to move away from simply reporting and instead move toward analytics and insights that show organizations how their business is performing, whether it’s growing, shrinking, or staying the same. Instead of sending Excel spreadsheets, they can now show the data that demonstrates how their business is actually doing.

In the BlueVolt survey, these customers identified a 7–16 percent sales increase among their distributors who completed more product training courses than the ones who completed fewer courses. This data revealed additional opportunities for manufacturers to promote their courses or require distributors to train in the BlueVolt network as part of their manufacturer contracts.

Finding new revenue opportunities.

Customers are also using BlueVolt’s data to gain better insights into their e-commerce revenue generation opportunities. With the new embedded BlueVolt analytics capabilities, powered by Logi Symphony, University administrators can identify their high-performing and low-performing courses.

By visualizing the performance rate of each product training course, administrators can update courses, prepare better plans for new ones, and eliminate low-performing ones. As customers began using their data to make decisions about their courses, they reported an average increase in e-commerce sales of about 7 percent. They owe this increase to simply changing or updating low-performing courses, as indicated by data trends in the network.

Create better courses and marketing strategies through data and insights

The biggest differentiator for BlueVolt is that their customers can use and merge their own data, such as their sales data, with BlueVolt’s learning data. By adding an analytics layer in their application, BlueVolt’s customers can make direct correlations between learning and product training with sales throughout their channels. They can also identify
increases and decreases in these areas.

“The ability to bring your own data and mix it with our platform data really sets us apart from our competition,” said Singh. “No longer do our customers have to move their data to a third-party application for reporting; they can analyze their data and generate reports right in our application.”

“Now that we’ve denormalized and flattened our data, our customers have access to, and full transparency of, that data right within the system,” he continued. “It looks pretty slick. It’s a modern application and gives our customers the ability to better understand their business. In addition to reporting, they see insights into where their business is and the potential for future growth. They can crunch their data as they see fit and extract it for their executive presentations.”

He added, “This feature enables our customers to gain transparency of their data and manage it, providing instant ROI. We’re offering this feature on three levels: the core level that comes with the platform, the executive level, and the developer level. Each level is designed to meet the unique data needs of our customers.”