Alan Prophitt, IT Administrator at Huie, Fernambucq & Stewart, knew he needed a learning management system (LMS) for several reasons.

He needed a central, cloud-based resource that could manage all of his training needs (from content to scheduling to reporting); he needed a system that would allow people to get their own answers to the most frequently asked questions at the help desk (alleviating a big load of calls each day); and he needed to support HR’s growing list of orientation and training needs.

Prophitt chose SavvyAcademy LMS, offered by Savvy Training & Consulting.

“Doug answered the phone in two rings,” Prophitt remembers of his first call to the company, when he reached CEO Doug Striker. “From the moment we first spoke, Doug has been driven entirely by customer satisfaction. I knew I wanted to work with him.”

But Prophitt faced challenges he didn’t expect as he was trying to motivate people in the firm to utilize the LMS.

“I could not get one single person to use it!” he recalls. He was baffled, thinking that people would be excited to have access to trainings and other resources from their desktop.

Then the firm hired a marketing director and she taught Prophitt something important about motivating people: it’s best to make it fun and reward them.

Prophitt jokes, “We IT guys are like a bunch of Sheldons from Big Bang Theory. We don’t know how to get people excited about new technologies.”

With the marketing director’s help, Prophitt rolled out an Olympic-themed rewards system for people who took classes on the LMS. The contest included a promise: for every class that a person took, they would get credits to use at Amazon. Within weeks, 40 people had made it all the way through the gold medal level in the contest.

Throughout the contest, Prophitt says he was able to “pull a crazy amount of documentation from the SavvyAcademy LMS to prove to upper management that the system was worth it.” He could track results down to individual users and could even boast that calls to the help desk were down.

Then, Human Resources decided to throw their hat in the ring, too. Seeing the success that Prophitt was having, they decided to require employees to take 50 modules per year – one per week minus two for vacations. Because the LMS could track who participated and when, the HR team was able to tie this expectation to the annual review process.

In the end, Prophitt realized that he needed a team to help him rollout the LMS.

“Marketing people think differently,” he says. “When she talked about doing a contest, I didn’t think it was all that exciting. Turns out, it was just what we needed!”

Prophitt adds that Doug and Savvy’s Training Specialist Terry Aurit have helped him every step of the way.

“I can’t say enough about Doug and Terry,” he says. “Those two are a wonderful team. Terry even had a conference call with me from Tokyo once. She stayed up late to call us in the States!”

To learn more about the SavvyAcademy LMS and how you can plan your rollout, contact Doug Striker today at 303-800-5408, Doug@SavvyTraining.com.