How the IGPDE led change and reduced its user support with Shortways
The IGPDE is the training organism of the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty.
During our “customer feedback” webinar, Emmanuel Bunel, Head of the IT and Logistics department, testified us how the IGPDE digitized this process with the training solution of Cegid Talentsoft, and guided its handling.
What was the context of your project?
Emmanuel Bunel: To summarize what the IGPDE is, it’s the continuous training center of the Ministry of Finance that also acts for the other Ministries. We are Qualiopi certified for our core business, the training, and it is on this part that Shortways intervenes.
The IGPDE has 3 main missions:
- Ensure the promotion and development of agents’ skills, increase skills in every domains, notably the managed ones.
- Supporting the public action transformation through research.
- Deploy research and disselination of knowledge and best practices from our European and international colleagues.
Here are some figures about us, to give you an overview of the volumes we process:
We are more than 33,000 trainees and preparers for the INSP (formerly ENA) competition, and with almost 50,000 trainee days. In addition, there are 130,000 of us in MEFSIN central administration. Which corresponds to nearly 160,000 potential customers with agents outside MEFSIN, with half training managers and half training advisors.
It requires good logistics to manage all these people?
Emmanuel Bunel: Absolutely, my department takes care of logistics and everything related to training logistics: training rooms, production and distribution of multimedia.
Besides, we have the infrastructures which allow us to manage this. Infrastructure operation and user support are managed by my department.
A few years ago, you decided to digitize all this management. What was the context of this project?
Emmanuel Bunel: We were faced with the need to change and update an old training management application which was more than twenty years old and review this IT part of business training. The “Bagheera” project was thus initiated in 2017 and put into production from the beginning of 2022. As part of this project, we turned to a SaaS solution offered by Cegid Talentsoft. It is a module focused on training and the entire information management ecosystem.
Our 3 main goals were:
- To replace an obsolete application,
- To digitize training registration processes which were partly on paper,
- Behind it, management wanted to put the trainee at the heart of this IS, from the expression of their needs to registration, attendance control and training evaluation as part of our quality monitoring.
This is a major project that addresses the heart of your operations. What were the challenges of the Bagheera project?
Emmanuel Bunel: We are on a complex plan with the Bagheera system and current training systems on all solutions. Are available 3 main modules: the TMS, the LMS and the LCMS.
These issues are linked to the choice of SaaS solutions, which are very practical but may result in particular configurations. For us, it was changes to our old procedures to adapt to the software. These adaptations forced us to organize a long-term change management process which was necessary for such a radical change from a “classic” application to an application in SaaS mode with completely different procedures.
Another stake is to know “why did we use the Shortways solution? “. We had to set up user support because a complex application means user support, especially in an important initial phase. Unfortunately, my department and especially my support team were not calibrated to answer this equation: 4 agents for 160,000 potential users with more or less complex profiles. An imbalance that does not allow for full-time telephone support.
This new equation was the starting point for us to look for a solution. In the training chain, we start from the agent, the future trainee. But we have internal profiles of training managers who manage them from A to Z, customer managers who collect the needs of other ministries with different profiles and rights on the application.
Finally, the last issue was the complexity of certain procedures. We put the trainee at the center of our application, which simplified their procedures. But this has made the steps or procedures more complex internally for our training managers for whom more requirements are needed on data entry, on the creation of actions, etc. This adds to their tasks to simplify those of the IGPDE end-customer.
This whole change management approach took into account very early on the need for effective user support. What training and change management methodology has been put in place for these users?
Emmanuel Bunel: We followed a standard approach by asking ourselves about the main stages of change management.
When you have few internal resources, it is necessary to create a network of ambassadors. It is often a network of service or department specialists to create local intermediaries, provide information and test the solution before putting it into production. We therefore created our network of Bagheera ambassadors.
Following this, we created a training plan intended for trainers to disseminate information to agents, then to IGPDE training correspondents. For this we have produced paper materials that can be downloaded online. We still had the idea of being able to respond to requests from Bagheera users through support. But we could not have telephone support with a team of 4 agents who were not exclusively dedicated to support because they had other IT tasks and projects. In addition, our network of ambassadors has somewhat left after the training phases. Our training capacity was limited so we had to rely on paper or online documentation. We realized through the first online questions that users do not read documents, this is a natural tendency in IT. Of course, we were faced with the user who finds a telephone contact to quickly solve their need. Small team and impossibility of responding to all requests during office hours, therefore impossible to do on our side easily.
In this context, you have completed this training system by choosing a user assistance, Shortways.
Emmanuel Bunel: Indeed: how can we respond to these difficulties and which we already assumed before going into production? We searched everywhere and told ourselves that a user had questions when connecting to the application platform. We had presentations on chatbot-type conversational systems but this seemed limited to us. We had fairly complex procedures, information entry screens through which we had to guide the user. It was therefore not adapted to this particular need. We came across the Shortways solution which combined interesting features and ease of integration into Cegid Talentsoft. Moreover, some of their customers were already using it, which completely reassured us.
Shortways is easy to use, and administrators can quickly get started.
The Shortways Team was omnipresent to provide us with very effective support and helped us get started on the product. The initial training on Shortways is quick, it lasts a day.
After that, if we have further questions, the Customer Success team is here to help.
Once this product was chosen, we began to prepare it for production, in February 2022: in December 2021, we began to take ownership of the tool. Then in January 2022, we started to feed the tool and our testing platform.
Why did you choose Shortways?
Emmanuel Bunel: What we liked were the 4 main modules. Unlike a chatbot, we have additional options which are greatly useful for an application like Cegid Talentsoft. These 4 modules are:
- Contextual help, a classic, which highlights a field and displays contextual help through a pictogram which can be called up at the user’s initiative. Even if they are an advanced user, if they forget something, they can search for information on this field with this tooltip. For example, it allowed us to direct agents to complete forms on free or non-mandatory fields.
- Notifications, which are at our initiative. When you want to emphasize the need to enter information or specify an area of the screen for which you must perform a specific action. They help put newcomers on the right track. The user can then disable them whenever they want. We have implemented them in particular for the training report forms. In the early days of production, few training reports reached us. Users thought that pressing the “save” button would send the report to their manager. But this was not the case, you had to click on the small “v” pictogram which definitively validated this form. We therefore activated a notification which informed the user of this final step.
- Step-by-steps, which takes the user by the hand. In certain procedures we tell him where to click, where to fill in the information and where to validate it. They guide the user through various screens and can be triggered when a specific page loads. We have invested in it to initiate and quickly learn all complex procedures. We take the user by the hand by clearly saying “click on the bento menu for training management”.
- The FAQ, which allows the user to query the system to get a classic answer about the software. This will guide him to the right FAQ to find the answer. The agent will find links to documents relating to his research or to the agent guide.
You also used another Shortways feature to solve your user support issue: the integrated support request.
Emmanuel Bunel: This is the module that saved our lives, if I may say so. Through this, we collect all user requests. We have a small team, we needed to find a way to handle user requests. There is a feature that we use a lot in Shortways, which is the online help request. When clicking on the Shortways Assistant, a small envelope at the top right of the screen appears. The user can then send a request to the support team. The user provides all the necessary information and can then open a ticket to our support to request help on a particular topic. He can also add a screenshot or a capture of the error message which will direct our support to a solution. It’s really great, it allows us to centralize all user requests, avoid phone calls and manage user responses in a rational and optimized way. We then collect all the information related to the problem that the user has indicated to us in the functional mailbox. This has been a lifesaver because we can get these tickets under control.
What evolution in terms of support requests volume have you seen since the implementation of Shortways?
Emmanuel Bunel: This Shortways solution must be brought to life, and to do so, you need reporting. We find in the Shortways reportings all user reactions on the different interfaces, the number of interactivities with the Shortways system on the Cegid Talentsoft application, and their difficulties:
What questions did they ask? Which step by steps did they run? How did they rate the help we created?…
Reporting allows us to analyze in detail all the questions asked to try to provide answers.
In particular, we can observe the questions which have not obtained any answer, which is super useful since when we analyze all this we have to address unanswered questions to try to identify the theme and be able to answer it: either by enriching the FAQ or online help, or by creating a step-by-step guide.
What feedback and advices would you like to share?
Emmanuel Bunel: I selected 4 elements.
First of all, like any tool, you must invest in human resources by allocating a resource for content design, especially in the preparatory phase and at startup. Shortways is no exception to the rule, you must immediately insert content into it. This is essential. I almost dedicated a full-time person, in the early days, to feed Shortways, create the step-by-steps, FAQs, notifications, analyze the reporting, etcetera.
The second lesson is to prepare a minimum base of aids. Even if you do not have created every step-by-step you need, a minimum base is necessary because in this type of tool, users judge quickly. If they do not have their answer immediately, they can quickly turn away from the solution and switch to making a phone call or sending an email to an identified support. You therefore need a minimum on the main screens before launching into production.
We also realized when analyzing the reporting that we should not create too long step-by-step steps because the user gives up along the way. Either because he already knows some of the answers, or because he prefers to click everywhere to go faster. The lesson is to create relatively short step-by-steps that can be linked together, which Shortways allows.
The last tip is to analyze the reporting periodically, to analyze user behavior and adapt the aids according to their practice. The Shortways team supported us well, they clarified this importance to us. In the first reporting session in the weeks following the launch of Bagheera, this was a revelation for us. At first we analyzed every week. From now on, we analyze Shortways data monthly to adapt our content.
The advice to remember is: analyze the reporting. This is valid for many software programs but with Shortways, it is particularly true.
Thank you Emmanuel for sharing this very interesting experience with us.
👇 Take a look at the IGPDE x Shortways customer case 👇
