Vanasse Hangen Brustlin

Founded in 1978, VHB is a multidisciplinary American civil engineering consulting and design firm headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts with offices throughout the country. The company, which has approximately 1,600 employees, mainly focuses on transportation and land development.

As VHB’s CRM (customer relationship management) and marketing analytics manager, Carissa Burlakos was the project manager and solutions architect for the creation, build-out and implementation of VHB’s integrated CRM platform (Microsoft Dynamics 365), branded as “Compass.”

Burlakos, who began working at VHB in April 2018, was responsible for ensuring that Compass enabled users to manage and maintain client relationships, track engagements and opportunities and provide marketing, business development and visibility tools to deliver actionable data.

Since VHB’s new CRM system was going to completely change the way the organization operated on a day-to-day basis, it was also going to significantly change the way employees worked, Burlakos said.

Because VHB classified its CRM system as a one-stop shop, the company needed to identify the right training solution—one that was going to be easy to use, accessible and maintainable. The organization wanted a tool that was going to allow the 1,400 users of the system to access training without leaving the CRM application.

“We really wanted to reduce any frustration that the user was going to have, so we also needed a tool that made it obvious to users as to how to access the support,” Burlakos said. “We didn’t want them to have to open separate files; we wanted it in their face.”

Although Burlakos and her team evaluated other contextual help platforms, including Adobe RoboHelp, they just didn’t meet VHB’s requirements.

“We did a lot of searches and research on what people do [for training],” she said. “I spoke to a few people within the same industry CRM system to see how they incorporated training materials. And we really weren’t finding what we needed until VisualSP was used in our internal system.”

At the time, the company was using VisualSP with its internal knowledge hub and intranet – VHB Central. When VHB updated this tool, it realized how easy VisualSP was to use to train employees on its updated internal system and decided to look into implementing the VisualSP platform to train users on its Dynamics 365-based CRM application.

“The fact that VisualSP has the help menu item directly in the platform itself has been huge for us and definitely what we were looking for in a solution,” Burlakos said.

When it came to ramping up users on VisualSP, Burlakos’ project management team developed a launch video to explain how to use the help platform within its CRM system.

“And that was really all the training we did,” she said. “I think [VisualSP] spoke for itself. It’s very easy to use, which is what we were looking for in our requirements in the very beginning.”

Implementing VisualSP for its CRM system has transformed the way the team operates as users aren’t asking the same questions repeatedly, including where to find the information they need to complete their tasks, Burlakos said.

“We rarely get support questions anymore,” she said, “And I believe having the information accessible to people [at the moment of need] has been a significant help. Prior to using VisualSP, even though people knew the answers, we were still receiving the same questions all the time. I think just having the information right at a moment’s glance for them has helped with the support burden.”

Initially, VHB just wanted to use VisualSP to train users on its CRM system and as such was mainly using banner announcements across the top of a page as well as walkthroughs. But after using the CRM system for a while, Burlakos and her team realized that they could use VisualSP’s inline help tool to draw users’ attention to new features at the relevant times in their workflows.

“Prior to using the tool . . . we as the product manager found we were repeating the same things over and over,” she said. “Now, we’ve also used the tool to help drive workflows in Dynamics. And I believe that this is one of the best features of the in-context tool.”

Burlakos particularly likes that VisualSP is customizable, so the team can configure the platform to match VHB’s logos or color palette.

“It has definitely helped with the user interface being more streamlined, which then in turn supports the user experience,” she said.

As for the users of VHB’s CRM system, well, they have reacted positively to the VisualSP platform, according to Burlakos.

“They loved it,” she said. “They loved the fact that it was just right there in your face and they didn’t really have to do anything. They didn’t have to go searching for the information on the internet. And they’re able to close out of it if they already know the information. Using VisualSP has been very positive. And in fact, [the company] is trying to use it in other applications because they saw how successful it was in Dynamics.”

Burlakos also appreciates the top-notch support and services VisualSP offers its customers.

“I’ve worked with several vendors for different applications and different services and I would say that hands down VisualSP’s service and support is phenomenal,” she said. “If I have questions, you have always gotten back to me right away. You definitely give us support that we need and you have made VisualSP successful because of it.”

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