FEATURE: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
organisational culture moves to a less
hierarchical model, social collaboration
becomes increasingly important.
SumTotal Social enables customers to
build communities, post blogs, start and
respond to discussions, share files and
plug-in standard styles into workflows.
SumTotal continues to support a Bring
Your Own Social (BYOS) approach for
organisations to integrate with market-
leading social platforms; an integration
with Yammer was announced last year
and more integrations are planned and
in development with popular social
platforms
• Exciting mobile enhancements:
SumTotal is committed to a mobile-first
design philosophy and the new Learner
Experience and Social Platform are
smartphone-optimised and included
in the SumTotal 18.2 Mobile App. In
addition to a UI designed for the phone
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grow revenue by targeting your customer
base to announce new offerings and
upsell new learning. This release offers
customers more flexibility than ever in
how they package and bundle content to
create compelling learning bundles and
channels. The new SumTotal Extended
Enterprise capability will also offer
greater flexibility in payment options
by supporting a virtual currency in the
form of tokens, making it much easier to
support a global audience
• Enhanced Skillsoft content experience:
The learner experience in this release is
further optimised for Skillsoft content
with Percipio Content Services. Using rich
APIs, Percipio Content Services will enable
SumTotal customers to access channel
curation, multiple modalities, courses,
videos and books to show through in
a best-in-class manner. In addition, it
provides dynamic content curation,
THE NEW USER EXPERIENCE IS
MODELLED AFTER EXHAUSTIVE
RESEARCH TO DELIVER CONSUMER-LED
EXPERIENCES LEARNERS HAVE COME
TO EXPECT IN ALL ASPECTS OF THEIR
DAILY LIVES.
form factor to increase employee
engagement and productivity, SumTotal
also leverages native mobile device
capabilities, including allowing users
to share pictures and videos from
their phones directly to their social
communities. The SumTotal Mobile
App is available for Apple, Android and
Microsoft, including Surface and Windows
10 laptops
• Extended enterprise marketing tools:
SumTotal Extended Enterprise gives
customers control over the training they
offer to external audiences and delivers
flexibility in cost, currency, duration,
cancellation methods, and policies and
bundles. This release extends the reach of
your LMS with a rich set of new Extended
Enterprise marketing tools, including
email marketing campaign support to
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INTELLIGENTCIO
competency alignment and value-
based reporting. This experience is only
available for Skillsoft content
• Redesigned Rule Manager: This release
delivers a completely redesigned and
updated Rule Manager in SumTotal
Workforce Management. The Rule
Manager is the engine that drives
customers’ configured business rules for
accurate processing of employees’ time
and attendance, scheduling and absence
management. The new Rule Manager
allows for drag-and-drop prioritisation and
enhanced sequencing of rules and rulesets.
This enhancement is the first delivery of
a multi-release update of the powerful
administrative configuration module of
SumTotal Workforce Management and will
allow increased customer self-service and
faster deployments
“SumTotal continues to innovate in the HCM
space. It’s new learner experience will enable
enhanced engagement that should drive
increased usage,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and
Lead Analyst at Aragon Research.
We spoke to Liam Butler, Area Vice President
at SumTotal, to gain a deeper insight into
how the Suite works and the purpose behind
its design.
Has the consumer-led design
of the Suite made it more
appealing to learners? How
did your research inform this
design change?
The consumerisation of business
applications is increasingly becoming the
norm; in fact, it’s expected. The reality
is that learners are consumers and they
have a high expectation of what ‘good’
looks and feels like. We are competing for
people’s attention against the backdrop
of challenging work schedules, the need to
access information on the go and crucially
the expectation that an application should
be as good, if not better, than the apps
they choose to use outside of work.
SumTotal focuses on the User Experience
(UX) with a consumer-led design philosophy.
When we rebuilt the user experience from
the ground-up several years ago, we focused
on the experience that learners receive from
the most popular consumer apps.
We’ve utilised the Bootstrap Front-End
framework to help build out the navigation
and user journey. It was originally created by
Twitter and is the framework used by many
of the world’s leading commercial websites
and apps. The reality is that a learner is
already subconsciously familiar with how to
navigate around our solution before they’ve
even used our software.
Should all enterprise technology
be designed this way, with the
consumer in mind?
Yes, the consumer should be at the
centre of what we do. The old days of
technology are just that; they’re history.
It’s incomprehensible that you’d ever need
an instruction manual to use a website; it’s
no different to using a piece of software in
that it should be intuitive and logical to use.
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