Kent County Success Story

The Challenge

IT managers aren’t the only ones who benefit from software adoption tools such as BrainStorm QuickHelp Video Training. Anything that helps an internal help desk reduce the number of calls while also increasing user knowledge is a welcome improvement to anyone concerned with business efficiency. But that’s not to say employees don’t find equal value in these tools. QuickHelp is not only a valuable extension of a firm’s IT and training departments. It’s also a simple way for users to speed up the software-adoption process on their own time without sacrificing productivity on a daily basis.

Julie Yarch, a clerk at the Kent County Juvenile Detention Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., has become a happy QuickHelp user ever since her organization switched from Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2013. With such a big leap in software versions, Yarch said she and her colleagues experienced a major learning curve when it came to finding features they were used to recognizing in the older programs. On top of that, the Juvenile Detention Center also transitioned to Microsoft Outlook 2013 from another email client that had a completely different look and feel.

“‘Where do I find this?’ - that was my major question,” Yarch explained. “Those are the kinds of things I ran into.”

She added that even the more experienced users found themselves looking at a completely different and unfamiliar product. Her organization offered a round of formal, in-person training - but it just so happened that Yarch was out of town during those initial sessions. She needed a reliable way to get up to speed without falling into a productivity trap of searching for answers on the Internet.

“Our workers are working directly with juvenile detention kids, so they aren’t able to sit on a computer for a long period of time and learn something,” Yarch explained. “If they have a problem, typically they will ask me or ask a co-worker.”

The BrainStorm Solution

QuickHelp quickly proved to be a valuable alternative. Most companies typically only provide a limited number of in-person training programs during the software-adoption process. This means it’s easy to create gaps, especially when not everyone is able to attend at the same time. Users can quickly forget the information presented in these sessions as well. QuickHelp made it possible for Yarch and many of her colleagues to hit the ground running.

“What I couldn’t find in the programs, I was able to look up without calling anyone,” Yarch explained. “I’m the type of person who will want to do something most users don’t need to do (on a regular basis). With QuickHelp, I was able to get the basics of where I was struggling with the new software.”

The Results

Yarch has seen many technologies come and go in her years at the Kent County Juvenile Detention Center. However, the transition has never been smoother since embracing the benefits of QuickHelp.

“I like the fact that you can most ably find the subject you’re looking for and learn basic guidelines on how to do something,” she said. “It’s there, you can hear it, you can see it. That’s quite helpful.”

Yarch also emphasized the fact that searching for answers on the Web just isn’t ideal. Not only can it take a significant amount of time out of the workday, but users are at the mercy of the Internet’s many security issues. She said QuickHelp keeps employees in a safe internal system for getting answers to their software questions.

“Clicking around the Web is dangerous,” she said. “It [QuickHelp] keeps us in a good environment to work in.”

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