Delivering e-training and informational resources to 750,000

Overview

ESI Employee Assistance Group, one of the 20 largest employee assistance service providers in the United States, services over 1,500 businesses and approximately 750,000 employees nationwide. They offer counseling services, literature, and testing to help build better work environments across America. The company’s aggressive growth and web-centric business strategy necessitated the creation of a portal website with hundreds of informational pages, web-based tools, and e-learning and course certification systems.

Problem

The first words regarding the website project from Jim Walter, ESI’s CEO, cut to the heart of the problem: "Let's not even talk about the old website." It was 2001. Jim Walter had recently acquired the small, regional company and had aggressive plans. He and his management wanted to gain market share, redefine the industry by providing a unique set of services, and alter the business model to leverage the web to drive better service in a timely fashion while cutting costs. Their existing site was outdated and not in line with current branding initiatives. With poor navigability and limited content, the site was a poor marketing medium for prospective clients and an even poorer resource for their current ones. Simultaneously, from a business perspective, routine employee training sessions required staff people to be flown to client sites. The costs associated with this activity were large. There were other routine client interfacing costs as well – providing service usage reports and making timely information available across the country.

Solution

Lance Technologies worked with ESI to design a new website that was in line with ESI’s new branding initiatives. The website consisted of a marketing section and a client portal that was user-friendly and delivered a tremendous amount of organized information to all employees of ESI’s clients.

As ESI grew from a small regional firm to become one of the largest in the industry, the website grew alongside elegantly – with ever-increasing resource pages. A web-based e-training module was developed by Lance Technologies to allow ESI to provide certain certification courses online. This functionality not only delivered better customer service by providing on-demand learning, it also greatly diminished the need for ESI employees to travel across the country teaching these courses.

The client portal developed by Lance Technologies was very scalable, allowing the website to grow exponentially in the number of pages. This was primarily due to the implementation of a content management system that allowed ESI to flexibly manage information on their website and keep content fresh. The content management system also seamlessly integrates with third-party information sites to provide vast amounts of resources in a completely branded environment.

To address client access and reporting issues, the content management system developed by Lance Technologies consisted of a robust user management system allowing ESI personnel to maintain their client and user access accounts. All user activity is tracked and automatically tabulated into real-time reports that can be accessed by a client’s Human Resources personnel.