In early 2018, we took a look at our Customer Success efforts and asked ourselves two important questions:
- How can we help our athletics departments reach their strategic goals?
- How can we help our customers work more efficiently with their student-athletes?
During our planning, I remembered my dear former colleague Erica Cenci (now Director of Student-Athlete Development at the University of Washington) telling me, “You know Christian, people still like hard-copies.”
Erica made a great point. We decided that if we could combine Game Plan best practices, customer feedback, and our own lessons learned into a book, it would be a valuable resource for all student-athlete development professionals in planning for a successful year with Game Plan.
Our 2018-2019 Customer Success Guidebook is now 90 days old and we could not be more excited about the feedback we have received from our athletic department partners and want to share some of our initial experiences with you.
The Building Process
Building the Customer Success Guidebook was a tedious process that encouraged us to compile best practices from all of our Athletic Department customers. Our Customer Success team works with AD staff members on a daily basis and the feedback and suggestions compiled over the last years was the driving force behind the creation of this book.
Through our experiences, we were seeing that those athletics departments with a clear plan in place for the entire academic year were consistently outperforming those who took a week-to-week or month-to-month approach.
To help schools take a more comprehensive approach to their athlete development, we created a plan for the 2018-2019 year that combined eLearning, Mentorship and Career for all student-athletes while allowing for flexibility to incorporate in-person events and other programming that is unique to each program.
As programming occurs, Game Plan prides itself on the ability to provide key performance indicators and data to help track participation, engagement and outcomes. Our KPI sections were designed to provide a baseline measurement of the impact of Game Plan on each campus. Measurements such as frequency of athlete logins, number of activities completed, number of Job views and applications, and number of mentor-mentee connections in the platform are easy to track and provide strong indications on Game Plan’s impact and growth within an athletics department
In July we sent each customer a copy of the guidebook and our plans are to send an updated book for every academic year.
Customer Feedback
The positive feedback on the guidebook has been overwhelming. We have had numerous customers reach out with examples of how they plan to use the book, and how they have seen tangible benefits for their athletics department.
Comments such as Loree McCary’s (SWA at Stephen F. Austin) “I know I’ll use it as a reference often.” and many similar ones, proved to us that the effort poured into the guidebook was well worth it. Most importantly, we noticed that customers actively using the book have seen a large uptick in activity, participation and efficiency. Customizing the book to your specific needs on your campus has been a best practice, and will yield great overall results.
These efforts have lead to a 4x growth in eLearning and job application activity in the Game Plan platform during the Fall semester. Our next Customer Success blog post will feature more information on the platform growth and ways your athletics department can grow usage as well.
2019/2020
Our Customer Success Team is dedicated to helping you get the most out of Game Plan and we hope the Customer Success Guidebook has done it’s part in this process. If you would like to schedule a time to talk through your Spring plans please reach out to us at any time.
As we are gearing up to create our 2019/2020 Customer Success Guidebook we would also love to hear your feedback and suggestions. If there are aspects of the book that you think could be improved, or if there are features that you think would be beneficial to add for all customers please let us know, we would love to hear your feedback.
Our Customers
A book like this would not be possible without our amazing customers. The amount of knowledge we gain from our athletics department partners cannot be overstated. Our customers create positive change for the student-athletes on their campuses every day and we are proud to be a small part of this process.
