Microsoft Academy Live is one of Microsoft’s most effective tools for delivering technical content presented by subject matter expert to its partners and employees. Consisting of both live webcasts and on-demand delivery (Academy Mobile), the group delivers approximately 2,000 live webcasts a year with a total of 350,000 views. When you include both live webcast and on-demand viewing, the program serves upwards of 62,000 unique users in any given year.

The Academy Live team asked Worktank to pilot a program to help them increase capacity by moving from a single webcast production vendor to a multi-vendor solution. Along with capacity, the Academy Live team also wanted to increase their operational efficiency by lowering both the time and cost associated with producing webcasts.

Worktank proceeded to conduct a deep, end-to-end review of Academy Live’s event production in order to devise a number of efficiency recommendations for the group.

By using our team’s existing knowledge, a carefully designed internal process, and a powerful set of tools, we were able to help our client quickly scale up their existing webcast operations and increase ROI. Our solution is plug-and-play and quick to implement.

Specific improvements we bring to any webcast operation include the following:

• Tools. Implementing a proprietary workflow system reduces errors and the time/cost associated with hosting events.
• Messaging. Worktank can work with you to create and/or update customer-facing communication including emails, PowerPoint templates, and user guides.
• Registration. Our event registration engine allows us to manage the webcast process from beginning to end. We can work with you to create a branded registration site, automating all attendee interactions and communications for greater efficiency and a uniformly positive customer experience.
  • Customer satisfaction. By emphasizing features within webcast platforms like webcam integration, customer polling, and interactive white boards, we’re able to coach presenters to improve the interactivity of their presentations which leads to higher customer satisfaction scores.
  • Reporting. Our reporting tools compile program-wide data and produced robust, formatted reports for improved post-event analysis. Our process reduces the time to create reports for each event and vastly improves their readability and utility.

By partnering with Worktank, Microsoft Academy Live was able to achieve dramatic gains in their ability to deliver services in an efficient manner, reducing their per-webcast costs by 66 percent.

Microsoft Academy Live also saw significant growth both in the number of events they could produce and in the number of customers they could serve. In fact, they achieved a year-over-year increase of 240% in the volume of events delivered. Customer satisfaction was also very high, with customers rating their events a 4.97 out of 5.00.

Worktank not only manages over 50% of the overall program volume for Microsoft Academy Live, but we’ve substantially increased their efficiency and reduced errors through the use of our robust tool set and the copious knowledge and experience of our event producers.