I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Christopher Johnson (CJ), Technology Adoption Manager at United Talent Agency (UTA). No surprise based on CJ’s role, UTA’s primary use case with Productiv is application adoption and enablement. It’s been really exciting to build our partnership and see a customer dive right in to our advanced engagement features and drive tangible efficiency gains.
UTA has a large staff of agents who develop strong relationships with talent, actors, musicians, performers, entailing a lot of in-person interaction. UTA recently refreshed their enterprise application stack with future-of- work applications like Slack, Box, Zoom, betting on these platforms to drive efficiency. And with COVID-19 sending everyone to shelter-in-place this spring, excellent communication and collaboration platforms went from important to absolutely business critical. Here’s a summary of a recent look-back conversation with CJ:
Why was Productiv purchased?
We were looking for a platform that enables a deep dive on our biggest applications. Having recently adopted Slack, Box, and Zoom, we’re very curious to track how these tools are being used. One thing we struggled with prior was getting metrics and finding patterns, for just our biggest applications this requires 3 different dashboards to review and pull data. I was spending a lot of time aggregating data for presentation to executives and the broader team. We had a pretty simple question that proved to be very time consuming to answer, across our 1000+ person company, are there teams or individuals with less tool/feature utilization than average?
What is your role at UTA?
I’m the Tech Adoption Manager at UTA, my team is responsible for training and enablement of business applications. We’re a new function at UTA, created to help gain enterprise value from UTA’s investment in modern applications and transition an agent workforce to new tools.
How is Productiv being used?
Productiv allows us to understand and drive efficiency – giving us confidence that employees are adopting core tools and efficiently using their time, helping us answer questions like How do we make our employees 1% more effective? How do we measure efficiency (adoption of tools) and effectiveness (outcomes)?
Now we are correlating efficiency with outcomes – replicating the set of activities that our most effective employees do across our employee base. With Productiv, my team saves 10s of hours every week, providing actionable trends across teams and employee segments to drive C-level decisions.
What were you using before Productiv
Spreadsheets! Before Productiv, I would personally spend 7-8 hours a week pulling data and analysis on tool adoption to present to the CIO and IT team. Now, it’s instantaneous! There are always more questions than we can answer, and with Productiv we can easily dive into details in real-time to view, and segment the data vs having to manually and inefficiently rework spreadsheets.
What insights have emerged from Productiv?
With shelter-in-place our agents had to shift from field sales to WFH overnight, we saw huge adoption of Zoom and video sharing, however screensharing was not moving. Turns out that most people were still sending documents as attachments or printing out, we adjusted our training curriculum and saw a large impact. Productiv helped identify a Zoom knowledge gap and allowed us to monitor the effectiveness of our training program. We now monitor every training program’s success with Productiv.
Additionally, Box is our main document platform, however, looking beyond SSO unique login data to engagement we noticed most people were viewing and sharing documents but not doing much creation or editing – so information consumption and not generation.
We thought, “What’s going on?” Comparing G Suite to Box we noticed the opposite, people were going outside of Box for information generation. Old workflows and habits were derailing full adoption of Box. This is something subtle with a big impact and with Productiv, we discovered it quickly.