Heartland Dental Optimizes Training Programs with Explorance Metrics That Matter

Challenge: Overcoming Training Inefficiencies in a Diverse Workforce 

A broad view of your L&D program is beneficial, but is it hiding specific problems? Heartland Dental has a robust L&D program to service its 1,700 locations. With so many employees, deploying and monitoring various training courses can be challenging. 

Having managed the L&D program and instructional designers for the past seven years, Scott Esker understood his department’s larger goals well. However, certain classes were not well-received, and these results were hidden in the broader data. 

Without adequate comparison data on hand, assessing individual class effectiveness quickly becomes complicated. Additionally, insights can veer into subjective territory without the means to accurately evaluate what is working and what isn’t. 

When Scott heard of Explorance Metrics that Matter (MTM)’s benchmarking insights based on 1.5 billion data points, he knew it would be the solution to his measurement efforts.  

Solution: Data-Driven Course Customization with MTM 

One of Heartland Dental’s flagship courses involves doctors and administrators in the same cohort. While it had satisfactory results on a broader scale, MTM allowed them to dig further into the data, discovering that the feedback from participants was split: one group really enjoyed the course, while the other didn’t see the value.  

By giving the organization the tools to go beyond the one aggregated satisfaction metric, MTM allowed Scott’s team to realize that it wasn’t serving half of its attendees correctly. When benchmarked against other similar courses, it became even more obvious that the course wasn’t working. 

“Those trends basically showed us one group was saying great things and one group wasn’t saying such great things. By looking at those two different subsets, we were really able to determine that we needed to split this course out. We need to put these two audiences and have two separate courses rather than one,” Esker said. 

Ultimately, the solution was to split the course in two, offering personalized learning for each group. The two courses allowed for more targeted content that better addressed doctors’ and administrators’ unique needs and preferences, which significantly improving engagement and satisfaction. 

“We were trying to put a square peg in a round hole by having both audiences together, but by looking at MTM data, we were able to determine two separate courses. After we implemented that, it made an extraordinary difference. We were able to tailor the course to the two different audiences, and it greatly impacted retention and many other things because they liked it so much more.” 

MTM also enabled Heartland Dental to build a detailed dashboard for each of its courses. Instead of having to do massive data exports to see the trends, they could now have a dashboard that gave deep dives into each course’s success. 

Results: Enhanced Engagement and Continuous Improvement through Benchmarking 

MTM has become a powerful tool for Heartland Dental’s L&D team, which has developed a deep partnership with the Explorance customer success team. Beyond advising them on how to set up MTM, their point of contact can share critical insights gathered from similar use cases.  

“We really enjoy the CSM relationship, the customer success manager relationship. One thing we like about them that is they challenge us.” he explained “They’re not there just to be cheerleaders. They ask some hard questions. The CSM also have the perspective of lots of different clients, and they can see what’s going on in other organizations as well, and really help you navigate some of your own metrics” 

Scott’s most important recommendation is to set up a dashboard that includes a breakdown of the ILT, VILT, self-paced, web-based, what the scores are, and net promoter scores(NPS). This metrics display gives organizations a quick performance overview while enabling deeper dives when needed.  

“One of the initiatives that we’re really looking forward to at MTM is MLY […] We have lots of feedback, which means we have lots of data. But just like anyone else, we don’t have all the time in the world. So if we can leverage an AI tool like MLY to do some of that legwork for us and kind of let that come to the top, tell us here are the insights that we can take.” 

MTM is excellent for data analysis, but it also creates even more data. Since most course evaluation feedback is qualitative, Heartland Dental is looking to integrate AI tools such as Explorance’s MLY to process data more easily.   

Once this technology is integrated into their system, the number of insights they’ll be able to gain down the road is limitless.