The platform has some big improvement to kick off the month of October. Coaches and Administrators are going to benefit from some new tools and workflows throughout the platform.
Forms have taken huge turn to be able to offer intake functionality and integrate directly with engagements. There are new onboarding workflows involved in the intake flow, but also in new tools for bulk import. Coach pools are also graduating to a new level with synchronization that can happen across engagements. And lastly on-demand coachees are going to love the flexibility in being able to cancel and re-use engagements.
In This Release:
Intake Form to Engagement Workflow
Forms have been a great way to collect data on Coaching.com. There are a few different ways that many organizations are using Forms, and that includes collecting feedback from prospective clients as an early onboarding flow, and also throughout the engagement to collect feedback, and setup the ability for ROI measurement and calculation.
In this release there are two key enhancements to Forms. First, the capability for a more advanced intake flow is now here. The Forms now connect seamlessly with the creation of engagements. And, the form data can be included within the engagement with a single click. Also, the filter on forms has been expanded and improved. This is helpful in finding and filtering quickly.
Intake Form Workflow
Forms can be sent to anyone inside or outside of the platform. An intake form can be one of the first steps in a client interaction and is helpful in getting feedback that can help with the rest of the onboarding steps. Feedback from the client could impact either the program they become a part of, or even influence the coaches that could be a part of their coach matching. Either way, Forms now have a new option to allow administrators to create an engagement directly from the Form interface. As the form results come in, Administrators can make decision and quickly launch engagements with a few clicks.
Now within Form responses there are new options:
If the recipient of the form is not on the platform yet, they can be added using the link "Add as a coach or coachee". Once selected, it will launch a wizard that will allow you to set the user up as an Internal Coachee, External Client, Client Sponsored Coachee, Internal Coach, Independent Coach, or Vendor Sponsored Coach. The dialog below shows the first step, and then it guides through the rest of the options depending on what is chosen.
After the form recipient is setup within the account, then the option to create an engagement becomes activated with the "Add to New Engagement" button:
This workflow is smart, and it knows if the individual is setup as a coachee or coach. But it also introduces something very powerful that did not exist before. Now the form results can be included direction with the engagement with the click of a button. The step in the engagement wizard below shows the option for a coachee's form. There is an option to "Yes, Include the Form". This will pre-pend the form results to the engagement program items and share the form with the coachee and the coach.
The "No, do not include the form" option, will simply leave the form results in the Forms Library and allow for the engagement to get started without the inclusion.
Form Filter Enhancements
The forms filter is now more powerful. The form filter can be found by clicking on the Filter option shown below:
The Form Filter dialog is new, and now offers 3 different filter or search fields. The new filter capabilities include:
Respondent Name: Name of the person who filled out the form
Respondent Email Address: Email address of the person who filled out the form
Submitted Date Range: Start and End date range for the submission date.
The new filter dialog is shown below:
Bulk Import for Client Coachees
Bulk import tools have existed for employees, clients, vendors, and engagements.....but not for coachees of client companies. This has created a pretty large gap for coaching providers who want to get client company accounts up and running quickly. As of today the barriers for getting client coachee accounts through bulk operations have been resolved.
The Bulk Import for Client Coachees tool is now available on the platform to create and invite client coachees. This tool can also be helpful for creating internal records for tracking purposes as well. Either way, the upload format is simple and so is the process.
Now account administrators will have a new option on their client pages, "Upload CSV File":
The "Upload CSV File" starts a new workflow that is similar to the bulk import for employees, and even clients. A dialog will be presented that allows for downloading of a CSV template file.
The CSV comes with some example data. The descriptions of the columns can be found below:
CSV Columns:
client: Name of the client company.
first_name: First name of the coachee.
last_name: Last name of the coachee.
email: Email of the coachee.
phone: Telephone number of the coachee.
employee_title: Career title of the employee.
employee_level: Leader level of the employee. This must match with existing leader levels in the system.
send_invite: Optional field to designate if an invitation should be sent. 1 signifies yes, while 0 signifies no.
For enterprise customers, there are 3 additional fields:
company_location: Location of the coachee.
department: Department of the coachee. This must match an existing department.
sub_department: Sub-department of the coachee. This much match an existing sub-department.
Prior to uploading there is an initial validation:
And after the upload has completed a response will indicate if the upload was a success:
There may be some processing time based on the size of the upload. But generally, the import will complete within seconds.
Coach Pool Synchronize
Coach matching and on-demand engagements can be launched using coach pools. A problem has existed in that when the originating pool(s) were edited, those changes to the pool would not be reflected in the engagements that were already using the pool. To add or remove a coach required going to each engagement to make the changes.
With this release, changes to a coach pool will be synchronized to engagements that are using that pool. Coach additions or removals will be propagated to the engagements.
When a Coach is Removed from a Coach Pool
There are some special considerations for when a coach is removed from a coach pool. That coach may already be interacting with coachees via interviews, or may have scheduled sessions in on-demand engagements.
When a coach is removed from a pool:
Any interviews that they had scheduled, due to being a part of this pool, will be cancelled.
Cancellation notifications will be sent to the coach and coachee.
The coach will be removed from the coach pool and will no longer be visible to the coachee
There is a new banner on Coach Pool page that provides this information as well:
On-Demand Coach Pool Additions
On-Demand engagements have been missing the ability to add additional coaches or pools to the engagement to provide more options for the coachees. Unlike coach pool synchronize described above, this allows for fine-grained control to add a coach to a specific engagement.
Just like in 1:1 engagements, or within Coach Matching engagements, there is a new "ADD COACHES" button available on the Coaches page of the on-demand engagement:
Selecting this button will present a dialog that allows for the administrator to add one or more coaches, or one or more coach pools to the coaches list.
Client-Side Cancel Session for On-Demand Engagements
On-demand engagements are unique in that coachees can choose a different coach for each session (or work with the same coaches if they choose). Since the relationship between a coachee and a coach can be quite different than in a 1:1 engagement, the requirements around cancelling a session are slightly different as well.
If a coachee has a session booked with a coach, and needs to cancel the session, there is a way now to do that. As long as the timing is before the cancellation window of the coach, the coachee is offered a cancel button right within the session interface.
After selecting the Cancel option, the coachee will see the dialog below to get them a little bit more details around this action:
The session will be recycled and put back in the queue for the coachee to use when the demand is needed.