How An HR Compliance Firm Established Trust And Loyalty Among Its Clients

Below you can follow along with a conversation we had with Jennifer Pawlak, director of I-9 services at Paragon Compliance.

Providing Sexual Harassment Prevention Training to Clients

Paragon Compliance is an HR-focused consulting firm, located in Pittsford, NY. After a new state law in 2018 mandated annual sexual harassment training for all employers, Paragon needed an online training platform to help their clients fulfill those training needs.

They needed a learning management system that could:

• Be customized to match their visual branding
• Connect to the main company website
• Track learner progress with easy-to-read stored reports
• Support both online instructor-led training and self-paced, on-demand training

Before Academy of Mine, Paragon hadn’t used an LMS before. However, the new state laws meant they needed to find one — and fast. Academy of Mine was one of the options they found, along with a few competitors. After doing 3-4 software demos, they felt we were their best choice because of our features, robustness, and customization options.

“We had some specific requirements and requests from clients for what they needed within a system. So when the chief technology officer was researching several different companies, Academy of Mine rose to the top of organizations that could work with us and could be very customizable for what our clients needed.” - Jennifer Pawlak.

Paragon Compliance's Online Training Platform Requirements

When speaking with Jennifer, Paragon’s Director of their I-9 and anti-harassment programs, she told us their clients vary in size, ranging from 250-15,000 employees. That wide range of clients is part of why customization and a comprehensive feature set were so important to them.

Here are a few specific features their existing clients requested:

• On-demand training where users can take courses on their own time and schedule
• Training groups using video-conference tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams
• User-friendly and accessible for both learners enrolled in courses and the companies administering the training courses

Paragon takes their courses very seriously, because they protect clients in the event of an audit. If a company is audited at the state or federal level and isn't meeting compliance requirements, they can face hefty fines and further investigation. Because of that, having easily accessible reports around user completion and individual user certificates was also vital.

Paragon’s LMS Goals

Paragon had two main goals they wanted to achieve by using an LMS:

1. Service their current customers with legally required sexual harassment training
2. Create online compliance programs that would attract new clients

“We were hoping to not only service our current clients, but also to attract new clients with a platform that was really easy to use and easy to set up a training program in.” - Jennifer P.

Customization is Critical

With the amount of clients they have and the range in company size, Paragon is dealing with a user base of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of employees and supervisors. Being able to adjust default settings in the training environment and custom build features to better fit the needs of customers was essential.

Listen to Jennifer describe her appreciation for being able to customize their LMS with Academy of Mine:

“Everything has been customizable, and it's been possible to develop new features, to add new features, things like that. Everything has been very easy to customize.” - Jennifer P.

Paragon also wanted to make sure their training system could be branded to match the visual aesthetics of the company using it by changing the default colors and text styles, attaching logos, etc.

Offering User-Friendly Training for Everyone

While creating and managing professional training programs, the user experience can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first is about the administrative experience, and the second is about the student experience.

On the administrative side of things, Paragon highlighted the following for exceptional ease of use:

• Adding new course administrators
• Adding new students
• Uploading new programs
• Adjust default system settings
• Customizing the visually branding of the platform
• Offering hands-off training and attracting new clients

During our conversation with Jennifer, in addition to talking about the team's love for our platform, she also praised our customer support and the smooth onboarding process. For example, when Paragon was first getting started with Academy of Mine, Jennifer submitted a large number of customer support tickets as she was getting familiar with the system. Afterward, she was impressed with how respectful, thorough, and quick our team was in answering her questions and providing solutions. We’re proud to say that many of our customers mention customer support when discussing their experiences.

Jennifer also said they get a lot of good feedback from clients about the students' experiences taking courses.

“On the student side, what I've heard from people is that it's very easy to navigate. It's clear, it's clean, it's not slow. It's easy to figure out, to see where things are within the system if you need to go find something outside of that training. It's easy for people to get in, to log in, all those things.” - Jennifer P.

Paragon also appreciated the fact that we could integrate a training portal login to their main website. This is key for students who can’t remember the exact URL to access their training courses.

Last but not least, Academy of Mine allows them to offer training courses to their audience while keeping them as removed from the process as possible. For example, if a learner needs a password reset, they go to their course administrator instead of a Paragon employee.

Helping Paragon Train Large Clients

Initially, Paragon partnered with us to help their clients offer state-mandated sexual harassment training to their employees. Now, as the company and its training needs have evolved, we're helping them reach larger audiences in need of training services.

Listen to Jennifer talk about being able to streamline training with Academy of Mine:

Winning Client Trust and Loyalty with an LMS

For Paragon, their top priority isn't significant bottom-line growth or selling more courses every month. Instead, their focus is helping clients maintain compliance. Paragon can best serve their clients after earning their trust and loyalty — and having a user-friendly and branded online training platform has helped them do that.

“We are a very high-touch boutique services organization. We like to be able to offer our clients the most that we can. Winning for us is being able to do that and being able to win their loyalty and to win their trust.” - Jennifer P.

Challenges Met and Moving Forward

Paragon Compliance successfully addressed the challenges of meeting New York state's sexual harassment prevention training regulations. By partnering with Academy of Mine, they were able to attract new clients and help their existing clients maintain compliance. The customizable learning management system offered by Academy of Mine allowed them to meet specific client requirements and provide a user-friendly experience for both administrators and learners. And of course, our reliable customer support has helped Paragon establish trust and loyalty among its clients while achieving their goal of offering world-class compliance solutions.

If you need help improving your compliance training, schedule a call with our team to discuss how we can help.