Testimonials & Success Stories – Nordson Corporation

Summary

How did the Communications department increase and take their engagement and interaction levels of end users within the Nordson SharePoint user crowds far beyond their expectations with CardioLog Analytics Usage Reports? Find out with their compelling vision of increasing user adoption rates within their SharePoint portal with increased readership of their company newsletter.

Nordson’s communications department strategy to ultimately increase newsletter readership to yield overall higher SharePoint adoption rates transpired into a successful reality as a result of sophisticated metrics and analytics of visitor activity, usage, and tracking of portal navigation. The department’s knowledge of their newsletter readership, along with their navigation and visitor activity led them to situate articles, newsletter links, and accessibility to pump up their usage and engagement reach. The members of the communications department took concrete steps to optimize the portal design in correlation with the company’s IT department and SharePoint administration team.

Once readers were inside the portal and reading the newsletter, their level of interest in the portal skyrocketed and took them on a journey to find more resources they found compelling and wanted to access regularly.

Here’s How

The Challenge

The Nordson Corporation is a long standing leader in the field of industrial material precision dispensing, with state of the art equipment for applying industrial coatings, including liquid and powder coatings, adhesives, and sealants to numerous consumer and industrial products during manufacturing operations.

Operating in 30 plus countries internally, with the total count of employees pushing into the 5,000 person range, Nordson’s communications department plays a significant role in communicating with employees with their company newsletter to ensure they are engaged, feeling addressed and significant in each of their roles, aware of company events, and have access to various resources of information.

The brilliance of the company’s communication strategy is that their newsletter is like many enterprise organizations, strategically situated within their SharePoint portal. To clarify why this strategy is indeed clever for any organization looking to increase user engagement and usage levels within SharePoint, play out the following scenario in your head and imagine:

  1. Employee receives a quarterly newsletter link that can only be accessed via the company SharePoint portal.
  2. The employee logs on to the company SharePoint portal and accesses the newsletter. While sifting through the vast updates, financial reports, employee policy changes, they see their name potentially popping up in the employee of the month section. They find a spot that draws them into the newsletter, and suddenly an interest has been sparked far more than the employee initially expected.
  3. The employee suddenly realizes he’s on the site that has various other links, sub sites, collaborative resources, blogs, wikis, and much more to work with than just a newsletter.
  4. Guess what happens? Employees inevitably start surfing their SharePoint portals more and more, with genuine enthusiasm for their portal’s resources.

The Solution

The communications department at Nordson was able to ensure that the process listed above was implemented by tracking employee usage within their portal by utilizing CardioLog Analytics.

They were able to identify visitor activity and navigation metrics generated with CardioLog Analytics usage tracking reports. With this data, they defined their brilliant plan for optimizing their newsletter and its location within SharePoint, ultimately leading to a surge in user adoption rates, engagement levels, and collaborative efforts.

Jerry Bendobler is responsible for Nordson IT management and SharePoint administration and management. Bendobler indicated that the value of CardioLog Analytics is excellent, as it provides great results and does everything Nordson requires for the analysis of visitor activity. This activity is based upon SharePoint active directory and user profile visitor segments. Bendobler continued:

“One function of our intranet is that it acts as an information portal for employees, handled by our corporate communications department. They were challenged to find a tool that would increase readership and viewership of the employee section, with the objective to increase overall adoption rates. These rates have statistically increased since the use of CardioLog Analytics began.

We needed to look outside for a tool that would provide integration with SharePoint and provide the insight we needed to increase traffic and understand what kind of compelling information should be available in the portal. The tool is convenient and easy to use. The reports are easily accessible, innovative. They collect the data that provides us with the information we require.”

Bendobler presented the following case for Nordson’s need for CardioLog Analytics, with thorough explanations for the importance of its use as an asset to increase SharePoint adoption rates and engagement levels:

“Your tool (CardioLog Analytics) gives the corporate communications department a way to look at usage over time, and enables them with the power to determine what kinds of stories and information is most applicable to their portal

With CardioLog Analytics we were able to identify the most useful resources for users. We then saw a massive increase of interest in using the intranet because once they started using the SharePoint portal, they kept surfing and searching for more resources. Your tool, CardioLog Analytics, enabled us to be able to take the steps to find the information we needed to make accessible to users”

When asked as to why and how the company was able to save financial expenses and resouces, Nordson’s Jerry Bendobler indicated that the value for the investment and the ROI CardioLog Analytics generates is noteworthy. He added the following:

“We have now been using CardioLog Analytics for several years, generating monthly reports. We can undoubtedly support its quality, stability, accuracy, innovation, and ease of deployment with the usage experience we’ve had. Before we decided to use the intranet, we printed our newsletter which incurred printing expenses.

When we went digital and left the print publication option, we actually saved money on our newsletters’ issuance as it was generated within our intranet. Now, CardioLog Analytics allows us to produce it more easily, effectively, and interesting with the analytics reports.

We are also able to save money and resources on man power expenditure because our corporate communications department publishes all of their newsletters online now, requiring little or no IT assistance with the data acquired from the CardioLog Analytics reports.”

Innovation and CardioLog Analytics:

The Tool Progresses with the Advancement of SharePointJerry Bendobler noted that CardioLog Analytics does a great job keeping pace with Microsoft’s advancements.

“In every version release of CardioLog Analytics, you seem to include new and more interesting features. Nordson is definitely very satisfied and ranks CardioLog Analytics as a top grade SharePoint analytics solution.”

Bendobler indicated the following regarding Nordson’s choice to acquire and deploy CardioLog Analytics as their SharePoint analytics solution of choice:

“We did try other products and we found CardioLog Analytics to be the best suited to our needs, as its SharePoint custom design and excellent features are the best ones suited to our needs as well as any other enterprise organization.

The most useful aspect we really connected to with CardioLog Analytics was the deep integration with Sharepoint’s active directory and user profiles to ensure finding out portal user information was easy and accessible through the reports we generated with CardioLog Analytics.”

Bendobler stated that the visitor activity, navigation and search reports were essential to the overall optimization of Nordson’s SharePoint portal.

“If one of my colleagues asked what’s the best SharePoint analytics tool: CardioLog Analytics. With its deep integration with SharePoint and ease of use, this is a tool that’s not invasive and subtly does the work without over occupying the digital workspace yet, it still powerfully addresses our needs for analytics. Its reporting features are ideal for our needs and we would recommend them to other enterprise organizations.”

Nordson Uses Engagement Tools:

Nordson’s Newsletter and Voice of Customer Surveys: Getting Reader Feedback

When in doubt, ask, right? So what’s stopping an organization from ensuring that their users are acquiring the information, resources, and services they need from their SharePoint portals? For Nordson, nothing held them back as with CardioLog Analytics they were able to use the voice of customer aurveys to get concrete feedback from SharePoint users regarding the portal’s effectiveness and usability. The surveys, according to Jerry Bendobler, were “helpful to acquire user feedback and increase engagement levels.”

Bendobler then pointed out the following when asked about how voice of customer surveys were specifically used to increase company newsletter readership,

“We’ve used the voice of customer surveys on the newsletter news stories to get feedback on them. It’s not intrusive and allows us to evaluate how happy our readers and users are. We’ve found it to be subtle but an effective way of engaging of users.”

An increase of collaboration efforts is generally made a priority by organizations that have implemented SharePoint into their internal communications outlets. What can an analytics tool like CardioLog Analytics offer SharePoint admins to increase collaboration efforts? Bendobler states:

“With our SharePoint usage for project management and our collaboration numbers gaining momentum constantly, CardioLog Analytics can help us identify these statistics. We use CardioLog Analytics to find out which projects are the big hitters and which ones users need to look at and use more frequently. This is very helpful to us.”

Support Services and Addressing our User Needs:

Technical Support Simplified with CardioLog Analytics.

Whenever there’s a need for help, the CardioLog Analytics team has been quick on their toes to ensure that the team of experts and support staff are readily available. They address tickets and inquiries for assistance with expediency, efficiency and effort.

Jerry Bendobler was quick to offer his generous praise and insights on how diligently and promptly support concerns were addressed when Nordson had any questions or concerns with their use of CardioLog Analytics. The support staff were evaluated as patient, enthusiastic, and open-eared with all of the courteous and effective approaches one would hope for in addressing a solution that services an organization of approximately 5000 employees. The level of comprehension, advice, and reliability of the team of support staff has always sustained itself.

Bendobler and Nordson’s experience with the technical support team have been positive and reassuring, along with the overall experience with CardioLog Analytics.