What to Expect From Us (How Buying Works)

Today, a lot of tech companies call their internal process the “customer journey”—that’s a fancy name for all of the hoops you have to jump through before you can actually use the product(s) you purchase.

If you think you want to work with us, this is a lengthy yet accurate overview of what you can expect...

First Interaction: A Phone Call or Live Chat

Either you called us or we called you, or we had a brief chat conversation on the website. The most common reasons why you may reach out first are:

• You saw an advertisement and clicked
• You were searching for something related to safety and compliance and found us

When we call you, the reason is simple—you have responsibility for occupational health and safety or compliance. We are a technology company that offers quality safety and compliance products. So we are calling to see if you might be interested in (a) delivering better safety training to your employees, (b) introducing efficient compliance technology, (c) affordable First Aid & CPR Certification, or (d) all of the above. By working with us, our customers typically save money, save time, improve training quality, and generally get what they need while having a great experience.

If you are interested, we schedule a meeting to get into more detail about matching up your needs and our products.

Also, sometimes you ask us to call you—we’re happy to oblige.

Meetings

We meet with hundreds of safety professionals each month. We also meet with small business owners, executives, human resource managers, and training coordinators. And because we are a national provider, we meet 95% of our customers online, with video conferencing software. There are two reasons why we do this: (1) you get to see our face and (2) it allows us to show you our products and how they work in real-time.

We’d rather take a show-not-tell approach.

The attitude we take to meetings is inquisitive by nature—asking questions helps us determine how best to serve you. This also helps us quickly determine if we cannot meet your needs.

Questions you may be asked:

• What safety issue keeps you up at night?
• What would an ideal solution to your problem look like to you?
• What are you currently doing for training?
• Do you have a Learning Management System (LMS)?
• How soon would you want to move forward?
• Do you manage Safety Data Sheets (SDS)? If so, how many sheets?
• Do you manage CPR & First Aid certification? If so, how many folks need this training?
• Does your organization have a budget for occupational safety and health?
• What’s your purchase process look like and what is your role?
• Do you need help explaining the need for safety investment to other stakeholders?
• Would you like to try our products and share them with others in your organization?
• How many employees do you have?
• What’s your confidence level for OSHA compliance for training requirements?

After we schedule a meeting, we let you know exactly whom you’ll be meeting with and what we’re planning to cover, so there are no surprises. We want to start from the same page because we respect your time. Our Account Executives are experienced with our products, your industry, and many of the professional challenges of safety and compliance. Individually, they’ve each met with someone standing in your shoes, many times before, and are prepared to answer most of your questions about product integration, customer support, purchasing, etc.

Expect to be challenged, kindly, in several ways; this is meant to deepen our understanding of your organization, your role, and problems we can solve together.

Next Steps

If we agree to move forward together—that continuing the conversation makes sense for both parties—you may leave a meeting with a few task assignments. This may involve communicating with other decision-makers in your organization, sharing a product experience with your team at the next safety meeting, clarifying your budget and purchase process, getting approval, or finding out the answer to one of our questions.

For us, the same is true. If you had a question we were unable to answer, we’ll go get you the most accurate answer. If there are other products you have interest in, we will make arrangements. If you’d like us to present to a larger audience, we’ll get that on the calendar.

Typically, we establish a timeline together to move forward, involving email check-in, a phone call or two, or another scheduled meeting, to follow-up with each other efficiently.

In this phase, we continue determining the right product mix, and will discuss:

• Which safety training courses you need
• Which employees, teams, or groups need to take which courses
• How often you your workforce will train for certain topics
• Where it is appropriate to offer refresher training
• Which best practice training is right for specific employee groups
• How many CPR & First Aid certification classes are necessary
• Which of your employees require specialty training courses
• Exact number of Safety Data Sheets and access needs
• Multiple locations within your organization
• The number of administrative personnel expected to support the solution
• Legacy system/software integration (if applicable)

Agreements & Payment Options

Since there are many different products available to you, there are different purchase types…

Transactional Products: No Agreement or Agreement Optional

• OSHA 10 & 30-Hour: Buy Online | Group Discount | Subscription Agreement
• MSHA Parts 48 & 46: Buy Online | Group Discount | Subscription Agreement
• Specialty Training: Buy Online | Group Discount | Subscription Agreement
• First Aid & CPR Certification: Pay-Per Class | Subscription Agreement

Subscription Products: 1 & 3-Year Contracts

• Learning Management System (LMS)
• Safety & Compliance Courses
• HSI SDS Online

For technology, the subscription model is common in our industry, and most providers offer contract options known as “software agreements”. Many government agencies and public entities are restricted to 1-year agreements (and sometimes Request for Proposal (RFP) guidelines).

Most of our subscription customers sign 3-year agreements for the following reasons…

• Lock-in discounted pricing for length of agreement
• Provide increased continuity to training programs
• Fix costs for 3-year cycle, simplifying budgets

When you’re ready to purchase, we send you a simple order form and try to keep the line-items to a minimum. Agreements are formalized when you engage with simple, electronic signature software, which is the industry standard and now widely accepted as common practice.

That’s called a DocuSign.

Our customers commonly elect to pay an upfront, annual amount covering only the first full calendar year of the agreement. For payment flexibility, we offer net terms to meet your needs, and quarterly payment options. Monthly billing may be available upon request (conditions apply).

Setting Up the Product

From experience, we know that execution is the single most important factor determining the success our customers. That’s why we’ve developed a smarter, customer-centric approach to product integration that measurably improves outcomes. No other company will offer you this guiding expertise.

After signing a purchase agreement, several wheels start turning. First, you are assigned an Account Manager, an Implementation Project Manager, and, finally, a Customer Success Advisor, each with different, key roles influencing your product experience.

Generally, our customers are happiest and most successful with our standard system implementation.

How fast we move is, in large part, up to you. The average timeframe for product integration spans 30 business days—based on standard implementations—but is dependent on when we receive necessary information.

Kickoff Meeting

In our kickoff meeting, we’ll discuss how best to configure the products. This conversation will determine the universe of trainable employees and what courses your employees will need to take, by group, department, or hazard exposure. We’ll confirm your needs, purchase, and expectations, answer any questions you may have about the products you purchased, clarify terms used in the setup process (Training Group, Hierarchy, Teams, LMS, etc.), and work through the Training Plan Document (TPD).

Here are the main variables involving Learning Management System (LMS) configuration. These options and services impact the complexity of your LMS setup prior to launching the solution, and require varying degrees of time and energy to work through collaboratively…

• Migration of legacy data (training records, reports, etc.): Service
• Human Resource Information System (HRIS) integration: Service
• Organization Hierarchy: Custom Configuration Option
• Training Assignments: Custom Configuration Option
• Single Sign-On (SSO): Service
• Access Codes: Custom Configuration Option
• Surveys: Custom Configuration Option
• Unique Permission Levels: Custom Configuration Option
• Custom Reporting: Custom Configuration Option

Training Plan Development

To completely build your training site, we need certain information from you; the faster we get it, the quicker the build. So you will need time during this period to focus on training plan development, to capture those details in your Training Plan Document (TPD), which we generate and tailor to your purchase. We recommend that you take the Online Training Needs Assessment to align the right courses with your compliance needs, as many times as you want, group by group. Once complete, we perform detailed review of your TPD for accuracy.

We will contact you during this time to obtain clarifications and resolve issues.

Launching Your Site

As your site nears completion, we’ll schedule a meeting to train your administrators…

• We’ll present the site and review the info listed
• Cover log-in
• Go through each menu item in the system
• Briefly cover reporting and schedule a 2-week check-in after launch to discuss reports
• Demonstrate adding/editing employees and explain Training Requirements.
• Ensure training matches your expected use cases
• Cover automated notifications in detail and turn them on

After training your administrators, we agree on a launch date, and schedule some informative, introductory notifications to build awareness and provide guidance to your workforce. You’ll also meet your Customer Success Advisor, who will be your guide and go-to partner throughout your experience with HSI.

Service & Support

You’ll love our products, but there’s one reason why 98% of our customers come back each year: people.

In a 2018 independent survey of environmental health and safety professionals (EHS), HSI was highly-regarded by customers, especially on the factors most important to vendor selection: course quality, customer service, overall value, and ease of use emerge as strengths for the Company. We earned very favorable performance ratings from those that knew of the company and, even discounting the scores due to inherent sample bias, the relative out-performance of competitors is noteworthy.

HSI’s “net promoter score” ranked #1 out of 12 online safety training vendors.

With HSI, your satisfaction is someone’s full-time job. Each customer works with one person—a Customer Success Advisor—whose sole responsibility is making your life easier. We help run your program so you can focus on building safety culture, tackling serious health, safety, and compliance issues, and sending your workers home safe at the end of each day.

Relationships are important to us, and taking care of customers is taking care of business.