How Gateway Ticketing blended the learning experience
Gateway Ticketing Systems, Inc. is the world leader in ticketing software, admission control and revenue generation for industries including attractions, theme parks, waterparks, tours, zoos, aquariums, museums and historic sites. Located in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, Gateway provides strategic consultation, sales, service and support for point-of-sale and ticketing systems throughout North America and worldwide. Gateway’s robust Galaxy® Product Suite integrates ticketing, admission control, resource management, group sales, online ticketing sales, retail, food and beverage, and membership management.
Project overview
Originally, Gateway delivered all of its Galaxy training face-to-face. However, it was not always convenient for Gateway’s customers to schedule instructor-led training. As Gateway expanded its training offerings to self-paced eLearning, it began the search for an LMS.
The training challenge
We needed to deploy software training in a variety of ways (self-paced, web-based instructor-led, and face-to-face instructor-led) to a variety of audiences (internal employees, business partners, and customers) through a variety of purchasing methods (free, subscription, and a la carte).
Our prepaid self-paced learning subscriptions alone had already covered the annual licensing costs of the LMS, with a profit margin of 60%.
Why you chose eFront
eFront was multi-featured and flexible enough to fulfill all our requirements, in addition to having a clean, user-friendly interface. We were especially happy with the ability to separate customers into branches and appoint customer users as the admins of those branches. Besides that, the ability to code our own plugins with PHP was perfect for meeting our unique reporting needs. We integrated our instructor-led training courses with WebEx, so that the WebEx sessions launched directly from the LMS. We have also used SAML single sign-on to give our customers a seamless experience as they move from the LMS to our other customer-facing sites.
The results
- Purchase includes the source code, so we had the ability to customize the tool as desired
- Ability to have content editors (SMEs) that are not the same as system admins, thus dispersing workload and enabling rapid development of a variety of content without paying for additional products or licensing
- Can authenticate via the AD for security
- Ability to automate communications and notifications to users through the tool
- Reporting by group, user, and course is possible, and multiple access levels mean managers can run their own reporting
- Built‐in feedback options
- Ability to control users’ progress through course
- Simple and intuitive interface so users can quickly and easily get started
- Comprehensive testing and assessment options, which had a high degree of automation. The licensing structure meant that the eFront solution was also extremely cost‐competitive compared to others in its class and also gave us peace of mind that we would have access to future upgrades and support when we had a problem
The results
In our first full year of using eFront, 54 different partner and customer organizations took courses through the LMS. Our average user rating for “What I learned will help me do my job” was 4.5 out of 5. Going into our second year, our prepaid self-paced learning subscriptions alone had already covered the annual licensing costs of the LMS, with a profit margin of 60%. Overall, our LMS has become even more popular, useful, and profitable than we had hoped.
Brandon Carper
Manager, Learning Solutions
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