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Coaching.com
Challenge:
Convert a highly personalized coaching system to an interactive online business
“Coaching” is a one-on-one self-improvement system that helps people achieve personal and professional goals. It requires a highly individualized approach, with trained coaches who assist people in identifying and resolving the obstacles keeping them from desired results, large and small.
The obstacles might be personal or professional, and each tends to affect the other — home issues might trigger problems at work, and vice versa. There’s no single cookie cutter method to coaching. The issues and approaches are as varied as the individuals.
How, then, do you take these one-on-one interactions between living, breathing human beings and put them online? What would it take to automate the coaching process, make it more cost-effective and accessible to millions using high-tech methods — while still maintaining the personal touch that makes coaching effective?
Just like the coaching process itself, we needed to identify the obstacles, resolve the issues, and work together to achieve the desired outcome — the first-ever online coaching system called Coaching.com.
Solution:
Design an extremely rich, highly interactive, user-friendly online system
We began by assembling “wouldn’t it be amazing if . . .” wish lists to meet the immediate and long-term needs. Developing the lists and then setting priorities required several years and dream-team skills.
Coaching.com needed a massive, intricately programmed Web-based platform. It needed rich content — among the items were nearly 100 issues people might work through, exercises, articles, and assessments. It needed reporting features to track progress and forecast gaps and trends in the companies engaging its services. It needed to be highly intuitive and user-friendly, to accommodate a wide audience. It needed to archive data and respond quickly to countless combinations of variables.
After setting priorities, we worked in a parallel processing manner, writing, creating graphics, programming, and testing as we went along. We mapped ways to scale up on coaches, to prevent having too many or too few at launch, and to get the coaches trained.
Today, Coaching.com continues to “change organizations, one life at a time” as a thriving part of The Ken Blanchard Companies. One return on investment (ROI) report indicates that the client (a major telecom company) experienced an immediate ROI in the millions with a 10-to-1 return, and the company expects the ratio to increase long term.
Not only that, 92 percent of the personnel who participated say they learned the coaching techniques and are actively using them with direct reports.
    
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