Maintaining technology takes a lot of time and effort. To make the best use of your resources, it’s critical to know whether your employees are actually using the features of your technology and how.
For one law firm gleaning those types of insights from its intranet has made all the difference. Its Manager of Enterprise Applications & Development has been with firm for 20 years. She has been using NGAGE to determine exactly how the firm’s 400 attorneys are interacting with the intranet in order to maximize its utility and figure out what needs to be changed.
“You get insight that you wouldn’t have otherwise,” she says. “Without NGAGE, all our information would be anecdotal and our biggest questions would go unanswered. NGAGE
gives us near-real-time information on how people are engaging with the intranet. Having that information at your fingertips is really great.”
Engaging NGAGE
The firm redeveloped its intranet on SharePoint 2013 about five years ago. When they deployed it, they naturally thought everyone would love it. What they found, though, was that, while lots of people did love it because it was a step up from what they had previously, they weren’t sensing the level of adoption and usage they wanted.
When it came time to redesign and redevelop the intranet on SharePoint 2016, they turned to NGAGE. Previously, they were using out-of-the-box tools that only tracked very limited behavior, like how many visits a page had.
As she explains, they needed a tool that could benchmark where they were and allow them to see if the new intranet created the levels of usage and adoption they were hoping for. “We wanted to make sure there was a focus on the attorneys and providing value for them, beyond just finding information in the different business department areas,” she says.
How the Firm Benefits from NGAGE
The firm deployed their new intranet about a year ago and is still in the early stages of using NGAGE, fine-tuning it to collect the information they want it to collect. “It’s helped us so far with learning about the different searches users are performing, where we might have missed the boat with certain information, and what areas of the intranet are not being used,” she explains.
NGAGE also helps the firm identify areas where it’s worth investing money. While in the past they had to rely on attorney anecdotes about where they saw value, NGAGE reports back up those stories by quantifying low versus high usage for certain features. “That was really helpful,” she says. “We decided not to make the modifications needed to bring those features into the new environment and eventually we plan to remove them from the intranet entirely.”
The objective of the firm’s intranet was to provide as much value as possible for everyone at the firm, particularly attorneys. They use SharePoint and Aderant Handshake to create highly personalized experiences for each user. Down the road, her goal is to be able to use NGAGE to promote different areas of the intranet that users might not know exist.
On Behavioral Analytics
NGAGE’s behavioral analytics have been crucial for the firm. “It helps us see if we’re meeting our goal of making sure our users are getting value from our intranet,” she says.
With their old intranet, users could never find what they were looking for through the search function. With NGAGE, and behavioral analytics in general, she’s able to report on when somebody put in a search term, whether they clicked on the first result, whether the search was successful or if they kept trying different terms, and more. “There’s so much information you’re able to get from your behavioral analytics tool that helps you know where things may still need to be worked on or where things may not be working the way you thought they were,” she explains.
Without behavioral analytics, they only had anecdotal information to work from. NGAGE gives her the actual reporting and metrics she needs to back those stories up.
Tracking Third-Party Tools
Much of their intranet was built using Aderant Handshake, a third-party tool that sits on top of SharePoint. NGAGE allows the firm to track usage of Handshake ‘skins’ (web parts) which has been critical.
“If we were just relying on what we have in SharePoint, that’s probably 25% of our content,” she says. “It wouldn’t be meaningful or sufficient and it wouldn’t provide enough insight into the data that people are actually interacting with.” NGAGE allows them to track all interactions with each skin including which items are clicked within the skin and, for example, whether a filter was used. “The NGAGE integration allows us to dig deep into our third-party tools,” she says.
The NGAGE Difference
In the first year of their new intranet, the firm has been able to validate how their attorneys are engaging with it, from associates through partners. “We were able to use it to make a business decision on whether we should invest in rewriting one area of our intranet,” she says. “We used NGAGE to look at the behavior and see that, in fact, it was not just that a particular practice group wasn’t using it, nobody was. Had we not had that tool, we definitely would have been spending the money to update that particular functionality, but now we’re eliminating it.”
What she likes about NGAGE is the information it provides. “It answers questions that would otherwise go unanswered,” she explains. “It would be all anecdotal, as opposed to the near-real-time information we’re getting now.”
So, would she recommend NGAGE to other law firms? “I would, yes. I don’t have any reservations about recommending it to them,” she concludes. “I think it’s a solid product that delivers on its promise. I would definitely recommend it for SharePoint users or firms that are using Handshake. I think they’ll get a lot of value out of it.”