Gainsight Helps Bonfire Scale its Academy

Bonfire empowers government procurement teams to unlock their potential, maintain compliance, shorten evaluation times, improve transparency and reduce strain on internal times. Bonfire’s end goal? 
 To help procurement teams make strategic buying decisions that create real-world results that advance the public good (e.g., better healthcare and roads).

However, Bonfire had a challenge: Scale its industry-leading user experience without having to grow its Customer Excellence (CX) team proportionally.

The solution? A customer academy that’d encourage learning and provide people with the content they needed to be successful. Gainsight was ready to help.

Historically, government procurement teams used outdated technologies and processes to do their work. In a rapidly evolving and digital-first world, this no longer cut it. Procurement professionals needed a better way to work. In 2012, Bonfire set out to 
 make this happen and quickly became the go-to technology for procurement professionals.

Sounds great, right?

Yes, however, the nature of the procurement space coupled with the intricacies of Bonfire’s technology led to a lot of back and forth between Bonfire’s team and its users. As a result, its team was under constant strain.

To help its customers, Bonfire built a robust and bestin-class Help Center. There was only one problem. It wasn’t getting the engagement Bonfire had hoped for, which meant people didn’t have the knowledge they needed to truly leverage the technology and benefit from it. With little clarity, Bonfire’s CX teams were inundated with support tickets. This wouldn’t be sustainable and Bonfire found itself at a crossroads: Pour more resources into the CX team or find a more effective and efficient way to educate its customers.

Bonfire Academy has helped government procurement professionals work better, faster and smarter. Since its launch, Gainsight has powered this academy, enabling it to continually provide value to its users. Here’s how:

Ready (and Easy) to Scale

When Bonfire was looking for an LMS, it knew it needed one that could easily scale. If its academy couldn’t keep up, it would lose value for all parties involved. By building its academy on Gainsight Customer Education, this was never a problem.

Right out of the box, Gainsight’s technology is engineered to scale. Need to onboard more people? Easy. Need to add 10 more courses? Simple. And the best part is that Bonfire could do all of this without sacrificing the quality. In other words, Bonfire could make changes behind the scenes without disrupting the user experience.

This benefit was particularly helpful in late 2020 when, in response to COVID-19, Bonfire launched a free-to-use program for organizations needing access to PPE. With Gainsight Customer Education, it could quickly launch a course that taught users how to use the program and get PPE. Without Gainsight, this would have taken considerably longer and eaten into significant internal resources.

Access to Always-on Support

Access to Gainsight’s Customer Success team played a key role in the success of Bonfire Academy for two key reasons: One, launching an advanced academy is no small feat. For organizations building one from the ground up, it could take years to get it to a place that provides real value.

Having always-on support provided Bonfire what it needed to get firing on all cylinders fast. Additionally, the guidance and support meant that Bonfire could reallocate resources away from the laborious and time-consuming steps, to more strategic and high-return initiatives. In addition to providing value during the creation process, Bonfire also had constant access to Gainsight’s Customer Success team, which helped its teams stay up to date on new features and capabilities.

Total Usability

Everyone learns differently. For example, some people like to sit down after work, while others prefer to learn over the course of a week or month. Due to the behavioral variability,
 it was important for Bonfire to have an easy-to-use LMS that allowed it to mold its Academy to the unique preferences and demands of the people who’d be using it.

Having this ability also helped Bonfire overcome the perpetual challenge of engagement. By customizing its academy, it could put users first and create something they would actually use.

1. Today, 100% of implementations utilize Bonfire Academy. This minimizes time-to-value, allowing Bonfire to onboard customers quicker and realize the technology’s benefits faster.
2. Using Gainsight, Bonfire’s Customer Excellence team saw a dramatic decrease in the number of support tickets, which helped win them back time that they could invest in other high-return activities such as strategizing with users.
3. With a robust LMS built on intuitive and easy-to-replicate templates, Bonfire could scale its academy in tandem with a growing and evolving company.
4. Thanks to an optimized customer experience, Bonfire is seeing 25% of its organizations use its academy — and that number is growing.
5. By building its academy on Gainsight Customer Education, Bonfire encouraged proactive learning, meaning users were more informed when interacting with Bonfire. This drives more efficient and meaningful interactions.