VP Groundforce Training

VP Groundforce Training provide sector-specific safety training solutions, specialising in excavation training. They have been accessplanit customers since 2016 and have scaled their training delivery in that time.

We spoke to Yvette Anderson, Training Administration Manager, to find out how our training management software has helped in her role - particularly how she uses our brand new consolidate emails functionality that can't be found in any other training management software on the market. 

About VP Groundforce Training

VP Groundforce Training primarily offers EUSR-accredited excavation safety training for construction and utility organisations. This includes showing workers how to install, inspect and remove shoring equipment safely. They also provide a range of other training courses within the utilities, construction, and civil engineering industries to ensure this workforce is qualified and safe.

They run on average 25 courses per week. Most of these are in-person, instructor-led at their dedicated training centres across the country, but they also offer some eLearning courses, too. They have 12 in-house trainers and sometimes work with partners to deliver their courses. 

The number of candidates trained and qualified has consistently climbed, with last fiscal year growth of 30%. "Each year is getting better and better for us, touch wood!" Yvette said. She has been working with the company for seven years. When she started, her main role was to help implement accessplanit across the business. 

The challenge

With so many delegates and different courses, having training management software is vital for the success of Groundforce Training.

"For instance, the other day, I had 32 delegates to put into the system for different training courses," Yvette said. Without dedicated software, this admin work is repetitive and time-consuming - and makes it all too easy for things to fall through the cracks, reducing the quality of the customer journey. 

With accessplanit's powerful, unique consolidate emails feature, Groundforce Training have been able to boost their communication with clients.

Operating in the B2B space, they often get big bookings from managers in companies who need to train their members of staff. Yvette explained: "They might book four or five courses. A lot of our large customers will book up the full eight places on a course."

accessplanit enables this to happen smoothly with Manager access - the only training management software to offer this - and a powerful workflow engine that automates key tasks like sending emails.

However, this presented an issue because bookers would receive more communications than necessary. "Prior to consolidating emails, they'd end up with a booking summary email, a booking confirmation and then eight sets of joining instructions for each delegate. Quite a lot of them asked us not to do this because it bombards their inboxes."

To tackle this, Yvette and the team used placeholders - booked but unassigned places on a course. However, this caused additional admin because they had to assign the places to delegates after the booking was made. 

It wasn't an ideal solution. The accessplanit team listened to the feedback and worked on developing a feature to fix this. 

The solution

Consolidate emails

"It saves us time and it gives customers a better follow up as well."

Yvette Anderson | Training Administration Manager, VP Groundforce Training 

Our consolidated emails functionality was rolled out to all accessplanit customers in June 2024. This means that when a booker is due to receive more than one email for the same workflow action, they will now receive just one consolidated email. This configurable setting allows you to choose which emails to consolidate and how to group them.

This has helped Groundforce Training in many ways. Now, they can send bookers all the information they need - including the names of the delegates they have booked - in one convenient email. 

Placeholders are useful in other situations - such as when the company hasn't decided who they are going to send on a course yet. But with consolidated emails, when the delegates are known, Groundforce Training's customer experience is greatly improved with reduced email clutter and confusion. 

"The consolidated emails look more professional," Yvette said. "It's going to be a lot better for them because they've got the information in front of them. They know who they've booked."

In addition, it has made Yvette's life easier as delegates are assigned at the point of booking, so they are pulled through automatically into the right workflow. If one delegate needs to cancel or transfer to a different course, this can be done with ease.

"It saves us time and it gives customers a better follow-up as well," Yvette said. "Now that they're consolidated, it's a lot easier for us." Admin is streamlined, meaning they can focus on other things and scale their offerings.

Support

"The help desk are really helpful. They're quick and easy to work with."

Yvette Anderson | Training Administration Manager, VP Groundforce Training 

Groundforce Training made use of accessplanit's professional services to get their consolidated email workflows set up. 

Yvette said that she'd recommend our set-up services to others who want to save time and streamline their communications quickly. "We're grateful that you guys have set the first ones up for us so we could get running straight away with it."

She also had this to say about the day-to-day help and advice provided by our Support team: "The help desk are really helpful. They're quick and easy to work with. [Customer Support Advisor] Stuart is a diamond! He's happy to jump on a Teams call and go through anything so that I understand it better or he understands it better so we can fix it."

But Yvette also said that she feels confident setting it up herself. "They look fairly simple to set up. So if I come across another one that I think I want to consolidate, I'm quite happy to give it a go. The instructions that you've sent out are clear."

Other key accessplanit features

"My end-of-month reports used to take me two days to gather all the information that the company needed from me. Whereas now I've got that down to half a day." 

Yvette Anderson | Training Administration Manager, VP Groundforce Training 

But other than our new consolidate emails functionality, what else do Yvette and the team at Groundforce Training use accessplanit for?

Opportunities and Tasks

Yvette said that one of the most used areas of the platform, and their favourite add-on, is the Opportunities module. This allows them to manage their B2B sales process and book bespoke courses all within accessplanit. This boosts productivity and profits, especially alongside our handy Tasks feature.

"Our business development team will log the Opportunities. Once they've set up a course and made a sale, they'll send a Task through to my team to process," Yvette explained.

"That's cut down on a lot of time. We just get that Task and know we've got to book it, get everything done and then it will be marked as closed-won automatically. That saves us from going back and forth."

With their sales process from start to finish happening in one system, there's no need to waste time and money on a huge, disparate software stack.

Reporting

Groundforce Training's accessplanit platform is a reliable source of historical data and records. Using our raft of powerful reporting tools, Yvette and the team can keep an eye on their KPIs for data-driven decision-making.

"My end-of-month reports used to take me two days to gather all the information that the company needed from me. Whereas now I've got that down to half a day." 

accessplanit provides in-depth reporting tools as well as at-a-glance information, and Yvette uses both. She explained how she uses filters to show only the information she needs in useful DataGrids that summarise key details. 

But for bigger reports, she uses our Report Writer module. This is another great example of how accessplanit's automation features can save training teams valuable time: "If I know I'm going to need it every month or every quarter, I build it into Report Writer and then have it emailed out to us." 

"It's a lot easier." 

The takeaway

We asked Yvette if she would recommend accessplanit and she said:

"Yes, I would. I have done in the past. I find it easy to work with and I think it has a lot more features than a lot of other systems out there. Particularly, the Opportunities module for us - not a lot of other companies out there offer that." 

"All the information is in there. It helps us record all delegate information, courses - everything we need really."