How BackBase Boosted Their Online Presence 25x Globally

How an Online Community Certification Program Can

Supercharge Your Business 3X

Table of Contents

1

The Emergence of Goliath

8

Impact of Certification Program

10

Online Communities

11

Your Tryst with Greatness

2

Certification Program

4

Challenges Faced in The Certification Program

6

David to the Goliath: Mettl Way

About BackBaseBackbase’s Digital Banking Platform is the leading solution on the digital banking platform market globally. The solution provides banks tools to develop a compelling experience on digital channels. Digital Banking Platform is particularly suitable for larger banks and their more complex legacy environments as well as for banks with desire to have a leading edge digital experience.

The Backbase Omni-Channel Digital Banking Platform empowers financial institutions to accelerate their digital transformation and effectively compete in a digital-first world. It unifies functionality from traditional core systems and new fintech capabilities into a seamless digital customer experience, drastically improving any customer channel.

B A C K B A S E

T H E B I G P I C T U R E1

The Emergence of GoliathSome of the world’s biggest brands, namely Starbucks, Nike, Google, were initially built through their communities. The most significant benefit of a certification is the community of dedicated professionals that you’re helping make.

The perfect example of community building through certification would be L’Oréal and their salon certification program, which helped them become one of the most renowned companies in the world.

So, BackBase decided to initiate their certification program, and the key word to gun for was ‘fast’.

Headquartered in Amsterdam and founded in the early years of the 21st century, the software company has more than 80 major banks as their clients. They have been on the forefront of software innovations since its’ inception and was also one of the first companies to develop an AJAX framework, paving the way to Rich Internet Applications.

How did a Certification Programhelp BackBase?Organisations develop certification programs when they want to create a preference in the marketplace for various types of people or technology. Certification helps validate the efforts of people who have invested their time and energy to learn how to implement a standard or best practice.

And certifications are a very powerful tool for driving market adoption of a standard or skill set. For the leading customer experience platform service provider, the certification program had clear benefits.

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Helped Standardise BackBase’s Position in The IndustryIn business, potential clients decide to choose either you or a competitor. It’s an ‘either/or’ proposition.

A certification program allowed the company to define the rules for the industry, in turn, making the decision-making process for their potential clients an easier one. They did this by influencing their buyers to choose them because they were seen as having the edge over competitors

T H E C E R T I F I C A T I O N P R O G R A M2

Certification is more than just a training and validation that someone goes through. It’s an opportunity to attract the best clients in the industry to assist you to move into new marketplaces, and this organisation knew how to take advantage of that.

“Entrepreneurs must have a base of loyal customers who are willing to pay a premium price—it is even better if these people become advocates—thereby creating a massive, loyal and vocal unpaid sales’ force.” - New York Times Bestselling authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman

Zipf’s Law states that the marketplace will choose the company or person seen to be on top of that industry.

Reached Their Potential Clients Through the Community

With a certification program, BackBase positioned themselves instantly ahead of their competitors—making it increasingly difficult

Protected their business from competitors

for others to compete against them—especially since they leveraged their certification program with a co-branding opportunity for their clients.

This created two types of royalties for the company:

Monthly usage-based fees (Their customers, trainers and coaches paid them monthly payments for long-term assistance.);

Lump-sum royalties (These were payments made to the company by the clients, trainers and coaches who were certified by them also to use the systems with their own clients.)

$

$$

But the initiative did come with its share of obstacles

T H E C E R T I F I C A T I O N P R O G R A M3

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Challenges

There are several challenges which BackBase considered before setting up a certification program. The chief ones were the program’s foundation, scale, legal issues, pricing and the need to anticipate problems before they appeared. Within all this, they also had specific requirements as to how they wanted their certification program to work

ScaleWhen setting up the certification program, BackBase expected to interact with an entirely new set of customers. The organisation was opening itself up to interactions with anyone who wanted to be in its marketplace, not just its existing members.

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

T H E C H A L L E N G E4

AuthenticityBuilding a strong foundation was crucial because, by their nature, certifications are intended to alter the way people buy and sell goods and services, so a solid sense of the program’s goal had to be present from the beginning. This foundation was also responsible for establishing the standard competence level.

Therefore, it had to consider the potential reach of its program and how far and wide it would like it to spread. The organization pondered upon some of the following questions:

AutomationThroughout the process of setting up the certification program, automation was one crucial factor which held the company back. They wanted to deploy a seamless process right from registration of a candidate and payment to the training, certificate generation and record updating. They wanted to do it right, and fast.

1 How far reaching a program did they want to implement?

2 The number of people could they feasibly put through the process

3 Possibility of promoting the certification to a larger number of people

T H E C H A L L E N G E5

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Create, Schedule and Conduct Tests – Online Assessment PlatformEasy to author tests, item & response randomization throughout an assessment, Permission based content access, multi-language support, ready to use catalogue of over a hundred thousand questions in 10,000 banks were some of the key features that convinced the company to partner with Mettl in creating their certification program.

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

T H E S O L U T I O N6

Mettl Way: David to the GoliathGiven the above hurdles, it made sense to the organization to engage a third party to help set up their certification program. In addition to providing for a shared-cost infrastructure, an independent, vendor-neutral third party also would also be able to help with planning for the evolution of the certification.

This is when BackBase met Mettl.

Monitor - Remote Invigilation and Auto ProctoringIn evaluating Mettl as a partner, BackBase was largely impressed with the former’s advanced web proctoring platform, which remotely authenticated users, prevented cheating, impersonation, and any other activities of the kind – cases that would compromise the integrity of any assessment.

Report - Results and AnalyticsIn-depth comprehensive reports on candidate performance, question by question analysis with built-in graphs and charts, combined group reports with benchmark scores, and reporting dashboard for quick slice and dice through results was an insight the company did not want to miss as it provided them valuable data to improve both their certification program and products.

Award Certificates Real-time on Assessment Completion – Certification EngineThe certification engine allowed BackBase to design and customize the certificates with candidate data and QR Code, which could be verified both offline and online. They also explored the process of awarding certificates based on gamified workflows and pre-set performance criteria.

Integration of PayPal - Payment GatewayThe integration of payment gateway with their certification program allowed them to overcome a huge geographical barrier – the ability to accept payments from any country without payment restrictions and minimal taxation

T H E S O L U T I O N7

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Impact of Certification ProgramThrough the partnership with Mettl, BackBase has conducted more than 500 tests till date and are moving very quickly in certificating candidates based globally in IT Services companies. They are happy with both the operational and technical support provided by the Mettl team.

They are also extensively using the assessment platform to create a bevy of tests for their courses, and the proctoring lite solution to maintain the authenticity of the assessments conducted. In addition to this, the payment gateway is also a key part of their system as it allows candidates from all over the world to register for the certification program, breaking the currency barriers.

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

T H E I M PA C T8

Companies Dream, BackBase’s RealityThat’s the kind of teamwork that many companies dream of, the kind of actions that leaders everywhere wish they could inspire.This became a reality for BackBase. Building an online community puts that kind of teamwork and action right at your fingertips.

Thinking across RoIEvery community has the potential to fight for something much larger than ROI:

What if businesses looked at community as having the power to fuel missions much larger than their revenue? What if we built communities so engaged that taking collective action was a no-brainer? What if your community made it possible to do what once seemed impossible? These communities are being built in businesses today.

Airbnb and Lyft have built communities that have changed laws, and they’re just some of the most visible examples we see on a regular basis.

T H I N K I N G A C R O S S R O I9

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Online Communities

While BackBase’s online community building exercise lives under the engineering and product departments, the program touches many more aspects of the business.

“One of the things I’ve been most impressed with is taking community feedback and putting it directly into the product,” – BackBase is paraphrased here.

In many organizations, people don’t know where community fits. But a community building program can pervade the organizational culture in any department. Once a program is started, superusers can contribute in endless ways to the product, marketing, localization, content, or support goals of your organization.

They use superusers for all kinds of tasks internally, even if their business goals are clearly defined around product and support.

hey’ll say things like, “Let’s go fix Greece today, and they’ll fix everything that is in Greece in one day.”

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

F I X I N G G R E E C E1 0

Your Tryst with GreatnessIn a world gripped by recession, marketers are often asked cut down on the costs by trimming video ads to 15 seconds and repurposing old creatives. But the fundamentals of marketing is not about shrinking your channels of growth. It is more about finding new avenues and letting go of what is no longer valued by the people you serve. It is about reinventing marketing through the lens of community.

Organizations often develop training and certification programs to build a community of people who have invested their time and energy to learn how to use and implement a tool or service. Certifications also serve as a powerful tool to drive adoption of a particular technology in the market.

Picture the status that you will have with your own certification program. It’s not the big that eats the small anymore; it’s the fast that eats the slow. With status and speed as your competitive advantage, you position your company to maximize business, not to mention improve the valuation of your company.

So, what are you waiting for?

C ’ E S T A L A V I E1 1

mettl.com

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+91-9555114444

Mettl is a Saas based assessment platform that enables organizations to create customized assessments for use across the entire employee lifecycle, beginning with pre-hiring screening and candidate skills

assessment, training and development programs for employees/students, certification exams, contests and more.

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