RecChat: Virtual Symposium Edition - 12/05/2019
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch is joined by Learning Product Designer, Leigha Foy Phillips to discuss the plan to bring the in-person Vermont Systems Symposium to a wider audience. Zach and Leigha discuss their goals for the program and ask the viewers about their thoughts on the service.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:07
And we are live but in a green Screen does this and now we're in the magical winters of Vermont. Welcome RecChatters to RecChat. I am Zach Malloch. I'll prove that in just one second here, like that. And this is,
Leigha Phillips 0:24
I'm Leigha Phillips and I work on Zach's team.
Zach Malloch 0:27
So anybody that attended the symposium will be familiar with Leigha, or lead What's something called RecTrac Lab. So we wanted to kind of take things a little bit in a different direction today. So this is, in the past, we talked about services that we're about to offer or features that are imminently out there or already in place. And this is really something that's still a little bit conceptual, we've got a pretty good idea of what we want to do with it. But we're really going to look for a lot of feedback from you guys. So the more interactive This is, the more you ask questions or give us your opinions about things, the better it's going to be. And based upon your responses, we'll send out a survey afterwards and get a little bit of information from that direction as well. So other people that have attended other RecChats and symposiums and the like. So the topic of the day, virtual symposiums?
Leigha Phillips 1:22
Well, actually, for this session, too, I wanted to add that I am going to be a little bit like your audience insert, I'm going to be monitoring questions today, because we'd really like this to be an open discussion with all of you. So as they come in, I will be prompting Zach with whatever your concerns are, we're gonna go through a little bit of an agenda and talk about virtual symposiums and hopefully receive some feedback from everybody.
Zach Malloch 1:47
All right. So what are virtual symposium? So what is it symposium? For those that don't know, twice a year, we offer a symposium here in Vermont. So we have customers come out from different organizations, different parts of the country. And they join us here in Vermont at a venue where we go through training and networking sessions. And it tends to get really good feedback and reviews. And we have really, really great presenters that work on that. And it seems to be pretty valuable. But it's not necessarily accessible to everybody to always jump on a plane go to Vermont, and we have a limited number of seats, we can actually fill because we want to keep those sessions fairly small so that we have good instructor to participant interactions and the like. But we want to serve everybody want to give everybody access to the content. And in that vein, if you're not aware, we've posted all of the videos from this past Symposium on to the knowledge base, they're there, they're available right now, I think there are 17 of them. So plenty of topics, you can find them right through the knowledge base. But we're gonna expand upon that. And the thing that's really lacking from the videos that we post is the interactiveness being able to ask a question during the session, MLA,
Leigha Phillips 3:02
much like today.
Zach Malloch 3:04
So in light, this, the the idea for the virtual symposium is to offer a rec chat like format, but more of a formalized training on a particular topic, and give people the opportunity to ask questions during the session, interact with other participants of that session. And then we're looking to also open up a VSI community forum where we have a post for each virtual symposium topic for people to go back in and discuss things about that and try to get as much of that networking piece that we have in the real the physical symposium in the virtual environment and make it more accessible. Yeah,
Leigha Phillips 3:44
the forum sounds awesome.
Zach Malloch 3:46
Yeah, we're very excited to have that coming. So I think it's going to work better if we can show you a little bit of what we have an idea on. So I am going to share. That's the wrong Button, this Button will work. And I wanted to share this document. So these are our tentative ideas for plant for topics that we wanted to present. And we've often struggled with finding out how to get people the right members into the right audiences. So we wanted to kind of divide it into four tracks. Anybody that's been in the regular symposium with us knows that we have the discover and the Explore tracks or discovery is a little bit more about just becoming aware that something's there and the ways to use it and then explore would be really digging into that same topic to a deeper level. So we want to still offer discover and explore but we want to offer a processing one we've had, we've had people ask about something that would be more appropriate for front desk staff. And then a manage option that would be specifically more towards reviewing the the details of how to set up certain components in the system. So if we had discover fees or explore fees So we'd be talking about the general principles about setting up the fee and how to do that if we talk about managing activities, we'll be going through actually step by step how to set up an activity, that would include the basic information about setting up fees, but it would be more geared towards somebody that's in that coordinator creation of activity management role. So hopefully, you also see that we've got two topics defined per month, and we have the numbers over on the side that's not fixed in place, these can shuffle around. And we'd also really like to hear from you guys, as far as what sort of topics we wouldn't be providing an offering. So if this looks awesome, great thumbs up. But if you have other ideas or other thoughts, then we definitely want to hear about those. And that would be something that we can receive feedback about right now, or we can have a will have a place in the survey for that. The schedule right now that we're considering we'll be alternating with Rec chat. So we'd have rec chat, one week, half an hour, quick discussion, free for everybody. And then we'd have the virtual symposium the next week. And we would kind of alternate between these sessions so that we can not get Not, not give RecTrac RecChat, it's do not take away time from preparing symposium stuff, and try to find that balance between everybody. We also wanted to kind of emphasize that the benefit of this is not just learning information from us, but the way that our customers tend to you guys tend to interact with each other in these situations. So sharing ideas, sharing processes, sharing struggles and solutions to those struggles. Getting an idea of how other people are using fees and rules or setting up activities or using touch Point Of Sale or end of shift could be a topic or it is a topic that we've got down there.
Leigha Phillips 6:53
I think there's value to even just seeing the kinds of questions that other people have. And valuable to me at least especially sort of in a setting like this, where RecTrac something that's so huge, being able to see that other people are also maybe having not necessarily issues or questions or things like that that are being asked, I think that that's a nice way to Build a sense of community within everybody that might be using RecTrac to
Zach Malloch 7:17
establish communication during the session, follow up with that person potentially, in the forum, discuss things outside of that. And you know, just kind of get a little bit more direction towards the using the system better, we kind of talked about and you know, it fits really well with our, our department, that probably the number one best way to make RecTrac more valuable to you is to know how to use it better because it is so big, and there's so much depth in so many options as far as how to use it. Knowing how to use it better is almost the same investment as getting a new software getting to that next level of using RecTrac. And that's what we're trying to foster and support in this session, the the networking piece, the q&a live sessions where you can ask that and get feedback from the trainers. Each of these sessions would be moderated. So just like Bret is sitting on there, and Cullen or listening to the or watching the comments, they can surface certain things to us and have us kind of change the direction of the topic, or go a little bit more in depth for something else. That's the same idea is what we'd be looking for in the virtual symposium. And the idea with these be these would be each round a 45 minute session with 15 minutes kind of dedicated to q&a afterwards. And just like we do with RecChat, trying to provide a document that covers some of the high level points that were discovered, we would be taking the frequently asked questions and things that come up afterwards. And we'd be providing that also. So yes, we would also then just like with RecChat, we'd be archiving and recording all the sessions. So if you subscribe to virtual symposiums right now we're talking about subscriptions. We'll talk about pricing in just a moment. Then you get access to every virtual symposium that has happened. So far every session that's occurred and been recorded. And then, yeah, so that brings us right down to pricing. Right now. The proposal or the thing that we're considering is around $600 per year, per organization. And if you decide to subscribe to this with your organization, it would be for anybody in your organization or organization, we would probably have a primary person, we would send them the link to it just like we do with Rec chat. But it would be a direct link, you would use it you distribute it to the people in your org that you want to attend. And then it could be five people it could be 50 people. You know, obviously with larger audiences, the q&a piece would be more to manage. We could add extra moderators if we need to for that. But the first question I have is would that be valuable to you, it comes to about $50 per month, which we break down to about $25 per session. So if you have five people, you're talking about about $5 per month for each of those people to participate in these sessions. We are considering also a potential non subscription method. If you look at that schedule that I listed, if once we get it finalized and published and say, This is what you are subscribing to, we have a proposal for a $40, one off purchase, where you can register for a single topic, and just participate in that one thing, and then not worry about the whole subscription piece. So let's see if we have any.
Leigha Phillips 10:41
It looks like Carla, who we met at the symposium says that she thinks it would be valuable,
Zach Malloch 10:47
very good
Leigha Phillips 10:48
position. So yeah. Thanks, Carla.
Zach Malloch 10:50
I see that Frank likes the idea of the forum frames also says it'd be worth about 80. So that's, that's really good to know.
Leigha Phillips 10:57
Actually, would you mind putting up the schedule again?
Zach Malloch 11:00
Oh, yeah, definitely. It's also the wrong Button. Second time on here we go. And once again, this is tentative, this is a proposal that can certainly be adjusted and edited. Both the, the order as well as the specific topics will be kind of shuffling it around based on the availability of trainers on our side, a lot of these would be presented by members of edu, but we'd also be reaching out to operations or the other departments when there's a reason to find expertise in a certain area. Or also just to get you guys interacting with different people. I know that's another piece of the physical symposium that we do. Everybody does really likes meeting the people that you talk to all the time on the phone, so we try to kind of have a rotating cast of characters go through.
Leigha Phillips 11:49
I like that from Frank. He's calling this sort of like a lunch and learn. That's kind of a nice way to think about it.
Zach Malloch 11:56
Oh, that's actually really good. And then Illinois, it'd be right at one o'clock.
Leigha Phillips 12:00
Actually, it looks like we are getting, so would you just mind breaking down the fees again?
Zach Malloch 12:06
Yeah, so the right now the thought would be, you could subscribe for the full year at $600. For the full year, that breaks down to $50 a month, and about $25 per session, if you did not want to subscribe or and you get the access to the archive at that point. If you did not want to subscribe, it would be around $40 per session. So you definitely save money if you wanted to do the whole thing. And you would not get access to the archive. We're discussing what we want to do with that we want to make this information available. But we also want to see that it's valuable. So the thought right now is that at the end of each virtual symposium season, the previous season would become available, kind of like Netflix actually get through Battlestar Galactica. And then after that seasons done on broadcast TV to watch. So yeah, that's some of the thoughts we're having right now.
Leigha Phillips 12:58
So then does that become part of annual maintenance?
Zach Malloch 13:01
I certainly couldn't be. We're not going to just blanket across the board increase everybody's annual maintenance, because we don't want to make assumptions that people all want to have access or need access to this. But if you are interested in building it in our billing department, our sales department, they're very willing to work with people. I think most of you have probably had that experience already. So yeah, hopefully that
Leigha Phillips 13:30
it looks like Oh, Darla also has a question about breaking things down session by session. So that would give us 24 sessions per year. Right?
Zach Malloch 13:38
Correct.
Leigha Phillips 13:38
Okay. And then it would be $40 per session, if you were to grab them all a cart.
Zach Malloch 13:43
Yes. And then, yeah, so then that question comes out. And if there's other things, please interrupt me, Leah. But the so first question was, would that be valuable to you? The second question would be does that schedule work and alternating kind of every other week, we would like to kind of keep the topics related to each other. And the idea would be to have a more introductory level topic, paired with a more in depth investigation of that topic within the same month. So if you wanted to have people start with the basic one, and then move up to one of the more advanced ones, they get both of those perspectives fairly close together. So you have a little bit more of the memory of each session for the next session for that
Leigha Phillips 14:28
sort of jumping off of that. Pardon me? What's your timeline on this?
Zach Malloch 14:33
So right now we're thinking q1, and that actually ties directly into one of my final questions. So with something like this, we understand that a lot of organizations have gone through their budgeting process and end of year might be a little bit difficult to open up extra funds. Does anybody when people see that q1 would be too fast for your organization to get approval to do something like this, or would it make sense just to start me Some people start right from the very beginning. And then other people go through the procurement process. And then as soon as you subscribe, you would get access to the previous sessions through the archive. And, and then that nicely segues to another topic I can talk about unless there are other.
Leigha Phillips 15:14
It looks like so far all we're getting our thumbs up. Awesome. Quarter one. Yeah.
Zach Malloch 15:19
So then the last piece about that. And I'm trying to remember the exact direction I was going, because
Leigha Phillips 15:26
a couple of iffy, maybe quarterly would be okay. Yeah.
Zach Malloch 15:31
So as I try to remember what my previous train of thought was, Leah, do you have any songs or dance prepared to?
Leigha Phillips 15:39
Sorry to distract, you know, some RecTrac lab previews.
Zach Malloch 15:44
So, we were always just with the general RecChat follow ups, and everybody's used to getting at this point, if you've attended sessions before, we're always interested in other suggestions, new ideas and new topics. It was actually at the first symposium session of this year, the physical symposium that we have a discussion about this, and, and the idea of making it a subscription process was brought up by one of our customers, I think, Aaron, I saw you register if you're in the chat today. Thank you for that idea. So, really, we want to make this accessible to as many people as we can and as pertinent and valuable to as many people as we can. And, you know, sign up, take the sessions, get access to the archive, if you can't get there right at quarter one, you'll have some topics to kind of pull off from and you know, the the forums, I think right now are going to be through the VSI support portal. That reminds me what my other question was. Right now, the thought is to add these to RecTrac lab. So we use a third party as our LMS provider. It's called E logic. And in the logic platform, that's where we host all the RecTrac labs. So you can go through and get oriented to RecTrac. Eventually, we're we're currently in process of getting all the daily processing modules out starting with activities moving to facilities, then passes will be after that. And we were going to add the archive to that. The the question that we have specifically around that is whether people are comfortable with giving access to their entire organization to these recorded sessions. You know, sometimes people are a little bit concerned, while it's front desk staff, they might get confused or try to do things they really shouldn't do if they watch a session about how to manage end of shift or how to set up and create an activity or edit fees. Obviously, permissions and RecTrac can prevent people from having access to things they shouldn't have access to. But information is something that people sometimes want to limit control over. So would that be a viable option to people? Or would you want some way to kind of segregate it so that you have kind of an admin level that you decide is going to have access to these sessions
Leigha Phillips 17:54
Only certian people have access to that?
Zach Malloch 17:56
Exactly. Yeah, so
Leigha Phillips 17:59
Well, in the meantime, will people sort of Mull that over? Can you go over sort of how many participants can view her or could participate in the symposium at any point, the virtual symposium.
Zach Malloch 18:12
So right now, we have a limit of 500 participants. So if we had a RecChat that had more than 500 people registered for it, the people after 500 would get a message saying that we didn't have room for it. But if it turns out to be really popular, we can bump that up, we can move our licensing for what we use right now zoom up to 1000 people per webinar session or virtual symposium session. So really, it's we're not looking at limiting the number of people who can participate from a technical point of view. At some point. If we want to offer valuable Question and Answer sort of stuff, there might determine that there's a an upward limit that really is functional and effective. And if that happens, I don't think we would say, well, people can't attend, what we could probably do is maybe leave the cap in place, but offer multiple sessions. Yeah. And it all depends on how popular this becomes how valuable people feel that it is. And we're very willing and interested in and doing what we can to make it as valuable as possible in getting as many people engaged and involved as possible, you really think that it's better with more engagement.
Leigha Phillips 19:21
And just to reiterate, within an organization, as many people as possible can participate?
Zach Malloch 19:26
Yes, yes. And when you subscribe to this, it will be an organization level subscription. There'll be an organizational level, access to the archives, once again, with that potential to select whether it's an admin only Type of thing or if everybody in your org can get access to it. We were talking about some ways that we could integrate that so you can still get to it right through the link in RecTrac. But depending on who you're logged into RecTrac As you might just have access to the lab or have access to the lab and all of the videos from the virtual symposium. Yeah, so hopefully that helps out a little bit. Yeah. So I see that, you know, a couple of people have some needs to wait to budget, some of the
Leigha Phillips 20:11
looks like admin levels. People are on board.
Zach Malloch 20:14
All right. Well, we did want to. I see Eddie had a question here more in depth on permissions, possibly something about Screen. Okay, so maybe some topic suggestions that you've got there, Eddie, that's, that's great, we can definitely take those ideas. For those that have come to the in person symposium, I know we have a few of you. In the in the chat today. The the strength of that is really the the networking aspect, and we have awesome value in the the information that we share. And we take some degree of pride in people saying I learned so much, and it's going to take a while to digest it and move through that and to review my notes. But you know, the networking aspect of that is, is a really big part of it. And that that's really what we want to bring to this, you know, you can always schedule individual personalized training with sales, and then we get a great member of support or implementation to work with you directly on a particular topic. So just so everybody knows, that is always going to be an option. This isn't replacing anything like that. But this is a way to kind of get that group experience where you can ask other professionals in your industry, and similar organizations, the way that they're doing things, or the way that this topic affects the way that they use RecTrac can run their business. So we will certainly keep fielding any questions that come in. But this could also very easily be kind of a short and sweet session. Just to get that idea out there to start people kind of mulling that over, it definitely seems like enough people are interested in it, and that we're going to move forward this with this. So we will definitely be sending the survey out consolidating and compiling those results, having that determine what we do. And I think we could definitely get a q1 launch to the virtual symposium exciting.
Leigha Phillips 22:16
Well, actually, too well, people maybe are still thinking of questions. Um, we were lucky enough to get some pictures from Darla last week. And I know that Brett said that in the chat a little while ago. But, um, if anybody has any pictures of their organization that they'd like to share with us that we could maybe highlight you during the countdown or read chat or even just on record chat in general, we'd like to start kicking that off. So if you guys have any great pictures, seasonal pictures, what does it look like yet, your organization right now may not look like this. We'd like to see and hear from you. So if you wouldn't mind, shoot us an email,
Zach Malloch 22:54
have a new rec center, you have an awesome display of lights like Darla sent to us or if you have just anything that you're really proud of in your organization, we'd like to kind of engage that sort of element of the community.
Leigha Phillips 23:07
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 23:08
Even to this too. So any any pictures that you guys have you want to submit, you can send them to RecChat@Vermontsystems.com. You could also send them directly to Leah or I am Zackm@Vremontsystems.com Zach with an H.
Leigha Phillips 23:24
I'm Leighap@Vermontsystems.com.
Zach Malloch 23:27
And we also have Bret with communities Bret one T A. If he can correct us if it's if it's other than that he's in the chat right now. So we'll see if he surfaces to share his contact information. But yeah, we have. Let's see it Earl is sharing some information about
Leigha Phillips 23:51
nice. Yeah, Darla, if you wouldn't mind sending more our way that would be excellent.
Zach Malloch 23:56
Yeah. And anybody else that has anything they want to contribute. We're thinking about a slideshow for the beginning during that to kind of put in the background of our countdown. So you have five minutes to look at something a little bit more interesting. Just that countdown and if there's something that ends up working really well as a background, and then we'll throw that up as the he's evolved in Vermont so far. But we want to become more global with eventual conquering of the world. All right. So let's see, we've got about five minutes left. If we want to go to the full time of RecChat. We can also end early Is there anything else going on and q&a?
Leigha Phillips 24:36
Eddie just had some very nice feedback says it's good idea for people who can actually attend the symposium. So thank you, Eddie.
Zach Malloch 24:43
Yeah, I see. Linda also said that she'd love to visit Vermont, but it's a great idea to virtual symposiums. Thank you very much for that, Linda. Yeah, so we've been talking a lot about this in in kind of a vacuum. discussing what we've done in The past and what we've heard from people kind of in passing. But thank you all so very much for engaging us very directly on this topic and letting us know what you think we would be worthwhile and valuable and useful to you. Once again, look for that survey. I think that we'll try to compile it and send it out. Within the next week or so. We will have a regular RecTrac follow up. So if there's anything you want to put in there, feel free, but we will send them more formal and largest. Yeah, Frank, we're going to keep doing the Vermont symposiums we do have those dates for next year already. Yeah. So we have the last full week in August, I believe in the last full week, in October. And so you can get your summer in Vermont, we usually do the social out actually on a building that's kind of on the waterfront, you're actually beyond the waterfront, it's been built up in the water on the platform, you take a little bit of a bridge to get over to that. And I'm just going to double check my dates here.
Leigha Phillips 26:06
I believe it was the 20th. It started in both months,
Zach Malloch 26:09
say alright ok, So I was slightly wrong about August, August 18 through August 20. And then October 20, to October 22. And I mean, that's also a good question to pose to everybody. If you if you have access to the virtual symposium, would you still find it, especially for the people who have been to it? Would you still find it useful to go to the full blown RecTrac symposium and get that in person experience, and I'm not going to brag too much. But Burlington is a pretty awesome city to come to and explore.
Leigha Phillips 26:44
It's a great place to be. And actually, can we get into a little bit of cost behind attending the actual symposium,
Zach Malloch 26:50
I believe that and we'll have our follow up document will include this but as of so this is not a quote replete. Disclaimer, not, I believe that the the in person symposium is $1,200. It's three days, we do 17 or so sessions within those days, you get to pick and choose which sessions you go to. And starting this year, we're going to offer the ability to schedule a dedicated hour long one on one time sometime within that week, with the VSI staff member. And we also wanted to start opening it up that if you just said now we're turning it into a commercial for the full symposium folks. But if you wanted to come and you're going to be here, if you came a day early, or if you came in stayed for the Friday afterwards, it goes from Tuesday to Thursday, you could schedule some regular training time, like you do on the phone, but get to do that in person with the VSI, a staff member who's been assigned to it. So we still want to make the the in person in the physical symposium a really special and exciting thing to do, but we want to make it the content and the Type of information we offer accessible to more people as easily as possible. So the ideal with that as a fairly nominal fee to get people engaged and accessible to all this
Leigha Phillips 28:11
just looks like lots of thumbs ups for keeping both the virtual symposiums as well as the in person symposium. Excellent. Yep.
Zach Malloch 28:18
Very glad to hear that. All right. Well, um, yeah. So any other questions from anybody? About anything?
Leigha Phillips 28:28
Anything you say?
Zach Malloch 28:32
And you have two minutes to ask those questions.
Leigha Phillips 28:37
Nice.
Zach Malloch 28:39
Yeah. Good feedback for budgeting stuff and offering multiple paths to this. And yeah, that's awesome. Thanks, everybody, for all this feedback.
Leigha Phillips 28:49
Truly. Thank you again. Yeah, this is wonderful. This is exactly what we needed.
Zach Malloch 28:54
Yeah, so you guys here have all? Yeah. So simply a question. We actually have a meeting. So when we scheduled the question about email templates, we ran into a couple areas, we realized that the process for doing email template customization needed a little bit of a customization piece, or a little bit of clarification for us internally. So we have a meeting scheduled in early January with technology and operations to kind of solidify that. So look for the RecTrac RecChat topic about email templates to come up early in the next year. And next week, we're going to be doing end of year so I'll be joined by Robert Kirk and Nick Salvatori, both support technicians that you've probably talked to. They both been around for a while.
Leigha Phillips 29:47
You saw Robert last week, I believe, maybe two weeks ago.
Zach Malloch 29:51
Yeah, he for the Support Portal edition. Robert was in here. And Nick has been next actually been here for six months longer than I I have just hit my 14 year anniversary. So Nick's a veteran at VSI. And we're going to be talking about kind of best practices for end of year processes, validating backups, reconciling reports and the like. And we'll we'll try to get a little bit of a 10, three and a three, one flavor. So we're going to try to Field questions as they come in, but also offer suggestions for for best practices at that point. And I think that's what we're doing right now. Thank you all for attending chatting with us. I've been Zack,
Leigha Phillips 30:30
and I've been Leigha.
Zach Malloch 30:33
We'll see you soon.
Leigha Phillips 30:34
Thanks, everybody.
Zach Malloch 30:35
Thanks a lot.
Supporting Documents
RecChat_VirtualSymposiums_FAQs.pdf