Challenge
Managing and Paying Hundreds of International Professional Coaches.
With hundreds of professional coaches based around the world providing an array of coaching activities to executives at Fortune 1000 companies, BetterUp found it difficult to manage its growing community of expert coaches.
As its community of coaches grew, BetterUp found it challenging to keep track of every coach's unique skillset, qualifications, language(s), and expertise — all of which are needed in order to match them with the best clients, who often request coaches with specific skills or speak certain languages.
Prior to Worksuite, BetterUp's coach operations team kept an ever-growing spreadsheet that recorded the information of each coach in a way that was not easily searchable or manageable — and impossible to keep up-to-date — making it difficult to make matches at scale over time.
Additionally, BetterUp found the payroll process for hundreds of globally-distributed coaches very difficult; the operations team had to manually build an activity report for every coach each month, send it to confirm accuracy, wait to receive it back, and then send individual payments via PayPal.
"The whole process took two to three days — at least" — Anisha Suterwala, Strategic Ops Senior Analyst, BetterUp
The lengthy manual payroll process meant that the BetterUp operations team wasn't able to focus as much time on higher-value activities like providing individualized support to coaches and ensuring client satisfaction.
Solution
With Worksuite, BetterUp was able to create a database of its entire community of coaches, who are able to enter in their professional experience, certifications, and language abilities, creating a more holistic and accurate profile for every coach.
This database of profiles, which can be updated by coaches at any time, enables BetterUp to easily and immediately find the best coach for a client based on the criteria of their choosing.
"It's very important for us to ensure a good fit between the program and the coach, based on matching the unique needs of the client with the skills and qualifications of our coaches. Worksuite makes this incredibly easy." — Anisha Suterwala, Strategic Ops, BetterUp
Paying coaches with Worksuite also became significantly less time and resource-intensive by streamlining activity tracking, invoicing, and payments — and dramatically reducing the amount of time the BetterUp team spends conducting payroll.
"Before Worksuite, we needed to do all the payments manually; with Worksuite everything is captured in the Worksuite platform and is automatically sent out on a regular cadence. It's super smooth, super quick, and takes about three hours now whereas it used to take about three days." — Anisha Suterwala, Strategic Ops, BetterUp
Result
Time Gained Means Better Service and Support.
"With the time we've gained back, we're able to build out more of our platform, including our dashboard and running the performance analysis that helps us improve." — Anisha Suterwala, Strategic Ops, BetterUp
"Getting bogged down in payment processing hindered our ability to give our broad community of coaches the individualized support and personalized assistance they need to succeed. I'm now free and able to support our coaches. Not having that 3-day payroll process hanging over our heads at the end of every month is very helpful." — Malaika Drebin, Senior Coach Community Manager, BetterUp
BetterUp coaches also noticed an improvement over the previous process. What coaches reported is that it's very seamless and makes a lot of sense to use. And since BetterUp now has the ability to easily keep track of their unique qualifications, expertise, certifications, and more, they have a more complete picture of every coach and are better able to match them to the perfect clients.
"The final piece of the puzzle is Worksuite's incredible support. Any question a coach has about the platform or payments has been answered immediately, so I have full faith that Worksuite is as committed to supporting our coaches and ensuring their success as we are." — Malaika Drebin, Senior Coach Community Manager, BetterUp
Founded in 2013, BetterUp pairs employees with a dedicated, expert coach to cultivate the leadership behaviors they need to thrive. Its mobile-first platform facilitates convenient, frequent touch points and continuous learning to prepare rising leaders for new challenges.
