100+

hours of development
time saved

6 months

to build bespoke intranet
with a team of just 1.5

World Finance
CASE STUDY

How World Acceptance Corporation rebuilt their Intranet and saved $100k a year

ShortPoint enabled us to build an entire intranet without consultants or developers. No doubt - ShortPoint is the most cost - efficient way to make SharePoint mimic a real intranet experience.

Jonathan Jones

Director of Talent, World Acceptance Corporation

customer

World Acceptance Corporation operates across 16 states, the company offers personal installment loans that help customers realize their financial goals.

Challenges

Determined to build a cost effective intranet internally, but lacking SharePoint expertise

World Acceptance Corporation was on a mission to really push the boundaries of their business. After making a huge investment to enhance their online presence and product range, they were enjoying explosive growth. As the company scaled, it became increasingly important that staff had fast access to the latest company, customer, HR, and competitor information.

While they had an existing company intranet that was designed to offer all of that, in reality the site was archaic, unengaging, and frustratingly slow to navigate around.

My goal was to make the portal look and function like a modern internet

- Jonathan

Without a well-designed, modern intranet, they were missing the chance to create a more engaged, connected workforce capable of driving further growth and innovation in the business.

“Employees couldn’t take care of their own needs, since it was missing a good interface to even find and view pages. “It didn’t look attractive, because it’s so difficult to design beyond basic templates in SharePoint. “Plus, we had other sites that were built outside of SharePoint, like our HR site. So if an employee searched for an HR term on our intranet, it wouldn’t recognize the content that existed in the portal.

”This lack of usability and centralization, coupled with drab design, meant user numbers were low. Jonathan was determined to change that, with a top-to-tail transformation of the entire site.“ To mimic what we know our employees do at home when they want to find information; where they pull up Google and quickly find the information they need.”

Our IT team was busy with new initiatives and backend infrastructure projects, so they didn’t need me knocking on their door every other day with questions about SharePoint.”

- Jonathan

Unleash your creativity.
Start a trial.

But there was a problem. Because of other priorities, the team that Jonathan could dedicate to the rebuild was limited featuring just one full-time and one part-time colleague. And none of them had much in the way of SharePoint experience.

His first thought was to hire in a
specialist pair of hands to design and administer the new site. But that was going to cost the company $100,000 a year a figure he’d find incredibly hard to justify to senior leaders.

So he had to find another way. He decided to search out design templates that could potentially be overlaid on SharePoint pages to improve their design.

During that search, an all-inclusive solution caught his eye—ShortPoint. The design add-in for SharePoint had all the functions Jonathan needed to create the entire site within his small team—with no coding, and no requirement for developer support. It sounded too good to be true.

“We were hesitant at first because I knew I had to kind of carry this task on my team,” he says.

Our leadership team gave me strict instructions to keep our costs as low as possible. So there was no budget for hiring developers who could produce code to deliver the high level of design we needed.

- Jonathan

So Jonathan contacted ShortPoint, who shared an avalanche of positive client feedback and reiterated the platform’s no-code simplicity. Jonathan was reassured and ready to build the portal he dreamed of with ShortPoint.

Like a lot of companies, we leaned on a portal we’d created in SharePoint to house all our materials. But it had so many limitations.

Jonathan Jones

Director of Talent, World Acceptance Corporation

Solution

No-code design solution that enables HR team to create a stunning new intranet independently

It only took a couple of weeks for Jonathan and his small team to feel at home with ShortPoint. For total peace of mind, he asked his IT department to oversee the installation.

But once that was complete, his HR team handled the whole creation process independently. Getting up and running with ShortPoint was easy.

ShortPoint provided a comprehensive library of how-to-guides and videos that explained how to get the most from every feature. And whenever they needed a little more hand-holding, ShortPoint jumped straight on the phone.

Excited to put what they’d learned into practice, Jonathan and his team started developing the site, using these ShortPoint tools:

Used Tools

ShortPoint has led to a more streamlined process, refined our workflow, and enabled us to bring more money in.

-Milton

1

Theme Builder. Jonathan used this function to improve the site’s overall usability and design. From a single drop-down menu, he was able to incorporate his company’s brand guidelines; add a reliable search and find function; introduce fonts that suited the brand, business and sector; add great-looking menus; and implement responsive mobile design. There was no coding or complexity whatsoever.

2

Page Builder. Next, Jonathan built out individual pages for the site using ShortPoint’s page builder. It was so intuitive and quick; he just clicked on ‘insert’ and added the design elements he wanted, including accordions, backgrounds, tiles, tables, images and text. All with the click of a button.

3

Copy and Paste. Jonathan saved even more time by using ShortPoint’s demo library to access a collection of beautifully crafted page designs. From there, he could copy and paste the designs he liked, immediately generating that same premium look on his portal—and customize images and text right away.

It felt so liberating for Jonathan to be able to progress the site so quickly, without having to wait for IT support or consultants to jump in. Thanks to ShortPoint, Jonathan and his team transformed the portal’s entire frontend in less than six months.

Unleash your creativity.
Start a trial.

We quickly found that even without a lot of SharePoint knowledge, we were able to do this internally on our team and pretty much run it on our own.

Jonathan Jones

Director of Talent, World Acceptance Corporation

Results

$100k of salaries saved and user adoption rates that are rising every day

ShortPoint enabled Jonathan’s ultra-lean team of just 1.5 employees, who were dedicated to the intranet, to create a beautifully branded portal within their team—and all in a matter of months.

Because ShortPoint allows Jonathan’s team to achieve so much so quickly, they didn’t need to hire a SharePoint expert to build and manage the site. Which saved them $100k a year in salaries.

“Everyone knows designing is tough in SharePoint,” he says. “Doing anything outside of the normal templates takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. “Using ShortPoint has saved—and continues to save us— literally hours upon hours every week because we can really simply create the designs we want. We’ve already saved 100+ hours as a team!”

With a branded new look and improved functionality that makes it easier for employees to find the content they need, user numbers have sky-rocketed.

“Our usage is increasing daily, as well as repeat visitors, which is a great measure of the site’s success because people keep coming back,” saysJonathan. “I feel like it’s really made a difference in an area that everycorporation struggles with, which is communication.

Before using ShortPoint, I’d never have expected that a small team such as ours could deliver a product that looks as good as our portal does today.

Jonathan Jones

Director of Talent, World Acceptance Corporation

“Because ShortPoint gives us the ability to have a cleaner front end interface and cleaner pages and organize our information better we’re able to finally give employees information the way they want it. “Employees are finding information faster, which reduces the burden on leaders, who now have fewer manual enquiries to deal with.”

Not only did ShortPoint enable World Acceptance Corporation to replace their archaic intranet with a modern and engaging platform, it made it easy to integrate all the content from their separate HR platform into the new, all-inclusive portal. This was a big deal, because it stripped out significant costs for the business and put an end to the frustrating issue of HR results not being returned.

Since using ShortPoint, Jonathan hasn’t looked back.

“There’s no question for me: ShortPoint is the most cost-efficient way tomake SharePoint mimic a real intranet experience.”

ShortPoint has brought us significant financial savings.Their pricing and structure is so upfront and easy. You just pay your annual fee, sign the contract and immediately have access to everything you need to build an intranet without developers, consultants or coding.

- Jonathan

Get Started Today!

Ignite your vision. Install ShortPoint directly on your site, or play in sandbox mode. No credit card required.

Contact Sales