Revolutionizing Jackson Hewitt’s Employee Onboarding with Bloomfire 

“Onboarding thousands of employees each year is intense. We use a variety of tools to ensure that tax preparers have the right resources, including AskJH, our Bloomfire website.”

Overview

Jackson Hewitt, a leading tax preparation company, faces the challenge of onboarding thousands of tax preparers annually who must stay up-to-date with the latest tax laws. To address this, the company adopted Bloomfire to streamline onboarding, boost employee engagement, and ensure compliance across its corporate and franchise offices.

Challenges

Massive Seasonal Onboarding:
Each year, Jackson Hewitt hires thousands of tax pros, many of whom are new to the company. The company must efficiently equip these employees with the most up-to-date tools and information to perform effectively during the busy tax season.

Complex Knowledge Management:
With constantly evolving tax laws and internal procedures, Jackson Hewitt faced the challenge of maintaining a current and accessible knowledge base. Moreover, they needed to ensure the content was segmented correctly to comply with legal requirements, especially in differentiating between corporate and franchise-owned offices.

Employee Engagement and Knowledge Utilization:
Keeping employees engaged with the knowledge management system and staying informed about new updates was an ongoing challenge. Jackson Hewitt needed a solution that provided information and encouraged active participation and continuous learning.

Solution

Jackson Hewitt adopted Bloomfire as a central hub for knowledge management, focusing on onboarding, continuous learning, and compliance. Within their new knowledge community, “AskJH”, they created intuitive custom homepages for tax preparers with regularly updated content and implemented role-based learning plans tailored to employees’ experience levels. Daily announcements and widgets were added to the homepage to boost engagement, ensuring critical updates are easily accessible. Bloomfire’s group features also allowed for precise content segmentation, ensuring compliance across corporate and franchise offices.

Streamlined Onboarding with Bloomfire

• Custom Homepages:
  Jackson Hewitt created custom homepages explicitly tailored for tax preparers. These homepages are designed to be intuitive and easy to navigate and feature regularly updated content that is crucial for new hires.
• Role-Based Learning Plans:
  Bloomfire enabled Jackson Hewitt to customize learning content based on an employee’s role and experience level. New hires receive targeted learning plans that differ from those for seasoned employees, ensuring that each individual gets the right training at the right time.

Enhancing Engagement and Promoting Continuous Learning

• Daily Announcements and Interactive Widgets:
  To maintain high levels of engagement, Jackson Hewitt uses daily announcements and custom widgets on the Bloomfire homepage. These tools highlight essential updates and make them easily accessible whenever employees log in.

Ensuring Compliance and Effective Content Segmentation

• Strategic Content Segmentation for Compliance:
  Jackson Hewitt utilizes Bloomfire’s group features to segment content between corporate and franchise-owned offices carefully. This ensures that each group receives relevant information formatted in compliance with specific legal requirements.

“We have tax preparers in offices, and imagine they’re always sitting in front of a client, and going between AskJH, our tax filing software, and, of course, interacting with the client. We want to give them something very straightforward, simple, and visual. That’s why Bloomfire has always been a good asset for us.”

Results

Boosted Engagement:
Following the implementation of Bloomfire, Jackson Hewitt observed a substantial increase in the utilization of their knowledge base, indicating improved engagement among employees. The company continues to refine its strategies to enhance adoption rates further.

Streamlined Onboarding Efficiency:
The integration of Bloomfire has significantly expedited the onboarding process, enabling new hires to quickly acclimate and become productive, thus reducing the time required to get up to speed.

Enhanced Compliance Across Offices:
Through meticulous content segmentation and strict moderation processes, Jackson Hewitt successfully maintains compliance across its diverse network of corporate and franchise-owned offices.

“We’re implementing Ask AI, which responds to questions directly, and we’re excited about the difference it can make.”

Conclusion

Bloomfire has become an important tool for Jackson Hewitt, enabling the company to efficiently onboard thousands of employees each year by providing a user-friendly, data-driven platform that ensures tax preparers have access to the latest knowledge and tools, thereby improving service quality. Looking ahead, Jackson Hewitt plans to refine the platform’s usability further, integrate advanced automation and AI tools like “Ask AI” for better search functionality and enhance its data-driven approach by analyzing user behavior and support tickets to continuously address information gaps and maintain a robust knowledge management system.