When you’re the source of alcohol service training for a provincial population of more than 15 million people, there’s a lot riding on your ability to provide fast, easy-to-use certification. That’s exactly the position Smart Serve Ontario (SSO) was in when they chose Integrity Advocate as their complete solution for online ID verification, participation monitoring, reviewing and support.
Recently, we sat down with SSO’s Executive Director, Richard Anderson, to talk about the organization’s evolving training requirements, and why he thinks similar alcohol and food server training organizations should consider adopting Integrity Advocate.
Big Territory, Big Challenges
To understand the challenges facing SSO, you need to understand Ontario. The province is home to more than 40% of Canada’s population, representing dozens of languages and ethnic groups spread out over 415,000 square miles. If you live in Ontario, and you sell, serve, handle or deliver alcohol, you need Smart Serve certification.
With such a diverse group of participants, a major challenge for Smart Serve Ontario is making sure training is accessible and easy-to-use for everyone who needs it.
“The liquor industry in Ontario is evolving… we want to ensure that anyone who is involved in it is doing so responsibly and knowledgeably,” Anderson told us.
We use Integrity Advocate to ensure that the person we’re certifying is the person that will be provided with a certificate; that they’re knowledgeable about the requirements; and that they’re not circumventing the testing process.
Maintaining Privacy and Ease-of-Use
Smart Serve Ontario was an early adopter of online training; when they first started working with Integrity Advocate, in 2019, the organization already had a robust online training program built out. However, their proctoring solution at the time was raising some significant red flags around privacy and accessibility:
“With our previous proctoring solution, you had to download an app, which people objected to; there was also a scheduling component that was inconvenient,” said Anderson.
What drew them to Integrity Advocate was the platform’s ability to offer a full-service solution — technology, reviewing and support from one vendor — that is customizable, and built for privacy and accessibility.
“Integrity Advocate works on all devices. We don’t hear any complaints, you don’t need to download any applications. The validation is very quick, the turnaround is very quick, the support is great, and it’s on demand. We don’t have any complaints from our users. We’ve been very happy!”
Things were going great. And in 2023, a major certification change would create a stress test that proved the scalability of Integrity Advocate’s solution.
The only identity verification, participation monitoring, and exam proctoring solution built on Privacy by Design principles, Integrity Advocate protects learner privacy and ensures assessment integrity for online learning events. Leveraging human review aided by artificial intelligence, services are available 24/7 on all devices, no plugins or software installation required.
The only identity verification, participation monitoring, and exam proctoring solution built on Privacy by Design principles, Integrity Advocate protects learner privacy and ensures assessment integrity for online learning events. Leveraging human review aided by artificial intelligence, services are available 24/7 on all devices, no plugins or software installation required.
