Skilljar Coffee Chats showcase different ways customers are using our platform, including demos with special guests. This month’s Customer Education Coffee Chat, hosted by Cutler Bleecker, Skilljar’s Customer Training Manager, featured a conversation with Andy Green, Sr. Director of Customer Education for LogicMonitor.

LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based automated monitoring platform for infrastructure applications and business services. LogicMonitor became a Skilljar customer in 2016, but it wasn’t until Andy’s team conducted a floor-to-ceiling renovation of their customer education platform that it became an invaluable resource for their customers and internal stakeholders.

Overall, engagement in LM Academy is comparably high, especially for a newer refresh like this. On a grading scale, I would give this an A in web outcomes so far. This has almost overnight reinvigorated web enthusiasm for our Academy pages.— SEO Manager, LogicMonitor

Andy explained how their renovation journey included an assessment of the existing platform, a re-evaluation of content, technology, and design, and a plan for transformation. As a bonus for chat attendees, Andy also revealed five ways to gain internal wins and improved relationships with stakeholders. Whew!

The newly renovated LM Academy from LogicMonitor

So grab your coffee and read the recap of how LogicMonitor set out on their renovation journey – and the amazing results that followed!

Inheriting a Customer Education platform? First, complete an assessment.

One great reason for a renovation is if you are coming into a new role with an existing platform.

When Andy joined LogicMonitor at the end of 2021, his first task was to assess the state of their customer education initiatives. With the rapid rate of growth the company was experiencing (LogicMonitor went from 180 employees in 2016 to over 1,000 by 2021), lack of budget or program identity, and changing customer needs resulting from the pandemic, he concluded their program wasn’t keeping pace. The content was largely focused around onboarding and lacked an organized structure.

LogicMonitor’s first iteration of Skilljar was a single catalog page in search of an identity.

Reasons to renovate:

• Their academy was unbranded and using the Skilljar domain, logicmonitor.skilljar.com, which meant there was no tracking available through Google Analytics.
• The platform was focused predominantly on onboarding content, which meant customers were using it as a single-serve experience.
• Low engagement meant low completion rates.
• Three different portals for customers, partners, employees with three different designs meant there was no uniformity or efficiency.
• No brand identity or content roadmap meant the platform was boring and floundering.

If any of these conditions sound familiar, your customer training program might be in need of a renovation!

Our company had grown, but we failed to keep our learning environment and curriculum on pace with updates and new features from both Skilljar and LogicMonitor. What we were offering our customers with the product wasn’t aligned with our learning platform. I felt like we had outgrown it.— Andy Green

Tips from LM Academy’s renovation journey

Andy and his team had their work cut out for them. Here is an overview of their four-part approach, along with lessons learned from their renovation journey.

Lessons learned:

• Be realistic on expectations – Now is the best time to fully chart your path, giving yourself plenty of time, because life happens.
• Keep it simple – Don’t overcomplicate things, especially at the highest level.
• Make friends – Understand which stakeholders you need to help you on the journey.
• Be willing to adapt – Forces outside of your control will arise. Respond to the ever-changing needs of your audience and deliver a truly valuable learning experience.

Your customer training program needs updates just like a house needs renovations. You need to bring it up to speed. For a learning platform, that means making it more user-friendly (and that goes for your house, too!)— Andy Green

Key pillars for your platform renovation: Content, Design, and Technology

Next, Andy explained the three main pillars of their customer education platform renovation over a horizon spanning eight quarters.

Scaling content quickly

To scale content quickly, Andy needed to create a system that flowed continuous content updates into the Academy.

You want customers to come and know that there’s valuable content being produced on a regular basis.— Andy Green

Relaunching design

In addition to establishing a constant flow of content, they needed to update their design to reflect the brand’s identity.

Expand tech stack

Lastly, they needed to broaden their education tech stack (which at the time, was solely Skilljar) to include certification proctoring, exam authoring and security, academy subscriptions, and more.

Scaling content with “byte-sized” learning

LogicMonitor keeps a steady stream of education content flowing into their Academy with Learning Bytes.

LogicMonitor created an engine to scale content into their Academy with the goal of doubling the amount of content by the end of 2022. They accomplished this through the creation of “Learning Bytes,” which are content tidbits crowdsourced from internal teams such as technical support, CSMs, and solution architects. In this way, Andy was able to loop in hundreds of subject matter experts. Each contributed content through short videos using templates his team created in Confluence so the content looked uniform. Users can self-select the videos they want to view based on their needs.

Andy leveraged an incentive program to get teams to participate, which turned out to be a great way for team members to highlight their expertise across the company.

Design for impact

Many Skilljar customers are able to match their learning platform to the look and feel of their website, such as LogicMonitor has done with LM Academy.

Need a new design for your learning platform? Start by exploring platforms from other Skilljar customers such as Gainsight, GoodData, Smartsheet, Qualtrics, and Pendo to get some inspiration.

It’s ok to take a look at what other Skilljar customers are doing to see the scope and expanse of what you can do with a little bit of skill and some imagination. Just remember your brand and align with it.— Andy Green

Andy recommended using Skilljar’s Walkthrough site to find code snippets that will help you improve your design.

The Skilljar Walkthrough site is a gold mine. It’s a phenomenal way to add some life to your page instantly.— Andy Green

Andy also offered these design tips:

• Have a sandbox domain to test your ideas and themes before going live on your platform.
• Don’t be afraid to mess up. (You can even use ChatGPT to help you fix your code if you are having issues.)
• Build a site map early to consider how users will navigate and flow through your platform. (You can use Lucidchart or simply put pen to paper to get started.)
• Consider your tag structure – Think SEO! (LM Academy has two of the top ten web pages for LogicMonitor and the lowest bounce rates for their site!)

By building a look and feel for our training platform that seamlessly integrated from our corporate homepage, we created an authenticity and established the Academy as a legitimate brand of LogicMonitor.— Andy Green

Results Matter!

With a little help from Skilljar’s latest analytics innovation, Andy’s team saw some impressive results proving that trained customers are your best customers!

Certified Customers are satisfied customers! NPS for our customers with at least one certification is 86% higher than users without a certification! Kudos to the team at Skilljar for building the Customer Education Business Impact Template. These new templates are a massive time saver for our team to show the business value results of a customer education program.— Andy Green

Plus, LM Academy saw significant growth across new, active, and returning students, enrollments, and certificates granted, as a result of their platform renovation.

In addition, they saw momentum continuing through Q1 2023 with online certification purchases increasing four-fold.

As we exited Q1 of 2023, we continued to see user engagements increase over a prior period where we had been just flatlining for years – which was awesome.— Andy Green

Metrics related to program efficacy and business impact/revenue are extremely important. But just as important is having stakeholders who can back your program up to team leadership – you want people talking about your program!

Here are Andy’s tips for getting internal team buy-in for your customer training program.

In summary, Andy offered this advice for anyone looking to renovate their customer training program:

• Be realistic in your expectations and give yourself enough time, keep your approach simple, build relationships with those who can help you, and be flexible and willing to adapt along the way.
• To design an effective Skilljar portal, get inspiration from public academies, align with your brand, use Skilljar Walkthrough and ChatGPT for CSS, test themes in a sandbox, create a site map, structure tags, and optimize for SEO.
• Implementing a customer training program that breaks down department silos, provides increased visibility, streamlines processes, promotes a culture of continuous learning, and improves efficiency can lead to improved collaboration, enhanced learning culture, and achievement of goals more quickly and effectively.

We’re so busy just trying to keep our programs afloat. This is a valuable reminder to take a step back to picture what we want it to look like, create a plan for how to get there, communicate goals, and get buy-in.— Cutler Bleecker

See more resources from Skilljar on how to renovate your existing customer training program and share your success with stakeholders:

How to Structure Your Course Catalog in Skilljar ( A before/after experience including tips and lessons learned from Skilljar customer, Solver)
Skilljar Walkthrough Site (Browse ready-to-use HTML templates, code snippets, developer tutorials, and more for a DIY platform renovation)
Skilljar Strategic Insights (Learn how your program’s performance stacks up against others so you can make a case to stakeholders)
Skilljar Business Impact Template (Visualize the impact of customer education on customer satisfaction and retention – your leadership team will thank you!)

In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s Director of Customer Marketing, Jen Raphael, hosted a conversation with our VP Product, Niran Kundapur, to reveal some exciting new innovations from Skilljar to help customer education professionals demonstrate the success of their training programs and the business value they create.

At Skilljar, we believe that the purpose of customer education is to drive business outcomes for your organization in addition to providing more effective training programs. In this webinar, Niran presented Skilljar’s capabilities for measuring the success of training programs – including two new innovations: Strategic Insights and the Customer Education Business Impact Template.

Business Outcomes Impacted by Skilljar

Niran explained that, in today’s market, a key business outcome is retaining the customers and revenue you already have. Customer education has demonstrated impact on renewals and expansions as well as across the complete customer journey, including:

• Brand awareness: Education helps create brand awareness, resulting in more leads and faster deal cycles.
• Onboarding: Education streamlines onboarding for different personas, leading to faster time to value.
• Product adoption: Education helps your product users, both new and returning, fully adopt key features leading to great value for them.
• Customer satisfaction: Our customers have shown that training usage is a key predictor of customer health and NPS.
• Scaling efficiently: Internal teams such as customer success, support, and professional services, are able to scale more efficiently when customers have self-service training options.

In short, customer education is about business impact.— Niran Kundapur

Bridging Customer Education and Customer Impact

Niran announced new functionality to empower Skilljar customers to build a bridge between customer education and business impact. On one side of the bridge, there is the customer education team. On the other side, there are stakeholders, i.e., executive leadership, responsible for revenue, pipeline, customer health, profit, and cash flow. In between, there are the latest Skillar functionality and innovations, including:

• Account-based Analytics: Compare customer accounts based on learning performance. (Consumption and certification reports coming soon!)
• Strategic Insights: Compare your program with other programs like yours. (This is a first release. We plan to make enhancements based on customer feedback.)
• Business Impact Templates: Show business impact for your program in the form of charts prepared for stakeholders.

These new releases work together to empower Skilljar customers to drive impact for both their learners and their business, and then demonstrate it to stakeholders. With these capabilities, our customers can identify performance gaps and opportunities, prioritize them, and take action – or find achievements to celebrate.

Training professionals take great pains to author the right content, acquire learners, and drive consumption, certifications, and training revenue. Now, Skilljar helps you showcase this value to your business stakeholders.— Niran Kundapur

Deep Dive: New Skilljar Product Innovations

Niran then gave attendees an overview of each of the new Skilljar capabilities.

Account-based Analytics Using Groups (Group Analytics)

Account-based analytics is a feature powered by Skilljar’s Group Analytics, which is built on top of Skilljar Groups. (A group is a subset of your learners that satisfy some membership criteria. For the purposes of account-based analytics, think of each of your customer accounts as a group.)

Account-based Analytics lets you compare the performance of your accounts based on metrics like active users, session time, enrollments, and completions. You can filter by date range, content type, or specific accounts. You can organize learners into groups not just by accounts, but also by product purchased, user role, or other custom categories.

Training usage is a key predictor of customer health, NPS, and renewals. Use Account-based Analytics to understand which accounts are actively learning and which need attention.

Strategic Insights

While Account-based Analytics lets you compare the learning performance of your accounts, Strategic Insights lets you compare the learning performance of your program against other programs like yours. Strategic Insights benchmarks are determined using Skilljar’s large dataset of anonymized learning experiences.

Strategic Insights has new data visualizations and continually updated comparisons to aggregated benchmarks. Learn more about the benchmarks and performance metrics available here.

We believe Strategic Insights is the first tool of its kind for our industry to help benchmark training program performance against evidence-based benchmarks.— Niran Kundapur

Customer Education Business Impact Template

Skiljar’s Customer Education Business Impact Template is a spreadsheet template (Excel or Google Sheets) into which you can import both your learning data and your business data to assess the value of trained customers versus untrained customers. Learn more about how to use the Business Impact Template here.

Skilljar’s new capabilities show me that Skilljar is thinking holistically about how to help me with my program, allowing me to manage up better.— Stephanie Pellegrino, Director of Customer Education and Adoption, Gong

(Note: The Business Impact Template is not exclusive to Skilljar customers; however, exports from Skiljar customers are template-ready. And our CSMs are trained to guide our customers through the process.)

Skilljar’s Suite of Analytics Products

Account-based Analytics, Strategic Insights, and the Business Impact Template are all innovations built on top of Skilljar’s core analytics capabilities including:

• Dashboard Analytics: Skilljar’s dashboard provides overview analytics; enrollment, content, and VILT analytics; Account-based Analytics; Strategic Insights; and more.
• Salesforce app: We have been told that our Salesforce app is the best for our market. Find it on the AppExchange, for which Salesforce requires stringent security reviews. Our customers use this app to tie learner data directly to Salesforce contacts and analyze the impact on revenue retention. They use our app’s Template Reports and Custom Reports to speed up time to insights. The Skilljar-to-Salesforce-to-BI integration is a great solution for all companies to show business impact of your customer education programs.
• Data Connector: As programs scale and mature, they generate large volumes of data that need to be pushed into their BI systems. In this regard, the Skilljar Data Connector is a great accompaniment to the Salesforce App.
• API& Webhooks: Move data wherever you want, and integrate with a variety of software, including iPaaS tools such as Zapier, Workato, and more.

Skilljar’s goal with our suite of products is to make your program data accessible, useful, and actionable so you can drive business impact.— Niran Kundapur

(For those of you new to Skilljar, our CSMs will set you up with everything you need to know about our built-in tools when you become a customer.)

Coming Soon!

Niran provided a glimpse of even more great innovations to come for Skilljar analytics including Custom Reports, which is a new feature to help you create a report on consumption and certifications, with just the data you want to see. Learn more about all of the great analytics built into the Skilljar dashboard here.

Ready to start demonstrating the success of your training program? Contact your CSM to learn how Skilljar can help. Not a Skilljar customer? Get a personal demo!

Skilljar Coffee Chats showcase different ways customers are using our platform, including demos with special guests. This month’s Customer Education Coffee Chat, hosted by Cutler Bleecker, Skilljar’s Customer Training Manager, featured a conversation with B.J. Schone, Director of Learning and Enablement for LaunchDarkly.

LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that empowers SaaS teams to deliver and control their software in a way that’s more manageable, less stressful, and more intelligent.

B.J.’s talk on how training practitioners can create a story about their education program’s progress and impact to share with senior executives is particularly relevant to Skilljar, as we are committed to helping our customers demonstrate the business value of their education programs.

So grab your coffee and read the recap of how LaunchDarkly communicates progress and impact for their Customer Education program!

LaunchDarkly Academy offers a video to engage new users, a series of four courses to get developers up to speed on features and functionality, live office hours, and a series of videos curated from their YouTube channel. They also offer Developer certifications with Admin and Product Manager certifications coming later this year.

We rolled out our Academy with Skilljar in less than six months. Skilljar’s been a great partner and we’re excited by all of the buy-in across our company – from Engineering, Product Marketing, Customer Success, and more – to build out the content in LaunchDarkly Academy.”— B.J. Schone

How do you gauge customer education program success?

Before embarking on any customer training program, it’s important to understand what you want to get out of it and what success metrics look like. For LaunchDarkly, this includes both a short- and long-term vision, and a comparison of trained vs. untrained customer accounts.

In the short-term, consolidating multiple training programs was key. In the longer term, they wanted to impact business metrics such as product adoption, expansion, renewals, and support tickets opened.

Initially, our focus was on communicating our progress building a program; now we’re shifting more toward the value we bring to the business. Ultimately, what matters is business impact.— B.J. Schone

10 ways to communicate Customer Education program progress and impact to stakeholders

Before you can demonstrate program impact, you should identify your internal stakeholder audiences and understand what information they need on a regular basis. Who are the people in power? Who might be interested in this information?

Map out what each group might need and how you can get it to them, based on the level of power and interest each group has regarding your program. Once you have this information mapped out, you can use the following tactics to communicate impact.

1. Create a “walking deck” to share with internal stakeholders

A walking deck is an informal presentation you can share with different teams and update based on their feedback and reactions. This will help you determine what the content teams would find most valuable and crystalize the success metrics you should be creating.

This type of presentation helps you build relationships and make stakeholders aware of what you’re doing and the progress you’re making. It also helps you share a common vocabulary around goals and impacts, so when you actually start to present your results, you are all on the same page about the information being covered.

Get out there and spread the word about what you’re doing. Even if you think stakeholders already know about your program, it’s not a bad idea to show them again from your point of view.— B.J. Schone

2. Establish a central source for all Academy information

To keep everyone streamlined as to what’s in their Academy, B.J. created an internal page in Confluence that his team contributes to. The Confluence page provides an overview of their Academy including an explanation of what it is, visual assets, marketing messaging, slides of Academy pages, FAQs, certification badges, courses in progress, and more.

Having our Academy information centralized helps us communicate all things Academy. For every piece of training we create, we have a page with the course description and learning objectives. We point stakeholders to it to get all the information they need. And they are very appreciative – our CSMs love this.— B.J. Schone

3. Create a Slack/Teams channel to share academy information with stakeholders

B.J. created an #Academy channel in their company’s Slack platform where they post updates on their customer education program, including results. It’s just another way for them to promote their progress and communicate program impact.

My goal with these announcements is to be able to one day say, we’re seeing the impact of trained vs. untrained audiences. We’re seeing fewer support tickets, or more frequent expansions and renewals, for trained customers.— B.J. Schone

4. Post Academy info in existing Slack/Teams channels to keep stakeholders informed

Whenever you have something worth sharing about your training program with other teams, don’t wait for them to come to your Slack/Teams channel. Post in other team channels when you have a key update that matters for that team and how they interact with their end users.

5. Create a quarterly recap report

B.J. created a quarterly report to keep stakeholders informed on their Academy’s performance and what’s coming next.

The Table of Contents for their Q4 recap includes:

• What We’re Hearing
• Q4 by the Numbers
• How We Enhanced the Academy
• What We’re building for the Next Quarter
• Questions/Feedback

Our execs are really happy with the data points we’ve shown them so far.— B.J. Schone

6. Send personalized messages to executives

It could be helpful to share any important results or information directly with company executives that would be happy to hear the news. Of course, you need to use your own judgment for creating these types of messages at your company.

Just be really smart about either the relationships you have and the ones you want to build, and how you would craft that message.— B.J. Schone

7. Create a “Wall of Fame” to share customer testimonials

B.J. uses an internal company page built in Confluence to share quotes from customers, partners, and internal team members to celebrate any positive news about the program. He then shares the page in one of the Slack/Teams channels mentioned earlier to gain visibility and update on progress and impact for the program.

From a LaunchDarkly customer:

“We might have purchased an enterprise plan if we had this training sooner and knew everything that was available.”

Quotes like this feel really good. And that’s something we want to make sure our internal stakeholders hear. Why not celebrate the impact you’re having on your customers?— B.J. Schone

8. Create a monthly feedback report

B.J.’s team uses Typeform to conduct sophisticated surveys for all of their courses. With this tool, they can dig deeper into feedback by using conditional logic to create question branches based on users’ answers, including hiding questions if they’re not relevant based on a response. For example, if a user gives a low score on something, the system can send them more questions to help understand why the score was given.

For example, the first question they ask is whether the respondent is a customer or prospect. Depending on the answer, they can ask questions specific to current or potential users.

Key questions in the feedback report include:

• As a potential user of LaunchDarkly, has taking this course increased your interest in our software?
• How useful was the course content in understanding the features and capabilities of LaunchDarkly?
• Has taking this course impacted your confidence level in using LaunchDarkly?

Along with the other measures discussed, B.J. compiles these results on a monthly basis to communicate program progress and impact to executives.

9. Put reporting into the hands of Customer Success Managers and Account Execs

B.J.’s team created a report in Salesforce to show where customers are in terms of completing courses in their Academy. They then share this report with CSMs, AEs, and anybody else in the company that has Salesforce access, and train them on how to filter the report. For example, CSMs can filter by email domain of a customer and see how many end users are completing training.

It’s important to empower teams to go in and get their own data by creating analytics dashboards and teaching them how to find the information they need. Skilljar helps give us this ability.— B.J. Schone

10. Build dashboards to monitor and share progress

Looking forward, B.J. plans to use Looker (data analytics platform) and Snowflake (data cloud platform) to build dashboards to monitor and share progress and impact with executives.

User data from Skilljar is connected to Salesforce via the Skilljar Data Connector. The Salesforce instance will be configured to flow into Snowflake. Looker is able to pull any data that exists in Snowflake and populate dashboards. (Every other data set in their company flows into Snowflake, so it’s important for internal teams to see results there.)

Starting with Skilljar data, we will be able to understand metrics such as support tickets opened, expansions, renewals, customer satisfaction, CSAT, NPS, and more – for our customers that completed training.— B.J. Schone

For B.J., the top questions to help assess the business impact of their training program are:

• Are Academy users more likely to use more features in LaunchDarkly?
• If they’re using the training, are they adopting the product more holistically?

Their team will look at the data they have in Snowflake and pair it up with their Skilljar data to create the ultimate impact dashboard to answer these questions.

In summary, here are B.J.’s suggestions for creating and showing business value for your education program.

First, make sure you have a clear idea of who your audience is and what they want and need. And then come up with ways you think will work best to keep them updated on the progress and impact of your program.— B.J. Schone

Ready to understand the impact of trained customers vs. untrained customers for your product?

Here are some resources from Skilljar:

• Customer Education Business Impact Template
• Group Analytics (for Skilljar customers only)
• Viewing Skilljar Data in Salesforce

Skilljar Coffee Chats showcase different ways customers are using our platform, including demos with special guests. This month’s Customer Education Coffee Chat, hosted by Cutler Bleecker, Skilljar’s Customer Training Manager, featured a conversation with “the three-headed customer education monster” at BetterCloud: Daniel Gualtieri, Principal, Training and Enablement; Jody Hoiten, Sr. Training & Enablement Instructor; and Kelly O’Sullivan, Customer Training & Enablement Instructor.

BetterCloud is a SaaS Management Platform that enables IT professionals to discover, manage, and secure their growing stack of SaaS applications in the digital workplace. They use Skilljar to power their learning platform, BetterCloud Flight School. 

The training team noticed that 25% of their customers were missing out on their two-day Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT) session that ran during business hours in North America. (These customers didn’t have the time to access a two-day training or were international and therefore not available during training hours.) They wanted to create a fun, engaging online learning environment available free to everyone. In addition, they wanted to use “gamification” to incentivize users to come back to training again and again. 

They started the development process by creating a theme: “Flight School,” which is a play on words for their product that was fun and welcoming.

BetterCloud connects your cloud systems via the Google admin console with Slack, Dropbox, and more. In other words, BetterCloud teaches you to navigate the clouds, and when you’re navigating the clouds, you’re flying. That’s how we landed on Flight School.— Dan Gualtieri

Brand assets for BetterCloud Flight School.

So grab your coffee and read the recap of how Flight School gave their learning platform the wings to fly!

Making the pitch for your Customer Education program identity

BetterCloud’s Customer Education team had to pitch their program identity and theme to their executive leadership. 

They knew that users who took their administrator certification exam renewed at the rate of 6:1. They used this as a justification to say to leadership that the more classes people took, the more they learned about the product, and the more likely they’d be to upsell and renew.

BetterCloud determines metrics by filtering all of their student records into Salesforce through Skilljar, and tying them to a BetterCloud contact record. From there, they are able to tie user records to their average recurring revenue, renewals, churns, and more. 

Fortunately everything that we do with Skilljar syncs directly into Salesforce. By pulling Salesforce reports, we were able to see who renewed, who upsold at renewal, and who ultimately churned.— Dan Gualtieri

Designing your Customer Education program identity

BetterCloud wanted to create an experience that was immersive and fun and not confusing for learners to navigate and experience. It was important to ensure their Flight School theme was on full display on the homepage along with easy pathing depending on a user’s needs. The three main paths that learners can take are self-paced courses, live instruction, and an exam preparation course to help them get ready to pass the certification exam. They also customized their site with a code snippet that welcomes learners by their first name.

Below is what it looks like if a user clicks into the self-paced path. Course tiles are represented by “boarding passes” with three-letter designations for courses that mimic airport names, e.g. OVR = Overview. 

As learners complete courses, they earn badges and can also earn Flight School-themed swag, such as mugs and tumblers. For example, as a user completes all of BetterCloud’s courses, they work themselves up to receiving a captain’s shirt. (BetterCloud worked with the vendors Custom Ink to create the customized items and Sendoso for warehousing and shipping.)

Getting your customers into your learning platform and giving them a reason to take a class is a great way to incentivize education and training.— Dan Gualtieri

Fun swag for BetterCloud FlightSchool.

Offering rewards in the form of swag was a great way for BetterCloud to incentivize learners and continue to uplevel them through their learning experience, leading to greater course consumption and driving them toward certification. 

Incentivizing continued education was really important for us because as we had seen even prior to expanding our offerings, customers who knew the product were champions of it and were more likely to renew or buy more parts of our product. — Jody Hoiten

Creating your content strategy

BetterCloud’s decisions about lesson, course, and overall program design were grounded in neuroscience, including the AGES model for long-term learning (Attention, Generation, Emotion, Spacing). 

Another key strategy was the timing of courses — each lesson is less than five minutes and each course is less than one hour. 

These short chunks allow for more realistic attention expectations of our learners, and also naturally create opportunities for micro breaks and spacing within learning. Mixing up our lesson types also helps people remain engaged with the content.  — Jody Hoiten

A third tool they used is storytelling to help learners remain interested and keep the content relatable by encouraging connections to things they already know or have learned previously.

We want to constantly be building, deepening, generating new paths of knowledge. And the more associations we can encourage that learner to make, the easier it will be for them to recall and use that information.  — Jody Hoiten

Varying lesson types

BetterCloud uses three main lesson types built into their self-paced Flight School courses: 

• Video content – This is the main proportion of courses, usually incorporating voiceover and screen shots of the product, built in Adobe Premiere Pro.
• SCORM content – This is used for hands-on activities in a simulated environment and created in Adobe Captivate.
• Quizzes – These are around five multiple-choice or multi-select questions included at the end of each section as a quick knowledge check. The types of questions included in quizzes in their courses are similar to the types of questions in their certification exam.

Our entire customer education program falls under the Flight School umbrella to keep that messaging consistent.— Kelly O’Sullivan

Most of BetterCloud’s content is delivered in short-form video-based lessons. Each section has a few hands-on activities, depending on the specific content, where they can then put into practice what they’ve seen in the videos. Users are prompted to click through into the platform to see how they can achieve certain steps. This way, learners can feel like they’re doing all of the steps in the platform without needing to actually go into a sandbox instance. 

All of their courses end with a survey built into the Skilljar lesson through an embedded Google form. This allows them to read and manage the results fed into a Google sheet. 

Sky-high results for BetterCloud’s Customer Education program

The assumptions the team made about how a thoughtful, themed learning program would lead to business value have paid off. 

From July 2022 – February 2023:

• Customers that have taken a BetterCloud Flight School class are 6x more likely to renew.
• 570+ student enrollments, 883+ course completions (640 self-paced).
• 35% of Account ARR has completed at least 1 class.
• 56% survey response rate.
• Satisfaction ratings score at 90%+ across all metric

We’re scoring at 90% or higher for the 56% of people who are giving us feedback. And 98% of learners said they would recommend BetterCloud’s learning experience to a colleague.— Dan Gualtieri

Now that’s a flight worth taking.

Ready to take your customer education program to new heights? Here are some resources from Skilljar:

6 Ways to Secure More Training Budget 
Creating Delightful Customer Education Programs That Drive Business Outcomes 
4 Incentives for Your Customers to Attend and Complete Training 
BetterCloud Wins the People’s Choice Golden Skillet Award at Skilljar Connect 2022! 

In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s Director of Demand Generation, Carolyn Bradley, hosted a conversation with Robin Wisner, LMS Administrator, and Christian Renfro, Senior Analyst, of ClickUp, to learn about how they analyzed and leveled up their education program metrics within just one year of launch.

ClickUp’s all-in-one productivity tool saves people time by making the world more productive. By unifying project management, document collaboration, spreadsheets, whiteboards, emails, and more, ClickUp’s highly-customizable and flexible solution is a one-stop shop for managing work. They created ClickUp University, powered by Skilljar, to help customers optimize their workspaces so that they can be as productive as possible.

In this webinar, Robin and Christian shared best practices for measuring customer education program success, along with tips for communicating ROI to stakeholders.

“We’re proving that Clickup University increases expansion rates, reduces churn rates, and improves usage and adoption rates for those who take our courses. Once you have this information, you’re ready to communicate ROI to stakeholders.— Robin Wisner

Why metrics matter

Robin pointed to some stats from Skilljar’s 2022 Customer Education Benchmarks and Trends Report to underscore the need for a better understanding of how to track training metrics and how many learning professionals are interested in making metrics an area of focus at their organizations. 

By leveling up our metrics, we’ve been able to improve our learning content and help with our content roadmap as well.— Robin Wisner

The evolution of ClickUp University

Robin provided context for where ClickUp was with their training one year ago, before making metrics a key area of focus for the company.

ClickUp’s customer education originally started with a team of three, nine courses, and simple metrics obtained through the Skilljar dashboard.

Robin acknowledged what most customer education professionals know: It’s important to collect and communicate your program metrics in a meaningful way, especially to stakeholders. Many are doing manual calculations, which is inefficient and takes up a lot of time. 

Metrics are everything, and more Customer Education teams are making this a priority.— Robin Wisner

One of ClickUp’s core values is to make progress toward perfection. They knew there was a need for their users to get more from their product. So they launched with a minimum viable solution to be agile and iterative in improving their learning platform. 

Sometimes we can get stuck on the starting block waiting to get everything perfect. Then you’ve missed a window of opportunity. I encourage all training teams to start small with your platform, and then build on it. — Robin Wisner

Here’s how they iterated ClickUp University:

November 2021 –  Launched at their user conference, LevelUp, with just nine courses and three learning paths. (At the same time, behind the scenes, their instructional designer was working on courses leading up to a certificate program.)

1st Quarter 2022 – Introduced single sign-on so users could log in from the ClickUp platform into the university. They also added an “All Courses” page where users could see all of the courses offered in one place, in addition to the homepage. They broke up longer courses into shorter courses to increase completion rates.

2nd Quarter 2022 – Built webhooks to ingest data from Skilljar to get better, more detailed results for their program. ClickUp University was growing fast. (Approximately 5,000 monthly active users rising by ~500 – 1,000 each month). They wanted to understand who was using the training, and leadership wanted to understand how well it was working. 

3rd Quarter 2022 – Launched their certificate program that offered users a certificate of completion. They also launched a second domain for partners.

4th Quarter 2022 – Launched paid Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT) through an integration with Stripe. They used Skilljar’s Plans feature to package and sell their training content with greater flexibility.

Just one year after launch, ClickUp University has grown to 50+ courses, 120,000 enrollments, and 8,000 monthly annual users (and growing).

How to “measure up”? Start with the basics

Robin’s experience of measurement at ClickUp was to start with the basics. For their core information, they wanted to know the:  # active students, # new active students each month (total #students for each month/#total number of students), # course enrollment, and # course completions.

With the ability to create and manage groups through Skilljar, there’s tons of information you can gather right from the Skilljar dashboard. When we were first looking at our metrics, we talked a lot with our Skilljar CSM, who was amazing.— Robin Wisner

Robin’s team found that their course completion rate was ~30% (versus the industry average of 40% and Skilljar customer benchmark of ~50%). And like most customer education professionals, they wondered how they could improve on these results. So Robin split up their courses into smaller units to encourage course completions. 

After they released the courses related to certificates and their program was growing by 500-1000 active users per month, it was time to start digging deeper. They wanted to start working on targeted promotional emails, looking at personas, and more. 

Time to level up your customer education metrics

What does every customer education professional want to know? According to Robin, it’s: who’s in your university, how long are they staying there, what are they doing, and why are they leaving. 

To help them start leveling up their metrics, Christian looked into Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as Segment and Snowflake to better visualize their data. That meant moving Skilljar data into other tools so they could compare course activity by cohorts, such as SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers. This was easily done by creating simple data models using Excel or CSV files, or Google Sheets.  Alternatively, the data could be extracted using an API or webhooks. 

For a deeper analysis, Christian demonstrated how once the data is extracted (using a CSV file, Excel, API, or webhooks) and loaded into your database (via Snowflake, AWS, or Google Sheets),  you can then transform the data and use visualization tools (such as Tableau, Looker, and Power BI) to enhance the data by joining it to your own company’s metadata to make connections between a user’s account information and things like Annual Recurring Revenue and product usage. 

The idea is to join registrations, course enrollments, lesson completions, and your own company’s data to build a central dataset that you can use to tie user activity in your learning platform (Skilljar) to user activity and behavior with your product. 

Communicating Customer Education ROI to stakeholders

Whether you’re using the Skilljar dashboard or building a data visualization tool, the whole reason you’re leveling up your data is because you want to communicate your ROI to stakeholders.— Christian Renfro

ClickUp divided their ROI reporting into three groups: Executive (helping them understand learning activity’s effects on churn and expansion), Sales & Customer Success (giving them access to data to tell compelling customer stories), and Product (making sure their learning content is sticky). 

Here are their goals for what they were looking for and how they extracted the data for each group.

Now we know that customers who invest time in training are less likely to churn.— Christian Renfro

Once we built a dashboard that combined training information with product usage data, sales reps could then have a holistic conversation about how clients were using different parts of the product and be able to self-service that information for themselves.>— Christian Renfro

You want to be able to get this information out there and available for the Sales team and CSMs so they can use it in their conversations with customers. This tool has been a real time saver for me and for a lot of the people who use it.— Robin Wisner

It’s very exciting for us because now we can actually measure product adoption, which is the dream of customer enablement. We want to know, is learning activity sticky? Is there increased product activity afterward? We can determine which are the high-performing courses and then we can investigate, why are they doing so well? — Robin Wisner

Robin concluded the webinar by explaining how metrics make the life of a customer education professional easier.

Being able to tie your program to revenue is key. We all want to be able to show ROI or at least a correlation between learning and product activity. Doing this increases your visibility and shows your value as a team. Having this data strengthens the company as a whole.”— Robin Wisner

Want to learn more about how to uplevel your customer education metrics? Watch the complete webinar or download Skilljar’s Definitive Guide to Customer Education Metrics. 

Post-event Q&A session with ClickUp

The chat was on fire with questions for this webinar! Since we weren’t able to answer all your questions during the live event, we’ve captured those that weren’t answered live here.

Q: Do you track time on site, time in course/lesson, etc?
A: Through the Skilljar dashboard, we are able to see “time in training” metrics. We are working on tying that to time/money saved. Any time a customer uses ClickUp University content instead of contacting support or their CSM, that is money saved. 

Q: Do you look at participation rates outside of completions?
A: At the moment, we are tracking enrollment vs. completions and user activity within the product 30 days pre- and post-ClickUp University course completion. 

Q: What were the reasons you chose to start with certificates over certifications?
A: Certifications require a much more in-depth process. They need to be legally defensible and usually have a proctored/hands-on component. We had such a huge demand for some kind of “proof” of ClickUp knowledge, we started with certificates for now. We do hope to have admin certification in the future. 

Q: Did you consider obtaining IACET certification for your classes so participants could earn CEUs and also increase the “value” of your training offerings?
A: Yes, we did consider it and may possibly add this in the future. We would like to offer at least admin certification at some point. 

Q: What is an example of a product usage metric that would be joined with revenue and ClickUp University data?
A: We built a great dashboard that showed if the user completed a course that mentioned certain features, did they go into the product afterwards and use that feature. (This does make a few assumptions but it’s still valuable.)

Q: Do you look at the connection between untrained users and the number of support tickets raised?
A: We are starting to dig into that data. We started with revenue data to see retention first. Gotta start somewhere!

Q: Are you able to compare feature use/adoption of people who don’t take the course to use as a baseline vs people who do take the course? That feels really hard because I’m not sure what point in time you measure against.
A: Agreed, that is a hard part. That’s why we took the users who did take courses, and took their activity before/after taking a course. The date selection between those two groups would have been hard to measure.

Q: How do you facilitate and promote communication with Sales and Customer Success to make sure they have the most useful and accurate information about content in the University?
A: It’s still a work in progress. We create a lot of enablement sessions internally, 1-pagers, and cheat sheets for them to use. It helps to focus them not on all of our learning but on our onboarding resources, i.e.,  here’s what a user needs to get started.

Gainsight’s mission is to help businesses drive better outcomes for their customers and, in the process, build more durable businesses that can endure all the ups and downs of the economy. Their software helps organizations scale customer success, build community for customers, and understand product usage. The bigger thing they’re doing at Gainsight, Nick said, is building a community of customer success professionals that can learn from each other. (We at Skilljar share Nick’s commitment to building a community for learning professionals.)

Nick explained how customer education is integral to every step of the customer journey. But much of what he said before getting into the meat of his presentation was just as worthwhile, entertaining, and illuminating. Here are some key takeaways.

Why customer education is more important than ever

“In these tough times, managing, retaining, and driving growth of customers, and enabling them to get the most out of your software are the most critical things you can do as a business.” – Nick Mehta 

Technology has made it possible for new vendors to rapidly develop and deliver their products to market. This has led to more choices than ever for customers, which means we all have to fight for our customers every day. With so many options, the idea of putting customers at the center of your business becomes core to every organization and makes what employees at these companies do even more strategic. 

Customer success is imperative for surviving the economic downturn

“There’s no better way to keep and grow your existing customers than having them trained and enabled on your software. If they’re not trained and enabled then you’re not going to keep them and you’re not going to grow.” – Nick Mehta 

Nick is a pretty smart guy, but don’t just take his word for the importance of customer success. He cited research that points to the importance of customer success for fueling business value.

Research from McKinsey & Company found that what’s driving the most valuable companies in 2022 is not just getting new customers but keeping and growing existing customers, i.e., net revenue retention.

Bain & Company, along with Gainsight’s own research, found that despite the economic downturn, companies are still investing in customer success. Approximately 90% of tech companies plan to keep and grow their customer success initiatives (including customer education) despite the economic downturn, according to Bain.

“In an economic downturn, there’s nothing more important than making your customers successful.” – Nick Mehta

“If our customers aren’t onboarded and enabled and getting value, then we’re not going to make it through these tough times,” Nick said. He explained the concept of durable growth–the only way to build revenue from existing customers is to make sure they’re onboarded, enabled, adopting, and getting value from your solution. Therefore, the role of a customer education professional is to make your business more durable.   

Why customer education is at the heart of customer success

Nick demonstrated the correlation between customer education and customer success as follows:

Customer Success = (Positive) Customer Outcomes + (Great) Customer Experience

While customer education and customer success may seem like different disciplines, the goals of both are exactly the same: helping customers adopt behaviors to drive the business outcomes they are seeking. 

“Customer education and customer success have the exact same goal; they’re just doing it from different lenses.” – Nick Mehta

Both customer education and customer success are about changing people’s mindsets, changing what they do every day, educating them, inspiring them,and getting them to achieve what they’re looking for. 

Not convinced yet?

When Gainsight conducted a survey of their customers asking them what their top four goals were for customer success, and separately, customer education, the results were the same– adoption, scalability, onboarding, and time to value.  

Customer Education is integral to every step in the customer journey

Now that Nick has made his case for why customer education is at the heart of customer success, let’s review the ways customer education is integral to every step of the customer journey. 

1. Onboarding – What’s the #1 predictor of a customer doing well? They’ve gone through customer training. These are the people who can take a project and move it forward using your software. At Gainsight, they measure the health of customers by whether or not they took their training (powered by Skilljar), i.e., not taking training is a key indicator of risk.  
2. Support – Every time a support ticket opens for Gainsight, through a Skilljar chat widget, support reps can see if a customer took training or not. If they see recurring cases about a particular topic, they can guide customers to a specific module in the learning platform, or develop one if none exists, considerably easing the burden on support teams. 
3. Adoption – The sooner a user adopts your product, the more successful they’re likely to be with it. Further, it’s important to not just get customers to use your product but to become more sophisticated in how they use it. (Gainsight has an incredible community of certified professionals who share best practices on Gainsight adoption based on training and promote peer-to-peer learning.)
   
4. Satisfaction – We want customers to have a great experience with our product but we also want them to like us, which translates into Net Promoter Score (NPS). For Gainsight, the difference between customers who are huge fans and those who aren’t is whether or not they’ve been certified.
   
5. Stickiness – We want our customers to be sticky, to last with us through the ups and downs. Having an educated, enabled customer base creates stickiness. Building an army of certified users who are raving fans of your product is one way to create stickiness and drive success long term.  
6. Digital & Scale – Everyone in today’s economy is being told to do more with less. Having CSMs train customers 1:1 is inefficient. You need to move to a 1:many or virtual classroom environment in order to scale. Gainsight sends automated messages to every new customer to get them into a learning path early on. This is one example of how to scale customer education.
7. Outcomes – How can we drive outcomes for our customers? Understand the risk of them not being trained. And then build a success plan for them that involves training. (Remember: Customer Success = Customer Outcomes + Customer Experience)
8. Expansion – One way to get customers to use your product in different ways and try more of your offerings is to get them more educated on it. Education should be built into the product itself, with modules that teach about how to use and understand its different features.
   
9. Advocacy – The goal is to create an army of advocates that post about your product and its value. A great example of advocacy is when users that are certified in your product post their certificates or badges on LinkedIn.
10. Product – You not only need to build a great product, you also need to build a seamless first-class user experience. Education is key for communicating the value of  your product.

None of these steps would be possible without customer education.

In closing, Nick left our audience with four things to think about that apply to you, the learning professional reading this, as well.

1. Consider a learning management system (LMS) to help you integrate education into every step of the customer journey.
2. Consider using education as input into how you measure customer risk; i.e.,If they’re not educated, that’s a red flag.
3. Create a chart that shows the differentials of customer behavior (net retention, time to value, NPS, etc.) with your product based on those who are educated versus those who are not.
4. Be proud of your impact.

Looking for more resources on how to use customer education to improve customer success? Skilljar’s got a few!

• Nick Mehta’s Keynote Presentation at Skilljar Connect 2022 
• How Customer Success Can Help You Scale Your Customer Success Team 
• Customer Education is the Scale Engine of Customer Success 
• Scale Customer Success With Education
• Gainsight’s eLearning Platform Exceeds Industry Usage Benchmarks by 3X

We know that trained customers are your best customers. Key business impact metrics like adoption, retention, and renewals trace back to the effectiveness of customer training, no matter where your customers are located. While the look and feel of the training may change from region to region, the goal of it does not. 

Gaining buy-in, creating, and deploying localized Customer Education content does not have a playbook, but this post details how Jamf, a mobile device management system for Apple, implemented a content localization strategy for their Customer Education program by leveraging Skilljar’s localization functionality and other best practices.

Click here to view their presentation from Connect 2022, the premier conference for customer education and training professionals.

What is content localization?

Localization is the process of transforming or adapting content about your product or service that you have created for your primary audience into content for audiences in another country or locale. You might be thinking, “Isn’t that translation?” Although localization involves translating from one language to another, it does not encompass the entire scope. 

Localizing content also needs to accommodate cultural and contextual differences from one country to the next. For example, if you create a training video with an American flag in the background for your primary United States audience, you could change the flag to a map of the world to comply with your global audience. The written training content on the screen may be the same as the primary market, but a slight tweak like this helps to localize the entire learning experience. 

Content localization can also be technical. Think about CTA buttons, for example. When you translate from English to German, the text may no longer fit within the button. Adjust the backend code within your hosting software to accommodate this language change. 

Localizing is not just about the words. Consider images, videos, currencies, and design formatting as you’re localizing content to create the ultimate customer experience. Adding personal touches to learning content increases customer loyalty and improves the time to value and product adoption. 

Three steps to introduce content localization 

As the decision maker or champion of your Customer Education program, you have probably been asked to localize your training content by a higher-up. But before you can grant their wish, it’s important to understand the full picture before tying up valuable program resources. 

1. Start with the “Why”

Start by asking, “Why are we translating this content?” and “What does success look like in six or 12 months?” For some organizations, that goal might be to drive revenue and customer growth in new regions. That also means retaining customers, so be sure to factor that into the strategy as well. 

Having this basic understanding will be the foundation for your localization strategy and ensure there’s alignment between your department and the rest of your executive team. 

2. Show the data

In addition to asking fundamental questions, seek to understand the data behind why executives are asking you to localize content. 

For example, you can ask for past and future sales performance in regions or territories where you’ve been asked to localize. Understanding the scope of regional success helps determine if that content needs to be localized and if it will be sticky for the customer. 

You can also take a look at support and Customer Success ticket volume by region as another indicator of a need for localization. 

3. Determine the “How”

Implementing a localization strategy doesn’t happen overnight. Continue down the path of collecting all the information you need to make this successful, including an understanding of how you can create the optimal learner experience for your customer. 

Consider questions like, “Where do customers begin their journey with your product?” Is that from marketing or technical documentation inside your product? Or, how does Customer Education fit into the product experience?

Take it one step further and ask how each department across the organization talks about the customer experience. Seek alignment on these crucial touch points before ultimately communicating the help you need to get this project across the finish line. 

How to create a content localization strategy for your customer education program

If you are localizing the entire company’s content, finish that process first. Once you have locked in the previous steps with the rest of your organization and localized the company’s content, you can begin localizing Customer Education content. But not before! This order of operations is critical to remember. 

Approach this process in steps to make it more digestible and break the content categories into three buckets: infrastructure, text, and multimedia. 

Start with your end goal

Localizing training program content is the last piece of the puzzle to creating a fully localized user experience, aka, your end goal. However, remember that localizing content is a step-by-step process. 

For example, you could start by localizing fundamental courses or courses with the highest registrations. Focus on where your customers are finding the most value right now instead of tackling your course catalog as a whole. Release one piece of localized training content and iterate as you go. 

Another caveat to consider is that fully localized will look different for each project. This could look like different languages for different projects or including or not including text-to-speech voiceover. Each project will have its own version of fully localized. 

Set up your infrastructure

Picture this: you are a Spanish-speaking customer that has completed a training course and is finally ready to take the certification exam. Your boss has paid for the exam and it is timed. High stakes! The exam questions have been translated into Spanish, but elements of the user interface (UI) that tell you how to move through the exam haven’t been translated. You start to feel stuck and hopeless. 

This is not the learning experience you want your customers to have. If you have the right infrastructure set up and in place, before customers take your exam, you can think about how to improve your experience. 

A learning management system purpose-built for external training can mitigate this error. Here are two examples of how to localize the customer experience using an LMS. 

1. In Skilljar, customers can add and manage language packs per domain to translate the (UI). Translating the UI is a critical step for localization. This means that Skilljar admins can see the base language in English in one column, the translation provided by Skilljar in the next, and an override text column. The override text column is a great option if you use terminology that’s different from what the language pack provides. 
2. After configuring your language packs, take a look at the homepage user experience. How can you bring languages to different users? If you only want to surface the intended language content chosen by a user, you can reflect that experience in two ways. One way to do this is by using a language picker drop-down that’s automatically built when you add language packs. This changes the language of everything on the homepage, from text to buttons.  But what about translating more than buttons? To help customers get to content in their preferred language, add filter groups via tags on published courses. You can surface this option on your homepage or specific catalog pages, for example.

Format the text translations 

Once your infrastructure is in place, it’s time to think about text. Text could include objectives, key points, or additional resources housed in your course lessons. 

It’s important to consider the text formatting you’re sending to localization teams to translate. Oftentimes, an Excel spreadsheet works well for such efforts. For example, you could format the spreadsheet to use a different sheet for each lesson or dictate formatting rules like consistent italics or bolded words. Whatever method you choose, make sure to pull text from all published courses and learning paths or catalog pages to cover your bases (don’t forget to include course titles!). 

Organizing this process is key to eliminating potential miscommunication between teams and helps your Customer Education team easily find the translated content once it’s finished. 

Adapt multimedia

It’s now time to tackle multimedia translation. This is trickier than translating simple text because multimedia or audio-visual translation (AVT) can include subtitles, screen recordings, or text-to-speech voiceovers (TTS). 

When creating a new course or lesson, start again by asking yourself a few questions. Will you provide subtitles only? Or will you provide full TTS voiceovers? If you know a course series consistently performs well, start there with TTS voiceovers. For the rest of your courses that need additional analytics to prove value, stick with subtitles. Be thoughtful about where you’re investing your localization team’s time and your program’s dollars. 

Another question to consider is, will you modify subtitles for the best user experience or make specific requests of linguists on translation? Meaning, some languages require 40 characters but are translated to 20. Keep in mind that text expansion will create longer subtitle segments. To curb this risk, you can impose character limits for subtitle translations. 

Perhaps the hardest question to answer and fulfill is, will you adapt visuals on screen? This requires a ton of time and may not be a viable option for your customer training team (or Learning Experience Designers) to rerecord several videos in different languages for one course. If this isn’t feasible, shift your focus to iterating current training videos in English and localizing those instead. 

Measuring content localization success

Once the localized content is published, Customer Education teams should take time and set up a cadence to evaluate the performance of the content over time. Gather all the possible data you can, and then determine what you can get out of the data to draw conclusions of how to improve down the line.  

For example, one success metric to analyze is engagement. Are customers registering and completing localized content courses? Product engagement leads to increased renewals. In order to continue building out the localized content catalog, education program owners will need to demonstrate that there is a need and a value. 

Some of the data may not be quantitive. Sometimes, the feedback may be more qualitative, like customers reporting misspelled words. Whatever the case, it’s still valuable data. 

Audience size is also a factor to how you measure localized content success. For example, a course in English may appear to have more completions in your LMS compared to the same course in Spanish, but the audience sizes are not the same. Consider the audience size and adjust your expectations and performance metrics when analyzing results head to head. 

Ultimately, you want to ensure that your English (or primary language) content and non-English content both point to the same company KPIs. Study the historical data and performance data mentioned throughout this post to figure out if your Customer Education program maps to those KPIs. Monitoring ROI is also important to the bottom line. Localization is not cheap, from time to people to dollars, so consider this commitment against ROI to make your business case. 

7 best practices for creating a content localization strategy 

1. Be vocal! 

Set clear delivery expectations for your stakeholders. Communicate to them the amount of time and effort a localization project can take. Or, if you want to make smaller commitments, take a crawl, walk, run approach and start by just translating text and iterate from there. 

2. Always test and QA

As you’re rolling out the updated content, go back through with a fine-toothed comb to QA for any potential errors. You may find that a page hasn’t been translated or a link leads to a 404. Catch them before your customers do and notify them that you’re in the process of correcting the mistake. 

3. Consider each project individually

Think about every project within your localization strategy as a separate project. For example, start text-to-speech on your most popular course series instead of across the board. Iterate on individual projects to keep timelines and expectations in check. 

4. Approach each language separately

Every new language that you add to your content is a new experience. You will run into new challenges and opportunities with each of them, so be mindful of this and how it affects the customer experience as you’re adding new languages. 

5. Utilize translation memory

Translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores words, phrases, and paragraphs of previously translated text. Utilizing this process saves time and money from translating over and over in the future. It ensures consistency and eliminates untranslated duplicate content. 

6. Be mindful of budget

It’s exciting to think about providing a new language for a new region. But if you have little experience in that region, it might be more difficult to localize than a closer region. Be mindful of how this can eat into your budget and communicate that to stakeholders making the request. 

7. Organize and partner early

Communicate with your internal and external partners as much as possible. It takes a village to create a fully localized customer experience, so lean on your external teams (localization team, LMS) for help and guidance and your internal team for support. 

Conclusion

It’s critical to consider how the customer experience will change from region to region as you build out your Customer Education content. Content localization is about more than translating text. It’s about considering, testing, and preparing for the entire customer experience to adapt to each language. As you build out Customer Education content for new regions, keep these tips and best practices in mind to create a global learner audience. 

In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s Director of Demand Generation, Carolyn Bradley, hosted a conversation with Smartsheet’s Sr. Manager, Customer Training, Stephanie Barbee, and Sr. Learning Experience Designer, Damani Musgrave, to learn about their customer education team’s journey creating and launching their monetization strategy.

Smartsheet is the enterprise platform for dynamic work—aligning people and technology to help organizations move faster. Smartsheet University’s bundled, self-paced training was the starting point while a scalable, revenue-generating course catalog was the end goal. So they ventured into what was once the uncharted territory of scalable, monetized training to make their vision a reality.

In this webinar, Stephanie and Damani shared their wins and challenges along the path to monetizing customer training and offered some tips for anyone interested in using education as a revenue driver.

We’re so happy to be part of the team that gets to deliver Skilljar to educate customers.–Stephanie Barbee and Damani Musgrave

Why monetize your customer training?

Being revenue-generating allows you to fund your own growth.–Maria Manning Chapman, Distinguished VP Education Services Research, TSIA

Stephanie began the discussion with a great question, why monetize? She highlighted a few reasons, particularly in light of the macroeconomic climate of work today.

First, moving toward a break-even approach (sales cover your program costs) or a profitability approach (sales exceed program costs), puts you in control of the growth and evolution of your customer education program.

Additionally, in today’s environment, it’s even more crucial for customer education to be seen as a contributor to your organization’s financial health and less as a cost center.

The early days of Smartsheet training

Stephanie provided context for where Smarthseet was with their training circa 2019, prior to their monetization strategy.

Smartsheet’s customer education originally started with self-paced eLearning and 1:1 onsite instructor-led training.

At that time, they used Skilljar for their self-paced eLearning option, which was either free or bundled into another product or service. Their sales organization didn’t see the full value in training just yet, so they regularly offered eLearning as a one-off or concession during sales negotiations.

In addition, their instructor-led training (ILT) program was primarily used for custom or 1:1 training engagements delivered primarily on-site. The demand for ILT wasn’t huge at that time and if they were to consider steps to increase it, their execution plan wasn’t scalable.

There were only so many trainers on the team and only so many days in the month. So at some point there would have been a tip into a lesser customer experience if the volume of training we were doing had increased.–Stephanie Barbee

That all changed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Making the shift to virtual instructor-led training

Once the pandemic hit, Smartsheet had to add virtual instructor-led training to their education offerings.

Every company—and Customer Education program—had their world flipped upside down when the pandemic hit. Like many companies, Smartsheet’s team had to quickly develop new standard operating procedures. On-site training had to be completely replaced with virtual instructor-led training (VILT).

VILT, something we had only begun to see more traction with at that time, became the primary and only mechanism for educating customers once the pandemic hit.–Stephanie Barbee

Smartsheet found that many learners weren’t interested in classes that required too much time in Zoom. So, a few months into the pandemic, they adapted that content into more consumable timeframes (no more than two hours per course) and focused the objectives of each learning experience on singular features or functions within their software.

These sessions were conducted as live virtual instructor-led events so customers could continue to get the benefits of engaging with the team and have a sense of “human contact.” They followed these sessions up with a recording, available for 30 days, so all attendees could review the content.

They also added the new VILT courses and a curated learning path into their existing Skilljar instance to take advantage of shopping cart functionality. The first course they offered covered their end-to-end software features and functions, with each course available to purchase individually or as a learning path using a credit card.

We were already familiar with the Skilljar LMS. We knew it could enable integrations for purchasing courses. It was a natural addition to incorporate the VILT catalog as a paid experience.–Stephanie Barbee

VILT also worked as a complement to their eLearning catalog. As Smartsheet began centralizing all of their customer-facing education options, essentially the ground was laid for the launch of Smartsheet University.

Smartsheet University today

Customers can learn how they want at Smartsheet University.

In July 2020 Smartsheet went live with their newly revamped training options for customers. Their self-paced, eLearning catalog stayed the same, but their paid custom training was delivered fully remotely and largely targeted at onboarding new users of the software in groups of 25 or less. In addition, they added a new VILT catalog to the mix. The simple, topic-focused agenda provided a way to quickly bring in more trainers to help support the program as it shifted to virtual delivery.

A benefit of this shift was that Smartsheet found opportunities to quickly deliver higher-level or solutions-specific training as the need arose.

The addition of a virtual instructor-led training catalog to our portfolio, which was designed for individual users who wanted to learn how to use Smartsheet in sessions that fit their schedule and skill set, was a game changer.–Stephanie Barbee

Users select the date and time for each course and have 90 days to complete the experience before they have to refresh that purchase. Smartsheet initially scheduled dozens of sessions each month that provided options for different dates and times for all courses that customers could choose from. They quickly added additional role-based learning paths to the catalog so customers had even more reason to come back and buy more training.

Smartsheet launches a subscription-based model with SmartU

Smartsheet University’s subscription offering.

In the summer of 2021, Smartsheet launched a subscription plan for their virtual instructor-led catalog and rebranded the program as Smartsheet University (SmartU).

Customers could add unlimited access to the SmartU eLearning and VILT catalogs for all users within their account. So for every Smartsheet license a customer had, they could add access to the SmartU content for education purposes by purchasing a subscription.

This approach enabled our sales organization to start adding training to more opportunities with significantly less friction. We sold just shy of about a million dollars in subscriptions in the first nine months of that program launching.–Stephanie Barbee

Today, Smartsheet University consists of a more current and regularly updated eLearning catalog as well as 25 virtual instructor-led training courses and seven learning paths.

In June of 2022, Smartsheet was delighted to relaunch their one-to-many in-person learning offering, branded “SmartU Live Regionals,” and they’re actively working to build out that catalog as well as expand live events to more cities. They are looking primarily at core functionality usage and specific use cases within Smartsheet. Two new topics are scheduled to launch in January of 2023.

Smartsheet is happy about the return of live, in-person learning sessions at their regional offices.

That said, there are many more changes to come for Smartsheet University to ensure the highest quality learning experience for customers.

We’re continuing to see higher volumes in our subscription plans sales, and our a la carte offerings remain a great way to test out new content and different learning experiences with our customers.–Stephanie Barbee

Damani Musgrave discussed how Smartsheet incorporates user feedback and shared some tips for anyone considering monetizing their learning platform.

The importance of user feedback

Today, everything on Smartsheet University is available for purchase. They use Skilljar’s course messaging to direct learners from one course to the next and users can learn in multiple ways—self-paced, virtually, or in person.

They recently implemented several improvements to the look and feel, and experience of Smartsheet University. They conduct course surveys to understand which improvements have the biggest impact on their learners. They also have a support queue where learners can email comments.

Lastly, they staffed a booth at their recent user conference to learn firsthand what users were looking for. They discovered that navigating Smartsheet University to find the most relevant piece of learning was an area that needed improvement.

User feedback is important so we can learn how they perceive our program and therefore the value of learning with us.–Damani Musgrave

Tips for monetizing your customer training

Damani shared some tips for companies looking to monetize their customer training program.

1. Treat your program like a business and measure its impact on the bottom line.

Track data such as monthly, quarterly, or annual recurring revenue (ARR), account or subscription renewals, and support ticket deflection. These kinds of metrics are not usually associated with customer education programs, but they’re going to help you measure what influences the bottom line.

Use correlated data as a starting point to test your assumptions. For example, if you see that classes tend to fill up at the same time of month or day, use this information to target promotions or special discounts. You don’t have to do a detailed analysis to understand why something is happening, just notice correlations that you could test to see if there is really something there to leverage. Another correlation example is tying course completion to product usage.

Consumption data, such as course completions or hours trained, is helpful for knowing program engagement, but it’s challenging to tie that kind of data back to ARR.

Additionally, use your trainers as a source of feedback. Involve them in content development. They have a good read on the impact your program is making on learners and it’s good to get insight from more people when you have a small team.

2. Create a sense of exclusivity—don’t lowball pricing.

If you’ve got two choices for pricing a session, $20 or $99, you might think that the lower price will entice more people to sign up. However, your learners may have higher expectations for a more expensive session and they may actually be more likely to register for the $99 session as a result.

You could always try pricing some things that are optional to gauge the interest level. As long as learners can opt out of something they’re not interested in, this gives you good information.

Damani admits Smartsheet is still seeking their sweet spot in pricing. They’re listening to their learners and creating new content to empower them while they improve the overall experience in Smartsheet University.

You will gradually solidify a pricing model that will work well for your learners. Don’t be shy about charging a fair value for the quality of your offering, just as you would with any other aspect of your business.–Damani Musgrave

Similarly, the team found that having too many offerings would lead to some sessions with only one or no learners in spite of the registration numbers.

It’s better to create a sense of exclusivity and use that demand to drive your own future behavior and what you offer learners.–Damani Musgrave

3. Test, don’t assume.

Damani shared that they originally limited their learning sessions to the middle of the week, making an assumption that this is when people preferred to learn. However, they discovered that Monday and Friday are just as popular for training as midweek. They also assumed that customers would be excited to learn about the topics that excited the training team.

The reality is that learners are trying to achieve their goals, not our goals for them as educators. We need to be sensitive to that.–Damani Musgrave

As another example, the team over-indexed on customer choice with their session schedule thinking that learners would want more options. The reality is that this diluted their audience.

Sometimes if you build it, they don’t come.–Damani Musgrave

Don’t be shy about testing different topics on different days of the week, different times of day, with different frequencies of delivery, among other things.

Try running internal pilots. You can get feedback from peers, the learning community, and colleagues to inform those assumptions.

4. Smart small and iterate.

You don’t have to wait until you have all the components in place to start selling training. For example, you can offer a paid webinar to see how interested your learners are in that content and how willing they are to pay. If you already have the material, it’s not going to take months of planning to test this and see how it lands.

The same holds true for improvements to your catalog. You don’t have to make every improvement in a day; you can roll things out gradually.

A lot of customer education programs get stuck in analysis paralysis trying to figure out what makes a best-in-class offering right from the start. That’s not going to serve you.–Damani Musgrave

In closing, Stephanie and Damani successfully made the case that bringing in revenue gives you the argument to grow the size of your team.

You could end up being a self-funding group by starting early adoption into monetization and growing the strategy from there.–Damani Musgrave

When you are a small team there is less program overhead which might actually be an advantage internally in making the case for monetizing your program sooner rather than later.–Stephanie Barbee

 

Have you attended a Skilljar webinar yet? Here’s what attendees are saying about this one:

“This has absolutely been the best webinar I’ve attended YTD—huge thank you to the Skilljar team facilitating and Stephanie+Damani, y’all are rockstars! Great insights! The amount of value packed into that webinar was well worth the time and re-watch.” – Jonathan Suchin, Qualia

“This has been my favorite and most beneficial webinar I have attended.”– Crystal Clark, Integra Connect

“Great session…so much resonates!” – Dave Brooks, NETSCOUT

“Thank you for the informative session Stephanie and Damani!” – Helen Yu, uPerform

“Thank you, this was very helpful!” “This was excellent!” “This has been great!” – Various attendees

Each quarter, Skilljar’s Executive team recognizes those “Skillets” who have gone above and beyond in demonstrating one of our core values. We’re thrilled to spotlight one of Q4’s Core Values Award winners, Jessica Enright, for demonstrating Learn and Adapt. Congratulations, Jess!  

We took a few minutes to sit down with Jess for a quick Q&A to learn more about what she loves about her role as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) and a few fun facts! (See all of our Core Values Award winner blog posts here.)

Q: You’ve been with Skilljar for a year and a half—congrats! What drew you to Skilljar initially and do you have a favorite Skilljar memory you can share with us? 

There are a handful of people from my previous company who work at Skilljar, whom I trust and respect, and have nothing but great things to say about the company! When I looked at the company values, which I 100% align with, I just knew I would love to work at Skilljar. 

My favorite Skilljar memory is when we did a virtual escape room as a team; it was funny and fun but also great to work together as a team to figure out the puzzle.

Q: You’re part of the Customer Success team. What does a CSM do at Skilljar? Is there anything in particular you like to nerd out on?

I help my customers achieve their goals. I meet regularly with my customers so they have an opportunity to ask specific questions. I provide recommendations on their use case and we work together to identify their goals and what initiatives we can take to help achieve them. 

I come from a support background, so when there’s a technical issue, I love to dig in and figure out what’s going on—even better if I can fix it right then and there!

Q: Your managers and teammates have commended you for your high standards, a commitment to excellence and a passion for continuous improvement. What’s been one of your most satisfying moments as a Customer Success Manager?

Overall, when I’m able to help my customers achieve their goals, and/or fix any issues they are running into, that is very satisfying to me. Getting to know a customer and seeing their program grow is wonderful.

Q: You started out at Skilljar as a Product Support Specialist (PSS).  Can you distinguish between the two roles and what led you to make a move to the Customer Success team?

The PSS role is more reactive whereas the CSM role has more of a proactive approach (along with a little of the reactive). The Support team is reached out to when customers have questions or a technical issue; the CSM role creates a working relationship with customers and provides ongoing support to help create their vision.

Q: Almost three years ago, Skilljar went fully remote. What’s your favorite thing about working for a remote-first company? Have you picked up any new hobbies during the pandemic?

I work from my home office, which is also my yoga and craft room, and I love it. But if for some reason I really need to focus and hammer out something quickly, it helps if I take my laptop to the couch or kitchen table. Sometimes, you just have to switch up locations!

I started making polymer clay jewelry and now it’s safe to say I’m obsessed—and have way too many earrings. I sell some through my Etsy shop, but that’s mostly just to feed my habit—I just do it for fun! It’s a very versatile medium. I love having an idea and bringing it to life. It’s also nice to be complimented on my earrings and I get to say, “Thanks, I made them!” 

Q: Given that Skilljar is a learning platform, it’s no surprise that a lot of Skillets enjoy learning new things too! If you could become an expert in something overnight, what would it be?

Music. I couldn’t carry a tune if it was in a backpack, but it would be lovely if I could. It would also be nice to play a few instruments, specifically piano. 

Additionally, I wish I could tap dance!

Q: What would we most likely find you doing on the weekend for fun?
Well… “fun” might not be the way I’d put it, but the home I bought a few years ago was all original, from 1966. We love making all kinds of updates and improvements to our home. I love vintage, 60s specifically, so we’re trying to restore the home but keep it to its original retro vibe. We’re DIYers so it’s a very slow process, but it feels good when a project gets done!

Thank you, Jessica! Congratulations on being named a Skilljar Core Values Award recipient for Q4 2022! See who else received our Core Values Award for Q4 2022!

Each quarter, Skilljar’s executive team recognizes those “Skillets” who have gone above and beyond in demonstrating one of our core values. We’re thrilled to spotlight one of Q4’s  Core Values Award winners, Jeffrey Richmond, for demonstrating Team Mindset. Congratulations, Jeff!  

We took a few minutes to sit down with Jeff for a quick Q&A to learn more about what he loves about his role as a Product Manager and a few fun facts! (See all of our Core Values Award winner blog posts here.)

Q: You’ve been with Skilljar for more than four years—congrats! What drew you to Skilljar initially and do you have a favorite Skilljar memory you can share with us? 

Skilljar was recommended to me by a few different people while I was looking to make the transition to another company from my previous employer. At that time, I was very interested in joining a startup to experience a working environment in which I could get to know and interact with everyone I worked with. Additionally, I really appreciated Skilljar’s mission of helping people learn.

One of my favorite memories at Skilljar would have to be from the days we were in an office and had a daily/hourly “handstand group” to get everyone’s blood flowing. It was not uncommon to see a group of Skillets upside down periodically throughout the day.

Q: You’re part of the Product team. What does a Product Manager do at Skilljar?

As a Product Manager, I focus on discovering and validating problems and opportunities that could help our customers do their jobs more effectively. This involves learning from our customers and prospects about what they do and what they need to be more successful, and then working with our team to define and prioritize changes to keep improving our product.

I enjoy owning the full product lifecycle from concept to adoption of my assignments to launch successful features. I also enjoy partnering with other teams internally, like Development, Customer Success, and Marketing, to define user stories, prioritize the team’s backlog, collaborate on feature implementation, and enable our internal teams to understand the release and help our customers get the most out of them.

Q: Your managers and teammates have commended you for your ability to support and enable other people’s tasks with selflessness and drive, and caring for the good of the team and our company over your own personal ego or goals. It’s clear that you’re passionate about supporting new product team members as they come onboard Skilljar. What’s been one of your most satisfying moments as a Product Manager?

As the team has grown significantly, it has been amazing to see some of the ideas and initiatives that have been on our minds for years (even predating my time) finally start to take shape and even become a part of our product.  

It’s also quite satisfying when I get to hand off one of my focus areas/initiatives to other team members to drive to completion. I still continue to observe and consult on these areas, while also learning about the various ways our work in Product gets manifested. Seeing these features released and helping our customers achieve the outcomes they are looking for is always a good feeling. 

I have also learned more from watching how my teammates approach problems I have spent time thinking about.

Q: You started out at Skilljar as an Implementation Manager in the Customer Success organization. Can you distinguish between the two roles and what led you to make a move to the Product team?

I joined the Implementation team as we were creating this function at Skilljar. This aspect of our customer success organization consults on the planning and tactical launch of a customer’s training program.  In this role, I learned a lot about the ins and outs of how the Skilljar product works. Additionally, I obtained a deep understanding of what our customers’ pain points are, what they are able to solve with Skilljar, and what they would love to see in the future to continue to help provide value to their companies.   

I had been curious about a role in Product Management prior to Skilljar. Having the ability to learn from and participate in some small initiatives while still on the Implementation team helped me understand that this type of work was something I wanted to keep doing. When the opportunity to move over to the product management team came, I was excited to take this on, learn more about the Product Management process, and continue to drive improvements for our customers and our team. 

Q: Almost three years ago, Skilljar went fully remote. What’s your favorite thing about working for a remote-first company? Have you picked up any new hobbies during the pandemic?

Over the past year, I invested in a walking treadmill for my home workstation. I have always used standing desks (even back when we were in the office) but having the option to move all day while working has been amazing. 

Q: Given that Skilljar is a learning platform, it’s no surprise that a lot of Skillets enjoy learning new things too! If you could become an expert in something overnight, what would it be?

I would love to be an expert in some type of string instrument. Live music is one of my favorite things and being able to immediately play an instrument and create music with others would be amazing.

Q: What would we most likely find you doing on the weekend for fun?
Skiing in the winter, running/hiking/mountain biking in the summer. 

Thank you, Jeff! Congratulations on being named a Core Values Award recipient for Q4 2022! See who else was named a Core Values Award recipient for Q4 2022!