Challenge
Gainsight needed an LMS that was easy to administer and would provide a great user experience. But they also needed an LMS that could integrate with payment processors such as Stripe, as well as Salesforce, to increase the visibility of training consumption for internal stakeholders. Another critical integration was the use of Articulate, so that they could design more accessible bite-sized elearning. The education team at Gainsight, led by Lila Meyer, is charged with driving product adoption and usage, and ultimately contributes to customer retention through strong user enablement. They understood that a scalable and customizable platform designed to support customer training – not just internal training – was essential.
Gainsight’s goals for its education program were to:
- Increase impact on retention
- Increase product awareness with educational content across the Gainsight product suite
- Increase adoption of new content
Solution
Gainsight University hosts all of their free product training and registration for ILT classes to serve customers, admins, employees and career seekers.
Gainsight University, powered by Skilljar, hosts all of their free product training for end-users (typically CSMs from customer companies) as well as Gainsight employees who need to learn how to use their SaaS applications, through multiple training applications grouped by product and role. They’re also seeing people who want to learn how to administer Gainsight to improve their job prospects sign up for training.
Besides free elearning courses, Gainsight also hosts paid Instructor-Led Training (ILT) courses on Gainsight University, and provides information about Admin certification offerings.
Skilljar allows us to deliver a more robust set of training offerings so that our onboarding team can focus more on the technical aspects of customer projects, and our CSMs can partner with clients on strategy, rather than doing ad hoc training.
– Lila Meyer, Director, Global Education Services, Gainsight
Results
Since implementing Skilljar, Gainsight has seen steady growth in their training usage for monthly annual learners and learner re-engagement, quarter over quarter. Since switching to Skilljar, Gainsight realized:
Impressive increases in users, course registrations, and re-engagement
Dec 2020 – Sep 2021
- Avg. monthly active users: +60%
- Avg. monthly course registrations: +61%
- Avg. monthly session hours: -16%
Q3 2021 vs. Q4 2020
- Last student activity (re-engagement): +212%
(The last date a student was active in a course; increasing percentage means more students returning to the platform, therefore engaging with it.)
Highest volumes ever for monthly learners, course registrations Q3 2021
- 1,360 avg. active learners/month – highest volume ever!
- 1,228 avg. session hours/month
- <1 session hour/active learners
- 4,241 monthly course registrations – highest volume ever!
- 2,858 monthly course completions
- 67% avg. course completion rate (vs. <20% industry benchmarks)
As we’ve built more elearning courses and added training for more products, Skilljar has been able to grow with us.
– Lila Meyer, Director, Global Education Services, Gainsight
Switching from the LearnDot LMS to accommodate a more robust set of training offerings:
Gainsight’s training was previously hosted on the LearnDot LMS and they made the switch to Skilljar in mid-2019. Prior to the pandemic, Gainsight held regular in-person workshops and sometimes traveled onsite for customer training. However, in April 2020, they pivoted to virtual classes, and as their customer base grew, they were able to sell more bundled training. As a result, they had to increase the frequency of their live (virtual) admin classes.
The migration from LearnDot to Skilljar was completed in under 60 days with one full-time resource from our team dedicated to the project. There were very few bumps in the road and the new site was launched on time.
– Lila Meyer, Director, Global Education Services, Gainsight
Lila’s advice to first-time LMS seekers or switchers:
Try to get your hands on any new application and explore the capabilities, so you know what you’re getting before you buy. Also, seek out and build a partnership with your vendor. This will help you when something inevitably doesn’t work the way you’d hoped or isn’t available in the product yet.
Skilljar does a great job of communicating their product development and roadmap with its customers, as a way of getting early input into product development. Further, it has a vibrant and growing community of users which helps everyone using Skilljar to learn from each other.
If you are a Skilljar customer and have a success story to share, email us at stories@skilljar.com. Not a customer yet? Request a demo.