Challenge
IPRO provides best-in-class Information Governance and eDiscovery software with predictive analytics to corporations, government agencies, law firms, and legal partners. They bring insight far earlier in the eDiscovery process (the digital version of conducting legal discovery), enabling teams inside and outside organizations to collaborate transparently at any stage, before data is even collected.
Initially, they were only offering in-person, paid training to a small subset of customers who requested it. The Sales team sold training hours and trainers met 1:1 with customers to help them with their training needs. According to Julie Badger, Director of Learning Experience, this process was highly inefficient, because:
“In the legal industry, attorneys and paralegals have significant time/availability constraints. Trying to get five attorneys and three paralegals into the same room for a week of training is a challenge under the best of circumstances. We’d have a completely full training schedule and half of the time customers would have to cancel with less than 48 hours notice.”
IPRO changed that approach by providing a printed course catalog that sales could use to sell individual courses. They were still only reaching a small subset of their total users with only one modality of live, in-person training (and some, limited Zoom trainings).
They knew as a growing company that, to scale, they had to move from live 1:1 private customer training to a nearly 100 percent self-guided eLearning model.
Every private training for a single customer takes time away from our content developers being able to create or update content for all customers. We knew we had to move to an online learning model in order to scale.
— Julie Badger, Director of Product Learning Experience, IPRO
Solution
IPRO’s Learning Center targets both new and advanced users of their solutions for the legal industry, including onboarding courses, key tasks to perform, a self-guided user certification path, self-guided troubleshooting courses based on customer support tickets, and recorded “Getting Started” webinars.
Badger proposed that IPRO build an eLearning platform that would include self-guided learning, live learning courses, and recorded webinars.
They chose Skilljar to help them create the IPRO Learning Center, an external portal aimed at meeting the learning needs of all of their customers—from those completely new to eDiscovery, to long-time customers and advanced users looking to improve their workflows, standardize their processes, and optimize their use of IPRO’s tools.
The Skilljar CSMs are incredibly skilled and helped tremendously as we worked through the implementation process together. They added features we requested, worked with us to take full advantage of their API, and really met us where we are in our business. The software is easy and flexible. Their people is what makes Skilljar as great as it is.
— Julie Badger, Director of Product Learning Experience, IPRO
IPRO’s basic content offerings include onboarding courses, key tasks to perform, a self-guided user certification path, self-guided troubleshooting courses based on customer support tickets, and recorded “Getting Started” webinars. They also offer courses aimed at administrators and case admins who perform deeper-dive tasks including a paid quarterly live administrator training web series.
IPRO leverages their Learning Center to deliver a standardized experience to customers, including a prescriptive onboarding process with a kickoff call, numerous email check-ins, and a wrap up before users move into the adoption phase.
I knew that if we built an online learning center, our customers would flock to it. In our industry, people have significant time/availability constraints. With an online learning center our customers could sign up, purchase their courses, take them, and get user certified all on their own.
— Julie Badger, Director of Product Learning Experience, IPRO
Anatomy of an Onboarding
When IPRO’s Learning Center launched, they charged on a per-course, per-seat basis, i.e., a user bought access to a course or public VILT training. They achieved nominal growth by running different marketing campaigns throughout the year.
In early 2022, they took advantage of the subscription plan capabilities in Skilljar and built two plans: one for Basic users (10 seats per subscription), which gave users access to “getting started” courses and materials. The Admin subscription offered one seat with access to all self-guided learning and recorded webinar training on the platform. Both subscriptions were for one-year and Learning Center content was incorporated into the onboarding product packages. While they weren’t mandatory, new users were strongly encouraged to take advantage of this learning experience.
Here’s an overview of IPRO’s onboarding process directly incorporating Learning Center content:
- To start onboarding, customers have a kickoff call with their CSM, during which they are introduced to the platform, how to navigate to the correct landing page for their subscription, and “getting started” learning content.
- CSMs provide users with a learning plan (a downloadable file summarizing the courses taken during onboarding) built around the relevant online learning content.
- Throughout the onboarding process, users receive check-in emails referencing the content to be completed with direct links to relevant courses to be taken before the next check-in. This helps tie the tasks they’ll be working on next with the training materials that explain that concept or functionality. Users can always refer back to the email messages or their learning plan at any time.
- Once all of the check-ins are completed, a “wrap-up” email summarizes the user’s journey and introduces the “Adoption” phase, which suggests more courses the user can take to gain a deeper understanding of the product.
- CSMs track customer progress in Skilljar to help ensure that the onboarding process is successful. Skilljar data is sent to IPRO’s CSM tool by first leveraging Skilljar’s integration with Salesforce, and forwarding that data from Salesforce to the CSM tool.
Our online learning content is directly linked to our onboarding experience and foundational to the successful onboarding of our clients and helping us reach our goal of creating customers that are confident, self-sufficient users of our products.
— Julie Badger, Director of Product Learning Experience, IPRO
To build user engagement beyond the kickoff call and subsequent check-ins with CSMs, Badger’s team created a Learning Experience blog within their IPRO Community. They issue bi-monthly posts encouraging customers to continue growing their skills through online learning. The blog posts link to topical free courses that drive traffic to the Learning Center. They’ve also added “mini-blogs” with tips or Q&As, driving to free courses or topics in their Help Center.
To increase engagement among admin users, IPRO offers a quarterly live administrator training web series in which customers pay for live training that is not included in subscription plans. They are also planning to launch a series of “Tech Talks”—topic-driven webinars that customers can register for to participate in a live, moderated chat, or watch them on-demand in the Recorded Webinars section of the Learning Center.
Results
Skilljar enabled IPRO to streamline onboarding and make it scalable. Their online learning content is directly linked to their onboarding experience and is foundational to the successful onboarding of their clients. Plus, it is directly in line with their mission of creating customers that are confident, self-sufficient users of their products.
Here are some of the results to date (14 months) for the IPRO Learning Center:
- Total Course Registrations: 1704
- Course Completions: 901
- Course Completion Rate: 53%
- Monthly Average Users (MAUs): 666
Most of this usage came from bringing the Learning Center into their onboarding process, which significantly increased user engagement. In the first five months of integrating their Learning Center into their onboarding program they realized:
- Over 70% of total course registrations
- 78% of total course completions
- 67% of total monthly average users (MAUs)
The Skilljar dashboard is super easy to use. We’re doing a LOT with this tool: external customer training, internal employee product training, pay-per-seat courses, subscription plans, learning paths, and lots of free courses. Skilljar handles all of it and we still don’t feel like the system is burdensome even though we’ve grown our course count to well over 150.
— Julie Badger, Director of Product Learning Experience, IPRO
Advice to LMS Seekers or Switchers
Julie Badger is the Director of the Learning Experience team for IPRO, which includes trainers, online learning content developers, and technical writers. Her team also oversees the design of their customer experience, particularly the onboarding phase.
Here is her advice to first-time LMS users or those looking to switch to a new elearning platform:
- Aim for minimum viable product first. You are not going to be able to go live with a fully developed system within an accelerated timeline. Shoot for a basic user learning path first.
- Define your user journey, starting with onboarding. Use your Learning Center and online learning portal as the foundation for your customer onboarding process. It might help you scale more quickly and develop happy, healthy customers who know how to use the product right from the start.
- Prioritize and normalize self-service and self-sufficiency. It’s great to have amazing support techs—it’s also awesome to create users who know how to solve their own problems.
- Use content to address common support issues. Use actual support ticket data to determine content that will help customers right off the bat. Then create mini-courses to address those specific concerns. Use blogs, live webinars, and customer forums to engage customers proactively; then see if that’s helping to reduce customer tickets.
- Keep it real. Moving to a self-guided learning model can make users feel removed from real people. Use blogs, mini blogs, and live topic-specific webinars to keep real people in the line of site of customers so that they know who you are and that you’re here when needed.
- Use data and analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Pendo to identify usage patterns and track what your customers are doing so that you can ensure your content is relevant. Use data to answer questions such as:
- Who’s using the content? How are they using it?
- Where are all of the places you can surface content and make it accessible?
- What types of blogs result in customers purchasing individual courses?
- What makes a customer move from the Help Center topics to Learning Center courses?
- Use certifications to grow your student base. Attach a certification to the learning path you create early on so that customers can add their certification to their LinkedIn profile.
IPRO offers a user certification for customers that complete the learning path for a particular product line, such as data collection, processing, or analysis. They also have an admin certification that customers can earn if they take admin training, meet the prerequisites, and pass the certification exam. Their admin exam is two parts: true/false multiple-choice and a long-form question/answer. If the customer passes both exams they receive their admin-level certification.
Prior to Skilljar, we used SAP Litmos for administrator certifications. The process was messy and inefficient. Student management was really poor. And simple things like access were error prone.
— Julie Badger, Director of Product Learning Experience, IPRO
Learn more about how IPRO uses Skilljar for internal employee product training.
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 personal demo.