Challenge
Enact uses customer training to educate mortgage lending partners on industry topics to better assist them in doing their job and enhancing their loan quality.
Enact primarily used its customer-facing website to act as the front end for training. On the backend, their content was housed in various ways: SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) content was in a Learning Record Store (LRS – technology provided by Articulate Online), videos were warehoused on the Vidyard platform (which does not allow for tracking of video completions), and webinar registration, delivery, and tracking was maintained using GoTo Webinar.
Using this approach, reporting was very cumbersome as they had to pull data from several different systems to compile it manually to deliver monthly reports. It was also difficult to provide certificate reprints to users who requested them months after training (since they weren’t automatically saved anywhere) and for users to access their learning history. These shortfalls were time-consuming and created obstacles for customers in need of this information.
When the LRS they were using was retired at the end of 2021, and with more people working remotely, they knew they had to find a better way to offer self-service customer training to provide a better user experience.
Loading content into Skilljar was easy. Moving to this training solution helped us meet our goal for a better user experience.
— Marybeth Merkle, eLearning Strategy and Development Analyst, Enact MI
Solution
Enact’s training catalog offers live webinars and on-demand courses for every skill level and role, to help their customers boost industry expertise, benefit their bottom line, and better serve their own customers.
Enact was looking for a better user experience in delivering training content. They turned to Skilljar to help them provide one access point for all training, with the ability for customers and prospects to access their certificates and learning history. They also found a way for admins to streamline internal processes, placing control over the education content function with the Learning team, rather than asking the Marketing team to make updates. They launched a new and improved training catalog using Skilljar in December of 2021.
I am impressed with the response I’ve received from Skilljar based on feedback I’ve provided. Skilljar listens to customer feedback and takes it to heart. I have not experienced that with other LMS providers.
— Marybeth Merkle, eLearning Strategy and Development Analyst, Enact MI
Results
Moving to Skilljar to create a self-service customer training catalog provided the following benefits to Enact:
- Customers were enabled to self-serve their own training based on their needs, and view their learning history and course progress
- Sales team was enabled to see training engagement in real-time through an integration with Salesforce, which improved response time to customer questions
- Increased efficiencies and internal resource allocation (The Learning team had more control over posting content, as opposed to relying on other teams.)
- Enhanced, built-in analytics improved the ability to track customer engagement
Initial metrics for Enact’s training catalog are impressive. Right out of the gate, they garnered ~2,500 monthly annual users with 35,000+ enrollments and 25,000+ course completions for an impressive completion rate of 71% – in just the first three months of launching their self-service platform.
Advice to LMS seekers or switchers
Throughout her 15+ years working at professional services companies, Marybeth Merkle has had a lot of experience evaluating and implementing Learning Management Systems (LMS) – including SumTotal, Saba, and LearnLive. She found these to be lacking in reporting functionality, integrations, features, and support, as well as being complicated to use.
Here is her advice for learning professionals who are looking for or want to switch to another LMS:
- No one system has everything you want. You have to decide what’s important to you and select the system that works best for your needs.
- Make a list of the features you must have versus those that are nice to have, and prioritize them.
- If a vendor says they can do something, make them show you how it will work, because sometimes expectations can be misunderstood.
- Find out what integrations they offer and understand the integrations you need. (For Enact, this is Salesforce, GoToWebinar, Google Analytics, and Tealeaf by Acoustic marketing automation software.)
Most of the lack of functionality I’ve seen with other LMS systems is related to a lack of integrations and a less than stellar reporting capability.
— Marybeth Merkle, eLearning Strategy and Development Analyst, Enact MI
Now that their self-service training catalog is successfully up and running, Enact plans to focus on improving content quality and exploring more ways to teach customers, including more instructor-led training opportunities.
Skilljar listens to customer feedback and tries to make improvements based on our input, which is great as we are always looking to improve our customer experience.
— Marybeth Merkle, eLearning Strategy and Development Analyst, Enact MI