Build, Promote, Measure: How to Gain Visibility for Your Customer Education Program [Webinar Recap]

In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s Director of Customer Marketing, Jen Raphael, hosted a conversation with Bethany Alston, Instructional Designer & LMS Administrator, to learn how Weave built, measured, and gained internal visibility for their Customer Education program.

Weave is the all-in-one customer experience software platform for small and medium-sized healthcare businesses. In this webinar, Bethany shared how she revamped their existing Customer Education program from the ground up, worked cross-functionally to promote their platform, and measured its success.

Two of the best parts of my job are the customer education program we’ve built and the partnership that we have with Skilljar. Our Customer Success Manager has played a key role in our success and consistently works with us to help achieve our business goals.— Bethany Alston

Build: The Evolution of ‘Weave Training Camp’

Weave originally offered live training sessions during typical working hours, but with an audience of healthcare practitioners, these sessions were not well attended. They needed a scalable training that could accommodate the needs of their busy customers.

We needed an on-demand training solution that our customers could access when they were available.— Bethany Alston

The first iteration of Weave Academy (later renamed Weave Training Camp) launched in May 2022 with content created using Articulate 360, a Skilljar integration that offers a suite of content authoring tools.

Customers were introduced to Weave Academy during their onboarding process. For the first launch, they organized their content into paths based on the product bundle a customer had purchased. Early results were promising but they soon learned through Skilljar metrics that course completion rates were higher for learners who were certified.

Bethany wanted to find a way to increase course completion rates by engaging more learners and drawing more tenured customers into training beyond onboarding.

After several months of running Weave Academy, they relaunched their program based on survey feedback from customers and metrics which indicated:

• A poor navigation experience (Users would get lost in the product bundle or certification experience and not know where to go next.)
• Website design was off-brand
• Certifications weren’t being recognized or rewarded

The relaunch of Weave Training Camp organized certification training into single courses with several lessons, instead of each lesson being its own course.

Bethany reorganized their training program by moving the content from isolated courses into lessons grouped together to create complete courses within learning paths. This made it easy for users to see all of the courses in one location and easily save their progress once they were inside of a certification. The new content organization made it possible for Weave to use engagement emails to directly link users to the page where they left off so users could complete their progress.

We encourage users to complete the whole certification because we know that the more training a customer has, the better their experience with Weave will be.— Bethany Alston

For their design revamp, they consulted training homepages for other Skilljar customers including Asana, Zendesk, and Qualtrics to glean best practices. They also met with internal Weave stakeholders (Marketing, Onboarding, Design, Web Development) to discuss the training needs of customers as well as how training could be leveraged by their internal customer-facing teams.

The new design displayed different categories of content (certifications, quick videos, live sessions, and all courses) in a more searchable format. They went from a very rudimentary platform to a more robust version with upgraded design and branding that was a lot easier for their customers to navigate.

Skilljar customers find success with bite-sized video content

Weave added a new piece to their content ecosystem when they relaunched Weave Training Camp. To re-engage lapsed customers they created a library of under-two-minute quick tip videos.

In addition to being housed in the Weave Training Camp, their Marketing team is able to leverage these videos for various purposes.

These micro-learning opportunities have proven to be very influential for our program. I would encourage any learning professional to try these out and see how they could work for your customers.— Bethany Alston

For more on how to create bite-sized training videos, see how other Skilljar customers have done it!

• Jamf created with “Jamf Shorts” – bite-sized training and support videos explaining common workflows, product updates, and new releases within the Jamf platform.
• TechSmith offers advice for creating great video testimonials and demos.

Promote: Getting buy-in for your training program from internal stakeholders

Bethany leveraged other internal teams (Onboarding, Customer Success, Marketing, and Product) to help promote Weave Training Camp.

Onboarding

• Included links to their training content within their standard onboarding emails and encouraged users to take the training
• Helped to position training as providing value to customers and made it more approachable

Customer Success

1. 1. Helped to encourage continued training among customers

Overcoming Customer Objections

Bethany shared a template she provides to her Onboarding and Customer Success teams to help them overcome objections from customers who say they don’t have enough time to complete training courses. It uses a tiered approach, starting out by encouraging customers to get certified. For customers who don’t have the time to certify, other options for training are then recommended, such as hand-picking courses from the certification or watching short-form videos.

You can create a similar document at your company based on the customer objections CSMs hear most often from customers who may not see the value in training.

Bethany also shared a template to explain the value of certifications training to customer-facing teams. This includes a description of the content included within a certification, the value of the training to customers, and the intended learning outcomes to help internal teams talk to customers about certifications.

Another way Weave helps internal teams demonstrate the value of training is through certification badges on Linkedin, a native feature in Skilljar. When a user completes a certification in their training platform, they can click the LinkedIn button and post their certification accomplishment directly to their Linkedin profile.

I encourage learning professionals who use Skilljar for certifications to enable users to add their certificates to Linkedin, so that customer agents can use it as one more value point when talking to customers. It also provides visibility for your program—when someone posts their accomplishment, others see it.— Bethany Alston

Marketing

• Uses Pendo pop-ups within the application that advertise monthly live webinars
• Direct mail postcards (yes, printed postcards!) that emphasize the value of Weave Training Camp
• Event handout for event booths
• Emails sent to customers to promote the benefits of Weave Training Camp

Product

• Both their desktop app and browser-based portal offer direct links to training
• When a user clicks for help in the Weave platform, the training material in Weave Training Camp that corresponds with the area they’re in on the application surfaces as a Pendo popup.
• Users can click on the link and pull up the training they need wherever they are in the product.

Measure: Using Skilljar tools to demonstrate training program value

Bethany uses Skilljar’s Strategic Insights tool to get a big picture of Weave’s training program and how it compares to other similar training programs and industry benchmarks.

Weave implemented their training program relaunch in January of 2023 and were thrilled to see their performance was above or at industry benchmarks for 30-day course completions. (Weave expected a decrease in course completions with the relaunch after they consolidated nine certification courses into a single course. The new user experience eventually proved beneficial because customers could see their saved progress and return to complete training more easily than they could in the previous version.)

Skilljar’s Strategic Insights came right in the nick of time. This is a huge win for us. It gave us the peace of mind to keep moving forward with building and iterating our program.— Bethany Alston

Bethany also leverages Skilljar’s built-in analytics using a Domo dashboard to demonstrate the impact of their redesign and marketing efforts.

In some months, enrollments and completions doubled, and certifications more than doubled thanks to the new website design, content reorganization, and marketing efforts (navy blue line on the left) and direct links to training incorporated into the product (navy blue line on the right.)

It’s exciting for us to see our efforts of redesigning are working to better serve our customers and show business impact.— Bethany Alston

Using the Skilljar to Salesforce integration, Bethany is able to demonstrate user training activity at the account level, so customer agents can access this information while speaking with customers to see what training they’ve taken.

With our Skilljar/Salesforce integration, we can take the analytics data from Skilljar and pair it with data from our accounts in Salesforce. We can learn about the types and tenure of accounts that are engaging in our training, which helps us to identify audiences we’re underserving.— Bethany Alston

Weave has been able to draw the following conclusions from their metrics:

• Undertrained accounts are also customers at greater risk for churn.
• Accounts with at least one certified user churn at a lower rate than other accounts.

We’ve been able to deliver these big business impacts to our Weave leadership and it’s opened up conversations about how we can increase the efficacy of our training program and our training team and pull in more resources to continue building and iterating to create a better experience for our customers.— Bethany Alston

Here are the templates for customer-facing teams that Bethany shared during the webinar:

Overcoming Customer Objections to TrainingTraining Certification General Overview

Another tool you can use to demonstrate the business impact of your training program is Skilljar’s Customer Education Business Template, which allows you to match trained customer activity with NPS scores, CSAT scores, and retention metrics.