New Innovations to Demonstrate the Business Impact of Customer Education [Webinar Recap]

Are you looking for ways to demonstrate the business impact of your customer education program? View these new innovations from Skilljar: Strategic Insights and the Customer Education Business Impact Template.

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

Why Skilljar Data for Strategic Insights?

See what Skilljar customers from LinkedIn, Gong, Asana, Alarm.com, and more, have to
say about why trained customers are their best customers.

Strategic Insights provides unique value to our customers because our evidence-based benchmarks are powered by our large, high-quality learning experience dataset.

• Volume: Over 275 million lessons have been completed, and 9 million certificates have been granted across all the customer academies we power. Learners have engaged with over 150,000 unique courses.
• Quality: Skilljar’s data is high-quality. Simply put, our customers deeply value customer success and customer experience and run some of the world’s best customer education programs.
• Diverse offering: Our customers have built their expertise over many years, across several companies, and through a broad array of offerings including on-demand, live, experiential learning labs; high-stakes certifications and badges; free or monetized courses; ecommerce and training credits; English and multilingual; open or registration-required.
• Industry leaders: Many Skilljar customers are evangelists who are eager to share their expertise publicly.

We believe Skilljar houses the largest and most powerful dataset of learning experiences that users voluntarily access to gain critical skills.— 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!