Challenge
The education team at Alarm.com focuses on partner education and enablement, selling their products through a network of service providers. The team ensures their partners can effectively sell, install, and support Alarm.com products and services and deliver an exceptional experience for their customers (end-users).
In the early days, Alarm.com had a training program that mostly consisted of monthly two-day, in-person trainings, where they covered sales and marketing, as well as technical and support subject areas. As their company grew, they quickly realized they needed a more scalable solution.
They used an LMS to host a limited number of courses while ramping up and building programs such as the Alarm.com Certified Technician program. Their previous LMS had very limited functionality and lacked the necessary guidance they were looking for. They needed a true partner to support their vision for growth.
Alarm.com’s goals in switching to an improved LMS were to:
- Improve consumption/activity among partners using their content and educational platform
- Launch a brand new certification program to help reduce support burden, increase engagement, and increase product adoption rates
- Impact business operations and revenue through increased utilization of their resources and tools
- Broaden their content offering by providing partners with ways to reduce customer attrition and increase their attachment rates through education
- Scale their offering through Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT), additional certifications, and a new professional services offering
Solution
Alarm.com switched to Skilljar to establish a multi-faceted educational platform including live Instructor-Led Training (virtual and in-person), recorded webinars, podcasts, asynchronous courses, and certifications. They focus on providing the right type of learning to technicians, salespeople, customer support, and operations teams.
Over time, especially through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Alarm.com Academy expanded into more virtual opportunities, including online courses and virtual instructor-led sessions.
The Alarm.com Academy had a very quick implementation turnaround. The Salesforce and Webex integrations came at later phases so they could get the platform live as soon as possible. (Skilljar advises a crawl, walk, run approach to launching a customer education platform.)
Advice to LMS Seekers or Switchers
Katie Bernal is the Senior Director of Partner Education & Development Programs at Alarm.com. She joined Alarm.com in 2013, tasked with building a comprehensive educational program to support all of Alarm.com’s dealer partners. She is responsible for ensuring that partners have the educational resources and knowledge that they need to be successful in selling, supporting, and servicing their customers.
Mary Kidd is the Systems Manager for the Customer Operations team at Alarm.com. She has led eight software implementations, built the operational framework for Alarm.com’s first certification program, and worked with leadership to launch their award-winning customer training program.
Their efforts have resulted in a decrease in support calls, an increase in product feature adoption, and an increase in partners implementing best practices for their businesses.
Here is Katie’s advice for anyone looking to start up a new training program or switch to an improved LMS.
- Know your needs. Working with or reviewing different LMSs (including Absorb, Docebo, and Workday Learning) has helped us realize what features we needed. Some features are only unique to a specific platform so it’s important to know your needs and select the platform that can best fulfill them, so they don’t have to develop it from scratch.
- Identify at least one project manager to take ownership over contact with vendors, allocating resources, communicating to stakeholders, preparing implementation timelines, defining scope, etc.
- Take your time and provide plenty of notice to all stakeholders. The RFP process will likely take around six months, if not longer. Migrating will take anywhere from 2-6+ months depending on your requirements, integration needs, and content volume. Don’t rush the process. Compromises will need to be made, but outside of key/deal-breaker requirements, ensuring that the company you choose will partner with you is most important.
- Create a robust and comprehensive needs assessment to share with vendors off the bat. This will help to eliminate useless meetings – if a platform cannot meet your needs, they should let you know instead of scheduling a demo that won’t go anywhere.
Mary Kidd adds:
- Have a shared vision for where you want to be in one year, five years, etc. and then grow your program from there. Starting off with a handful of courses is fine, as long as you focus on what your main objectives are.
- Sharing the success of those early program wins with your executive team will help you gain the internal buy-in you need to build your program faster.
- Keep an iterative and agile mindset. Once you define the scope of your program, focus on that scope. Not everything’s going to deploy at once. You’re going to have to continue to develop and improve over time.
Data Measurement and Reporting
Alarm.com uses Skilljar’s reporting to measure the impact and evaluate the success of their training programs. Their training team looks at course completion, registration for VILT sessions, as well as the number of certifications granted month by month and year over year. They also make overall linkages to success as a reduction of call volume interactions in their support center.
Their training team looks to assess technician behavior after completing training. Specifically:
- Are the technicians using the support center more or less?
- What type of searches are they conducting?
- What type of tickets are they submitting?
- Are training programs affecting these behaviors in any positive way?
They use Skilljar’s Data Connector with their data warehouse to tie a technician taking certain classes or becoming certified to the number of interactions that company has with our support center. In addition, they look at overall engagement with their knowledge base.
Alarm.com routinely shares their business objectives and results through quarterly business reviews with Skilljar executives. They also enjoy hearing from Skilljar what’s on our product roadmap.
Results
Usage of Alarm.com’s training by external customers was low until they had the opportunity to build out their platform and content.
Since switching to Skilljar:
- Course catalog has increased by over 400%
- They’ve had 440,000+ course registrations
- There are currently 14,000 Alarm.com Certified Technicians – and counting!
Through the end of 2021:
- Total Course Completions = ~80,000
- Unique Users = 10,736
In the first quarter of 2021, Katie’s team relaunched their tech certification program to be foundationally focused, including intermediate and mastery level certifications and a new visual design of the content.
Results included:
- 1,216 new certifications in 2022 (March – October)
- 80% increase in Certified Technicians maintaining their certification YOY (Technicians are required to complete a certain number of certification units every two years.)
- 280% increase in “My Binder” activity (Articles saved from the knowledge base for easy access while on the job)
Their partner education program started over ten years ago with another LMS and a team of three. They’ve since grown to a team of ~30 partner education professionals comprised of instructors (including VILT), content developers, instructional designers, and e-learning content developers.
Alarm.com was so successful with Skilljar, they introduced the platform to four subsidiary companies, including one migration from Talent LMS for partner training. Mary Kidd trained the other groups to manage most of their own training.
What’s next for Alarm.com Academy?
Alarm.com currently offers a foundational certification curriculum for their technicians in which they take a series of online courses followed by an exam. They are working on two additional certifications that will be more advanced and incorporate a blended-learning style. They are also building a new partner onboarding program that will include a platform certification for all non-technical roles.
They are also working on incorporating VR (Virtual Reality) into their programming to create a learning environment to “play” and practice with fun exercises and games. They first exhibited a proof of concept in 2018 and have since evolved VR into an interactive course that provides real-time feedback and visuals that guide technicians through complex installations.