In the past couple of months, I, like many of you, have used Zoom as my window to the outside world. I’ve Zoomed into my family’s Passover Seder, hosted my daughter’s first birthday party, attended book launch parties, happy hours and more, all on Zoom. While this may be new for some of us (looking at you, mom), it feels like the world is just catching on to something customer education professionals have known for a while – virtual meeting and webinar platforms are great mediums for instruction, learning, and collaboration.
When it comes to virtual live training, Zoom is great alone, but it’s even better with Skilljar.
In this post, we’ll showcase features in the Skilljar-Zoom integration that help you save time, deliver an amazing virtual training experience, and create a centralized learning destination for all of your Customer Education initiatives.
1. Integrate with Zoom Meeting or Zoom Webinar
A common question I get from Customer Educators getting started with Zoom is, should I use Zoom Meeting or Zoom Webinar? With Skilljar, you have the option to integrate with either. For training and collaborative learning sessions, I prefer Zoom Meeting. For lecture-style presentations, where you only want presenters to speak, Zoom Webinar is the better choice. Both options have similar features, but Zoom Meeting allows everyone to share their camera or screen. Zoom has a detailed comparison of the two products available here.
2. Create once and use everywhere
You know the drill – create a webinar event, create it again in your event management service, and then configure it for sign-ups. When you integrate Zoom and Skilljar, you can create the event in one place, Skilljar, and it automatically gets created in your Zoom account. What’s more, if you have several time slots for the same training, you can easily include them all in a single Skilljar lesson for students to select whichever is best for them. The settings for event creation in Skilljar are all in one location, and you don’t have to worry about managing two systems.
3. Customize Registration Emails
While Zoom meetings don’t have custom registration emails on their own (webinars do!), by opting to host registration in Skilljar, you can unify your communication, brand your email and send the invite alongside other important details. If you want to send additional information when a student registers to attend your virtual training session, you can use Skilljar’s Customized Notification Emails for Live Training. You can also save your template to use again in the future. One common addition to the default email template is on-demand coursework that someone can take online while they’re waiting for their scheduled live training session.
4. Build a Centralized Learning Destination
Ideally, your customers can get used to one central destination for all of your company’s learning materials. That’s why it makes sense to host virtual live training sessions alongside on-demand sessions in your Skilljar training portal. Added benefits of doing so include showcasing your on-demand content and exposing customers to your broader training offer. Customers can easily add the events to their calendars, and then come back to your training portal to enter their live event. You can also leverage the training calendar at [yourskilljardomain].com/calendar to see all of your training in one place.
5. Unify Your Data
It makes sense that you’d want all of your training data in one place, not scattered across different systems. When you use the Skilljar Zoom Integration, live training registration and attendance is automatically retained within your Skilljar Dashboard Analytics, and get sent to any systems you integrate with, such as Salesforce or your Business Intelligence software. Creating great live training, marketing to your customers, and executing on it well takes a lot of effort in and of itself, you don’t need to spend additional time migrating data and playing around in Excel spreadsheets to get the full picture of your training program. You certainly don’t want to have to engage your Sales Operations or Data Science teams to get your lists uploaded to Salesforce or consolidated with your other databases.
6. Get the Best of Zoom and Skilljar, Together
Consistent service, breakout rooms, polls, and silly backgrounds are just a few of the reasons many of us love using Zoom for Customer Education. When you integrate Zoom with Skilljar, you get to use all of these features, but you also get the benefits of the Skilljar course structure, that allows you to have students engage in pre-work and post-work for customers before the live training. Moreover, you can leverage Skilljar’s customization options, and manage the entire process as an autonomous team, without having to get resources from across the organization to stand up your training sessions.
Don’t use Zoom? Don’t worry! Many of these tips are relevant regardless of which webinar or meeting hosting platform you use, and Skilljar integrates with GoToWebinar, GoToTraining, GoToMeeting, GoToWebcast and Webex Training too. We’ll be releasing tips for the GoTo platforms and Webex in the coming weeks as well.
