Success Strategies for Scaling Customer Education, Training & Onboarding [Webinar Recap]

In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s VP of Marketing, Michael Freeman, hosted a discussion with Marina Hydeman, Education Success Lead at Outschool, and Kim Wheeler, Associate Director of Content for Year Up, who shared their secrets of success for customer education, training, and onboarding.

View the on-demand webinar or read the recap below.

Year Up serves more than 240,000 students through internships with 250+ forward-thinking corporate partners. Kim shared how Year Up is providing a personalized, self-paced training experience for different segments of their users – from first time internship supervisors to senior corporate training professionals.

Outschool currently serves 10,000 educators from five countries offering over 100,000 online classes to learners ages 3 – 18. Marina shared how Outschool was able to scale their platform eleven-fold in just a few weeks when they shifted from live online classes to self-paced learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are the key topics covered in our discussion with Skilljar customers Outschool and Year Up.

1. Segmentation for Meeting Customers Where They Are
2. Self-service at Scale
3. Freeing Up Staff to Focus on Customer Success
4. Unparalleled Access to Integrations
5. Advice to Other Educators

1. Segmentation for Meeting Customers Where They Are

Segmenting your learner audience ensures that you can deliver the right kind of education experience for each group of users.

Marina explained how segmentation allows Outschool to provide different levels of self-paced learning to different users.

“An organization admin who’s actually running the program versus individual educators who are interfacing with youth are going to need different levels of training and different levels of compliance. We’re able to segment these groups in a meaningful way and offer different trainings to help them get started.”

“Segmentation is so essential and one of the big factors that drew us to Skilljar,” according to Kim. The Catalog Pages feature on Skilljar allows us to effectively segment and have a foundation of content that may flex across different user groups.”

Kim went on to explain exactly how they segment their audiences at Year Up to meet them where they are:

“We have designated groups based on the user’s engagement with us as an organization. We can segment based on whether they are a new or returning Internship Supervisor. And we can deliver a tailored experience based on that, thinking about the level of information we provide. Folks who are directly supervising  interns need a different onboarding journey and pathway than those who are helping to facilitate the Year Up program at their company.

“We’ve even created dedicated portal experiences for our largest clients, actually segmenting a group based on company. We offer customized, tailored experiences that provide that extra level of client service to them, which makes them feel valued and heard, and that we’re directly serving them.”

2. Self-service at Scale

Customers expect self-service in every aspect of life — whether it’s filling up your gas tank. booking your next flight, or checking out items at the grocery store. Customer education is no different. People want to be able to customize their learning on their time to fit their needs and their schedule.

Marina described how they create self-service options at Outschool:

“Once you are an Outschool educator, you are welcome to enter the platform and explore. Using Learning Paths and Catalog Pages allows our users to self segment. One of our team members built a ‘pathway picker’ that lets users ‘choose your own adventure’ based on a short quiz to determine ‘What Kind of Educator Am I?’ This is a fun way of helping our educators identify where their areas for growth are, so they can find the trainings that are right for them.”

For Kim, “Self-service at scale means users want flexibility across devices and they don’t want to have to finish courses in one sitting. They want to start and stop as they please, without being limited to a particular timeframe for completion. And that’s exactly what we give them.”

3. Freeing Up Staff to Focus on Customer Success

Self-paced learning has benefits for the organization as well. Many teams focused on education tend to feel overworked and understaffed. By giving them back time, they can focus more on analyzing data to understand what courses are most effective to drive the desired product behavior, be it renewals, expansion, or just customer happiness.

Here’s how our panelists have been able to augment customer success efforts with the help of Skilljar:

Marina said, “We look at our client education at scale as a supplement to some of the other practices we do to support customers. It helps us continue to raise the bar on our account management and client service disciplines. By moving a lot of our onboarding into Skilljar, we’re able to support our educators in a more holistic way.”

According to Kim, “There are so many times throughout the engagement cycle where it would be helpful to have a pulse check on our customers — How are things going? How are they feeling? Our resources were freed up to focus on areas where the human touch can make a difference, like having an informal check-in with a person or group at a company to really provide that extra layer of support.”

4. Unparalleled Access to Integrations

Both Marina and Kim rely on Skilljar’s integration with a slew of automation tools to create a complete platform to educate and engage their users.

Kim said, “We’re using the contact role data within our CRM to figure out the segmentation, along with Marketo as a tool to facilitate the enrollment. Because those two systems are integrated with each other and Skilljar, you’re able to use complex logic, for example, to confirm someone’s eligibility for a certain program.

“Based on this, we can create dynamic email campaigns with unique access codes for course registrations. We can also use other data in Salesforce, such as start dates or other criteria, to manage those enrollment pathways.”

Marina offered, “We’ve been able to use Skilljar’s integrations to host our required compliance training for educators. We were able to quickly boost the percentage of our educators able to get up and running within seven days by 59% –  almost overnight! Beyond compliance and onboarding, we’re able to support continued professional development as our users grow their businesses on our platform.”

5. Advice to Other Educators

The webinar concluded with advice to those interested in starting or augmenting their customer education experience.

Advice From Marina

Draw from your one-to-one client service experiences to learn:

• What are your users really connecting to?
• What is the meat that you can pull out and how can you adapt that to a scalable platform?
• What are the questions your team is spending hours every day answering over and over again?
• What are the anxieties or the value props that you are hearing from users?

It’s all about using those stories to create a scalable onboarding experience.”

Advice From Kim

My best advice is to be your own use case when testing out new tools. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and get in there to push the boundaries with integrations. With Skilljar, the sky’s the limit in terms of being able to centralize your platform as a conduit between other systems you’re using.  

Keep the client or user experience front and center, but also keep the experience of your staff in mind. What’s going to make the biggest impact for them? Really think about the opportunities outside the scope of what you may see on that initial sales pitch for a customer education platform.”

View the on-demand webinar here!

If you are a Skilljar customer and have a success story to share, email us at stories@skilljar.com. Not a customer yet? Request a demo.