Challenge
For Asana, customer education is a true team effort across three groups: User Operations (customer support, including their knowledge base), Education (live training and their eLearning platform, Asana Academy), and Community (community forum and ambassador program).
Their Customer Education team needed a way to scale the repetitive training that their Customer Success Managers (CSMs) were doing with their customers. In addition, they wanted to reduce the volume of customer questions that were coming into their support team. For the customer success issue, they started a webinar program to address key customer questions. As for the support side, they introduced a knowledge base with guides, articles, FAQ’s, etc.
Both initiatives were helpful, but in creating options for one-to-many learning instead of one-to-one, they realized they could go even further. They needed a Learning Management System (LMS) to scale their customer education efforts even further.
Once we got really clear on what content we wanted to teach people, we needed a Learning Management System (LMS) to capture these learnings in a self-serve, automated format where customers could come on their own to find the information they needed.
— Carla Bagdonas, Head of Customer Education, Asana Academy
Solution
Asana Academy teaches customers the best ways to use Asana through online courses, video tutorials, and webinar trainings.
With Skilljar, we have a lot more control over how we organize our content so we can make sure that customers are easily finding the right learning experiences depending on their role or persona or the specific way that they’re using Asana.
— Carin D’Oliva, Customer Education Program Manager, Asana Academy
Asana was looking to go beyond the limitations of video conferencing software and their community forum to educate their customers. They chose Skilljar to build Asana Academy, where they centralize their diverse resources into a single location. Another thing that’s been impactful for Asana in using Skilljar is how easy it is to use, both for the internal team to quickly and intuitively build courses and also to enable other colleagues on partner teams as well. With Skilljar, they also found a partner in customer education, not just an LMS vendor.
Carin D’Oliva is the Customer Education Program Manager at Asana. Previously, she had an LMS at another company that was so difficult for everyone to use, they needed a dedicated, full-time admin assigned to it. It was internal facing rather than external facing, which she says created a square peg/round hole situation. One thing she appreciates with Skilljar that she didn’t see on other platforms was the ability to create deep links, as all of the content exists on web pages. According to Carin, if you want to promote something from somewhere else, it’s really easy to do with Skilljar.
I’m such a fan of Skilljar, I’ve never had this kind of love affair with my LMS before. I didn’t realize how easy and accessible an LMS could be until I found Skilljar.
— Carin D’Oliva, Customer Education Program Manager, Asana Academy
Advice for starting a Customer Education program
Carla Bagdonas works closely with Carin as the Customer Education Program Manager at Asana, responsible for live trainings and Asana Academy. Here is her advice for those looking to start a Customer Education program.
- Know your customers. Know what their biggest pain points are and understand how they prefer to access learning.
- Talk to your CSMs and support reps. Find out the questions they hear most often. They’re the ones who are working with customers day in and day out and understand where they need the most support.
- Sequence your customer education programs. Start with content that is scalable and requires less overhead to get off the ground. Then, move to things that are more complex. For example, if you don’t have a knowledge base, just start with a few articles and documentation that customers can read.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment. Live training is easy to iterate. You can deliver a training, change a few slides and do it differently the next time. Once you’re really clear on what content works, that’s a great time to codify it into a self-paced course.
- Start with what you already have. For example, when we had only instructor-led trainings, we recorded these and broke them up into pieces and easily turned them into our first self-paced courses using Skilljar.
We chose Skilljar because of the:
1. Return on investment. The ROI on Customer Education is apparent through product usage and retention.
2. Support. The support you’ll get from the team at Skilljar to help you create the vision for your program and bring it to life is absolutely fantastic.
3. Ease of use. Not only is it a great platform with great support, but it’s intuitive and easy to use, even if you’ve never used this type of software.
Results
With thousands of customers coming through Asana Academy each month, Skilljar has helped the team build a business case for Customer Education at Asana.
On a company-wide level, Skilljar has given us a way to massively scale the delivery of education to our customers. Over the last two years, we’ve doubled the number of customers who are coming through Asana Academy each month.
— Carla Bagdonas, Head of Customer Education, Asana Academy
Because Skilljar integrates with Salesforce, the Customer Education team is able to draw connections that prove the impact of their programs by:
- Tying customers who’ve engaged with education to NPS scores and early adoption, versus customer who don’t engage
- Tying the types of learning experiences customers are consuming to product behavior and usage metrics (adoption, average deal size, net retention revenue – NRR)
- Identifying opportunities for new business and expansion within accounts
Having that connection between Skilljar & Salesforce has helped us make a business case and prove ROI for education at Asana.
— Carla Bagdonas, Head of Customer Education, Asana Academy
In addition, they measure engagement with their learning program in terms of:
- # customers reached (2.25x YOY growth in monthly active users)
- # hours reclaimed by “human touch” teams (customers spent 60,000+ hours learning on their own in 2021)
- ↑customer satisfaction (customers that engage with training score 19 points higher on NPS and have 4.5+ average CSAT scores)
- # customer champions cultivated (nearly 25% of Ambassadors say they discovered the program through the Asana Academy)
They share these metrics with executive stakeholders at Asana to help determine the success of the program and how they can further scale it.
Carla and Carin believe that the best way to get ahead on retention is to have strong adoption to start with, and that trained customers adopt faster.