Marketing Platform Scales Education with On-Demand, Interactive Content for 2,000+ Students
Challenge
Opal is a robust platform offering many ways to collaborate with colleagues and accomplish tasks. While the platform is an asset for customers with varied needs and team structures, these capabilities may come with a learning curve.
Prior to partnering with Skilljar, Opal was conducting training entirely over the phone or onsite with customers. The Customer Success team was spending a significant amount of time and energy manually tracking the status of each customer’s training progress and it was challenging to compare the impact of education across accounts. Opal needed to streamline their Customer Education Program to relieve its trainers of manual processes, standardize training across its user base, and encourage greater product adoption.
Additionally, with a user base spanning the globe, Opal needed a way to provide users with real-time training resources that fit their schedule, provide account owners with inspiration to use new capabilities and bring on new teams, and make it easy to practice using Opal without affecting their live environment.
Goals
- Create a seamless, self-service training experience
- Reduce the volume of 1:1 instructor-led training (ILT) and decrease requests for this format of training
- Provide customers with a one-stop- shop for both theoretical and practical knowledge acquisition
The Opal Learning Center has courses filled with text, video, gifs, screenshots and hands-on exercises for people to fully grasp how to not only use Opal’s capabilities, but how to use it to do their jobs better. With Skilljar as the foundation, we also are finally able to track who is going through our trainings. It’s been a true game-changer for us.
Gary Ploski, Senior Content Producer, Opal
Solution
Together with Skilljar, Opal created the Opal Learning Center for external customers
and Opal University for internal employee training. The most notable feature of Opal’s training program is the interactivity of its coursework. Not only can users access written content, they can also engage in interactive training experiences. These virtual ecosystems demonstrate the nuts and bolts of using Opal’s mobile and desktop products, allowing customers the opportunity to engage with the Opal platform with guardrails and a helping hand, without the need of a trainer’s assistance. The implementation of these hands-on exercises further provides an approachable and safe space for users to practice Opal outside of their live workspace.
Content Development Process
To create the hands-on exercises, Opal uses three tools: InVision, Sketch, and ScreenFlow. The first step is to capture screenshots of the Opal platform using a standard resolution size. This ensures that updates can be made easily by anyone on the team. Captured screenshots are added to Sketch where they are arranged and processed using the Craft plugin. When ready, the exercise is uploaded to InVision. ScreenFlow is then used to create an animated welcome screen for each exercise. The file
is exported as an animated GIF and then uploaded to the relevant project in InVision. You can engage with a brief sample hands-on exercise from Opal at this link.
If you have further questions about this process, the team at Opal would be happy to connect. Reach out to education@workwithopal.com with questions.
Results
Since launching these platforms, Opal has seen more than 11,400 course registrations, 2,000+ actively engaged students, and 3,000+ hours of session time.
The interactive trainings have been so well received that Opal built a course to use during in-person trainings. Once completed, users are more willing to navigate and experiment within their live workspace environment and determine the most effective way to collaborate with colleagues.