Challenge
Since 2016, MRI has significantly grown its global footprint and capabilities to support clients in key regions around the globe. As a result, the company needed to consolidate learning content from several acquired businesses into one learning management system.
Additionally, MRI required a more affordable, on-demand option to support post-implementation training offerings for clients. The company needed to simplify the manual registration process for new users and move toward a system that allowed users to manage their own login and training path, reducing dependence on MRI staff.
MRI’s specific goals were to:
- Increase revenue from paid eLearning content by 20% year over year
- Decrease manual procedures around billing and course registration
- Introduce a subscription-based model to purchase and access eLearnings
- Integrate with Salesforce for better customer data management and reporting
- Increase opportunities for public customer training post-implementation in addition to private training
Solution
MRI offers over 700 courses through its Training Academy including eLearnings, videos, public Instructor-Led Trainings (ILTs), and certifications.
MRI chose Skilljar to be the central hub for all eLearning and public format live training. The company hosts more than 700 courses in its Training Academy, powered by Skilljar, on four different domains: North America, UK, South Africa, and Australia. Because MRI’s product offerings vary by region, this allows them to easily pare down the content available to users based on regional applicability.
Each domain is organized into catalog pages by product, so the end user starts on a home page where the company can advertise new courses, run quarterly promotions/discounts, and provide help videos and documents. From there, users can choose the relevant product and courses they wish to take.
MRI offers free, paid, single-use, and subscription-based content, where a pre-determined number of users has access to a certain number of courses over a designated period of time. About 75% of their training is paid.
Many clients use MRI training content as an onboarding option for their teams as they hire new staff. Several MRI products have seasonal functionality, and clients will use certain content as a refresher, for example, end-of-month or year procedures, tax items, etc.
Having an LMS allows clients to have training at their fingertips.
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software
The Value of an LMS
Collin Besinger has been with MRI since October 2012. He was part of the internal training team for over six years, and in 2020 he took over leadership of the content team, including external training. During this time, he’s seen a lot of internal LMSs (focused on employee learning) and external LMSs (focused on customer learning).
MRI has acquired five businesses that used other external LMSs such as Docebo, SAP Litmos, and LearnUpon. By consolidating LMSs, MRI has been able to save roughly $40,000 annually.
After reviewing these systems I feel that Skilljar has the right balance of functionality between the administrator and the end-user.
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software
Here is how Collin describes the value he gets from Skilljar as an external LMS provider:
- Self-registration for students is key for us and Skilljar handles this process well.
- The ability to create sub-pages in our domains, as well as client groups, makes it easy to categorize course content and control visibility to students.
- The reporting package allows me to easily track my KPIs like revenue and course registrations/completions. Monitoring course performance is easy using the Analytics report section.
- Localization and currency support are critical as we operate in the US, Canada, UK, South Africa, and Australia. (MRI works with Skilljar support to set the currency on courses that are not in USD. Skilljar performed customizations to make the South African rand available.)
In addition, Collin finds the following customer support benefits with Skilljar:
- I have been impressed with the amount of documentation that exists for various functions in Skilljar. Every time I ask our CSM a question, or Google something, I am easily able to find a knowledge article that answers my exact question–with steps to implement! I have never felt like I couldn’t get a question answered.
- I’ve been thoroughly surprised at the level of customer support that we are given and the fast response time for support tickets. We have monthly meetings with our CSM and quarterly business review meetings with our CSM and Account Manager.
Results
Since its launch in 2016, the MRI Training Academy was able to accommodate several migrations of content from five acquired companies that were using other LMSs, including Docebo, SAP Litmos, and LearnUpon. During that time, MRI has migrated around 60 courses from acquired businesses into Skilljar.
Skilljar made the process of migrating content from acquired companies very easy by assisting with bulk uploads of courses, users, transcript history, etc.
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software
When Collin took over management of the content team in 2020, he set a 20% revenue increase target for MRI Training Academy for 2021. He explained: “Because there was no target prior to 2021 and little marketing effort, we didn’t know what was possible, so 2021 was a proving ground year to see how much revenue we could generate by increasing our marketing effort and expanding our catalog of courses.”
To meet this goal, Collin’s team introduced new marketing efforts to drive users to the Academy, including the use of quarterly promo codes, pop-up banners on the MRI homepage, email signatures for the business, and banners in support ticket emails and on the MRI client portal. The company achieved a year-over-year revenue increase of 38%, or 118% of the goal, for paid training content (single purchase courses and subscriptions).
MRI Training Academy Discovers the Power of Certifications
MRI’s Partner Connect Program has offered certifications to partners for years. The company’s extensive partner network is comprised of third-party businesses that collaborate with MRI on product integrations and client implementations.
According to Collin, “We want to show clients that our partners are just as knowledgeable about our products as our employees are, so we developed a series of courses and exams that our partners are required to complete for certification.”
The partner certifications are offered for free, as partners are considered extensions of the MRI team. A client certification program is also currently being piloted. Here’s how it works:
- The certification exams are created as separate courses with recommended ILTs and eLearnings in each exam course description.
- The client or partner completes the exam as a course in the Training Academy.
- The course settings allow users to upload certification templates and clients (and partners) can easily download and display these certifications upon completion (through LinkedIn, for example).
- Student records for both partners and clients, course history, and certifications are pushed into Salesforce which allows them to link a student to a contact record, a client’s account, support cases, projects, etc.
I love that Skilljar offers certifications for its platform, and my team members have participated in these certification programs.
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software
MRI continues to offer private training, but the addition of on-demand eLearnings and live public training provides clients with topic/feature/function-based training in smaller bites as opposed to the traditional multi-day module training.
Prior to our on-demand eLearning options, a client might spend 1-2 weeks in the scoping process defining what their training should include, plus there could be a project backlog of up to 6 weeks before the training could be delivered. Now with Skilljar, the client can access this content at the push of a button.
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software
Advice for LMS Seekers or Switchers
Collin offers the following advice to those who are searching for a first-time LMS or thinking of switching to a new system:
- Think bigger than your current needs. Think outside the box about what you could do with the system in the future and make sure that the system is prepared to handle your growth.
- Ask the vendor about how other customers use their solution. Ask to see examples of branding, integrations with other systems, SSO, and the use of catalog pages.
- Consider the revenue factor: Are you charging for training currently? Is there an opportunity to charge for training in the future?
Some of our earlier migrations are having incredible success now.
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software
If you are migrating to another LMS:
- Document a communication plan for clients migrating. I would recommend this plan include additional follow up 1-3 months post go-live.
- Move courses early–don’t forget about the time to build quizzes or attach surveys.
- Make sure you leave enough time between submitting imports (students, transcript history) and going live. This means accounting for holidays and weekends, and consider doing multiple imports so that an early set of data exists for go-live, and then do a catch-up import closer to or post go-live.
- We have had some migrations where clients need an access code to access their content on our subscription site. In this case, make sure you factor in the creation of access codes. Also, these clients need to know their access codes for future student creation, which necessitates individual emails rather than a bulk email.
- Consider pricing changes in LMSs; migration might be the right time to make a change.
I look forward to our continued partnership and growth in our use of Skilljar!
— Collin Bensinger, Director, Education Services, MRI Software