Skilljar makes customer education possible for all
What do you like best?
Skilljar is relatively straightforward to build and implement, which is so helpful when you find yourself in the driver's seat as a project manager and/or content manager. The customer success team is also very helpful in setting up, rolling out and answering questions and sharing resources. They provide lots of helpful training and materials to help you internalize the information. Their customer success team truly wants to see you succeed and are there through the most crucial first steps and they listen and respond to requests very well.
It has a multi-course pathway structure that can be applied to any role in your enterprise, ending with a certificate that goes on a LinkedIn profile. It integrates and plays well with many other platforms such as Salesforce, Zoom and Survey Monkey. These features make using it as a learner or administrator a big plus.
We haven't had a chance yet to dig into analytics but are excited to check them out after our hard launch date.
*edit* Returned after hard launch to update this part. I have looked through analytics and while I still don't have the best grasp of them I would say they are overall quite useful from the Skilljar dashboard side. You can see the # of people registering for courses and their completion rate as well as quiz scores. Our Customer Success person is working with us to better understand this data.
However, our Salesforce integration didn't quite meet expectations. Skilljar does hook in very easily (our dev team said it was the easiest integration they had ever done) and show how each contact in Salesforce is doing in Skilljar, however, what it doesn't do is let us view that student data in groups.
Since our customers are classified by school district, that would be our logical way to group the students and see if their completion of training led to lower churn but the standard integration does not roll up contacts by group and our team has limited resources to write custom code to make that happen.
Unfortunately, that brings us back to square one in terms of linking lower churn to training completion. We still have those metrics in other ways but hoped that the Skilljar to Salesforce integration would make it less clunky to show that our customers who completed training churned less.
Back to things I like though, they just added an engagement email feature which is super helpful! They implement improvements often and do seem to be listening to what customers are asking for.
What do you dislike?
While Skilljar's administrator interface is simple to use, it is not the sexiest looking thing when compared to the more expensive options.
From the end-user standpoint, the out-of-the-box UI also leaves much to be desired visually. However, if you have someone who knows how to code then they can insert code to customize it and make it look a little more polished.
Another thing I dislike is that there really are no social learning features. Other platforms have badges and scores and discussion forums and things of that nature but Skilljar doesn't. Something I would love to see is "social proof" features that show the user how they performed/behaved compared to others in their org.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Set up a call with someone there and ask them to take you through the platform itself and answer your questions. You should ask them for examples of low to high effort implementations of Skilljar by their customers so you can know what to expect and how much effort it will be to get yours to look that way.
Know that the fewer resources that you can wrangle in your org, such as web developers, project managers, content developers, etc., the less you'll be able to accomplish when it comes to building content, SSO builds or customizing content. The out-of-the box experience isn't bad it's just a little less sexy.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
With Skilljar we are now able to reach all of our customers with a standard certification track with quizzes when before we just had a video library. This alone offers a great deal of value to our customers but on top of that we are able to use our customer success and sales teams to have insights into their customers like never before.
We have always wanted to offer a certification pathway because we know that those customers who utilize our standard on-site training renew at higher rates so we are confident that we will have less churn as a result of our certification pathway yet are still working on the hard data points to show this ROI.
We are also learning a great deal about good customer success and customer education practices ourselves as Skilljar is a great model for excellent customer success!
