Skilljar Finds Increasing Commitment to Customer Education in Light of COVID-19

Skilljar, the leading enterprise Customer Education Platform, today released the 2020 Customer Education Benchmarks and Trends Report, a comprehensive report based on a survey of over 250 customer and partner education experts and an anonymized analysis of education programs hosted on the Skilljar platform.

The report reveals that technology companies are seeing increased online learner engagement in light of COVID-19. To respond to this interest, companies are opening up access for their programs to wider audiences by removing fee requirements. The report also found that the top two drivers for customer education are customer retention and reduced time to value for customers. Key findings from the report include:

• Respondents reported the following impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic:
  • Nearly 50% of respondents indicate that their students are spending more time learning.
  • 40% of respondents are now offering some free or discounted courses, where previously all courses were fee-based.
  • Also related to the pandemic, 6% of customers expect their budgets to increase in the next three months (April - June 2020) and 61% of respondents do not anticipate their budgets to change.
• The top two driving forces behind external education programs are customer retention and decreasing time to value.
• More than 80% of organizations surveyed use their training programs to educate multiple audiences, most commonly for customers, partners, and internal employees.
• Nearly 70% of respondents report integrating their training programs with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
• Based on the analysis of programs hosted on Skilljar, the most popular lesson format is video, and 66% of courses hosted on Skilljar feature at least one video.

“As organizations adapt to COVID-19, it’s critical for education teams and their stakeholders to understand where their training program is succeeding and where there are opportunities to further optimize,” explained Skilljar CEO and Co-founder Sandi Lin. “With this report, we hope to empower education professionals with tangible benchmarks and industry standards to strategically grow and improve their programs.”

The industry survey and Skilljar program data both indicate that the discipline of external education is evolving fast and aligns well with business initiatives like customer retention and decreasing time to value. The COVID-19 pandemic is further increasing organizational interest and investments in Customer Education, and respondents believe that this trend will continue.

Methodology

The findings in this report are the result of two data sources: an industry-wide, self-reported survey and an in-depth anonymized analysis of the education programs hosted on the Skilljar platform. Both sets of data focus on external (customer and partner) training programs unless otherwise noted.

About Skilljar

Skilljar delivers an innovative training platform which enables businesses to provide scalable and effective customer education. The enterprise-grade solution is used by hundreds of companies to accelerate customer onboarding and product adoption by enabling multimedia course creation, an intuitive and mobile-responsive learning environment, and automated CRM data integrations. Founded in 2013, Skilljar is based in Seattle and backed by top-tier venture capital firms Mayfield, Shasta Ventures and Trilogy Equity Partners. For more information, visit www.skilljar.com.

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