Since Skilljar focuses on training external audiences (customers and partners), many of our clients are already using marketing automation software to scale email communication. Rather than replicate this functionality in Skilljar, we prefer to integrate with existing systems so that clients can leverage best-of-breed tools.

One of the most popular marketing automation systems is Marketo. This post describes how Skilljar clients are integrating our LMS with Marketo today.

At Skilljar, we often work with customer success teams that are seeking to launch and grow their customer education programs. Whether you're a software company selling your product or a training company that's selling content, your prospects can choose from an increasing number of options and are able to switch vendors more easily than ever before.

Providing successful customer onboarding and quality ongoing education are therefore critical to demonstrating product value, improving retention, and fighting customer churn at scale. In this blog post, we'll discuss the 3 keys to running a successful customer education program.

1. Customer marketing
2. Customer training
3. Customer communication

What makes customer training unique? When selecting an online training solution, it's important to work with a system that meets your needs, whether that's delivering an online college course, employee compliance, or externally facing training.

Online training solutions like HR systems focus on internal learners, such as employee training. Customer training serves such a different audience, that it requires very different features. At Skilljar, we primarily work with companies that are training customers, channel partners, community members, and 1099 contractors. Read on for 5 unique features to look for when delivering customer training.

At Skilljar, our clients are typically looking to both scale and improve their customer onboarding process. "Customer" onboarding also refers to channel partners, 1099 contractors, and community members as well as direct customers. Training sessions are typically driven by customer success managers and delivered either in person or via live video conference using a program like WebEx.

There are many benefits of adding an on-demand, self-paced option for customer onboarding and customer training. Here are the top 3 benefits!

Customer Success is a relatively new term among B2B software companies. It combines elements of account management, customer relationship management (CRM), onboarding, training, implementation, and support in order to help customers successfully adopt and use a product in the long-term.

Previously, customers bought software on multi-year license agreements that required heavy implementation. Once the contract was signed, it was very difficult and expensive to switch providers. In today's subscription economy, many B2B software companies have self-service billing options and customers are able to try many different options before signing up. With fewer human touchpoints and ever-decreasing transition costs, Customer Success has evolved as a practice to help companies proactively manage the health and retention of their customer base.

This article summarizes the different types of software that are commonly used by customer success professionals.

In addition to finding an online training platform like Skilljar, companies frequently need to outsource some or all of their eLearning content creation. In this article, we describe general expectations for your content budget, based on different scenarios for outsourcing eLearning development.

It's April 1st and we're excited to launch some new features that are very much in-demand. Read on for the complete list!

According to TrainingIndustry.com, companies spend most of their training dollars (56%) on external audiences, not employees. External audiences are sometimes referred to as the "extended enterprise." However, this is not a commonly known term, even in the eLearning industry. So what types of trainees are part of the extended enterprise? We call them the Four C's - read on to learn more!

Photo by StockMonkeys.com / CC BY

With the rise of the "sharing economy," the very nature of how we work is rapidly changing. Nearly 1 in 5 American workers is now part-time, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Recent articles in Time and the New York Times describe how an increasing number of us are earning primary and secondary income by becoming part-time drivers, renting out our rooms, pet-sitting, delivering packages, and more.

For operations managers, the sharing economy's contract workforce presents unique challenges for scaling, onboarding, and ensuring consistent quality experiences in the marketplace. This article summarizes the key challenges and our recommendations for training and development in the sharing economy community.

With so many Learning Management System (LMS) vendors to choose from, the ability to integrate workflows and data with your company's processes is just as important as delivering a great learning experience. At Skilljar, we've found that creating flexible APIs and webhooks have given our clients the widest range of options to support their technical needs. In this post, we describe three of the most common LMS integrations between Skilljar and other systems.