Skilljar Blog

Scaling Customer Success: Our Quarterly Business Review (QBR) Template

Written by Sandi Lin | November 24, 2015

At Skilljar, we spend a lot of time thinking about customer onboarding and success. Even after our customers have successfully launched on the Skilljar platform, there are many reasons why we'd like to stay in close touch.

Earlier this year, we started doing proactive Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with select customers who are "post-launch" with Skilljar. These 60-minute sessions are an opportunity for us to learn more about our customers' upcoming business goals, get feedback on our product roadmap, and share best practices.

This post describes the typical agenda and template that Skilljar uses for our QBRs. Major kudos to the Preact team who created the master template that we use.

QBR goals

In designing Skilljar's QBR, we considered the desired goals for Skilljar and for our customers. 

For our customers, it's an opportunity to:

  • Think strategically about the upcoming quarter and year
  • Review historical results and metrics
  • Leverage new features offered on the Skilljar platform, of which they may be unaware
  • Learn best practices shared by our Customer Success Managers
  • Provide input to our feature roadmap

For Skilljar, we aim to:

  • Build relationships with our customers, particularly with new stakeholders
  • Ensure customers are achieving their business goals, as mapped against our feature set
  • Reinforce the ROI delivered through reporting and analytics
  • Share training tips and strategies
  • Understand key objectives for the upcoming quarter and year, so we can plan product features accordingly

Our process

To prepare for the session, our customer success team reviews all aspects of the account, including previously discussed initatives, features utilized, and training metrics. While the specifics will vary from customer to customer, in general we'll put together a Powerpoint presentation similar to the following deck (customer-specific information has been removed):

Metrics

We like to start with reviewing key metrics that relate to the specific goals of our customer. The example shown begins with a course-level summary view of registrations, completions, session time (hours spent in training), and completion rate. This gives our customers a quick glance of overall activity.

Slides 5-7 drill deeper into engagement metrics - lesson views per course, completion rates per course, and last activity day by month. In lesson views per course, this customer was surprised to see that one course has been viewed over ten thousand times. Completion rates are also higher than industry median, which is particularly significant since this customer does not require completion or provide particular incentives to do so. Finally, training usage has been very steady during months since launch, showing continuous engagement and value (November is a partial month in the example shown).

Features

Next, our team reviews the customer's training portal and makes proactive suggestions for improving the user experience. In this example, the customer is always offering free training, so it may make sense to remove the repetitive word "Free" from the course catalog. In addition, with a growing number of courses, the customer may want to tag courses with attributes and provide more specific header text.

The course catalog is a great example of how our customers can grow with Skilljar - initially the customer only had 1 course, so a catalog was not required. As they launch more courses, our customer success team helps them use more of our feature set.

Slide 9 is an opportunity to share recent feature launches with our customers. While we communicate launches on our product newsletters and blog, customers may not always read these, or understand how they can be used in their own organizational context.

Roadmap

In the last part of the QBR, we review Skilljar features in progress, and collect feedback from customers on our roadmap. As part of this, we discuss the customer's upcoming goals and objectives, and how training fits into the overall picture. We wrap up the session with questions and next steps/follow-up, including emailing the updated deck after the call.

Have questions or feedback on our customer success QBR? Email us or leave a note in the comments!