A focused Learning Experience: the missing ingredient?

Earlier in my career, I was 20 minutes into a C-level presentation of the Customer Education program I led at the time, and was asked a question that reprioritized the following half-year of my work:

What does a new user need to do to enroll in a course?

Up until that point, my Customer Education approach had been centered around its curriculum: the learning plans, the courses, the activities i.e. making the content engaging, valuable and use case-driven. Survey feedback was healthy; customer users who completed our courses seemed happy.

But what was the Learning Experience (LX) like? Getting back to the presentation question, it did take well over 10 steps for a new LMS user to go through registration, account activation, sign-in, browsing the curriculum catalog and then finally, enrollment. Further investigation with sibling organizations such as Customer Care revealed users typically abandoned this process due to confusion and frustration, turning then to product documentation, opening support cases or plain ol' trial and error to find out how to use their supported solutions.

That first question prompted many more: How easy was it to find information about our education program in the first place? How were we communicating the program internally and externally? How could customer stakeholders (such as IT managers) track progress of their teams's training? And by the way, how straightforward (or not) was it to get a team of 100 users certified on solution X?

These questions then drove extensive collaborative work with internal organizations and directly with users, to overhaul and optimize the program’s Learning Experience, inside and outside of the LMS. While we tackled larger projects such as new promotional content/processes, as well as an LMS redesign, so many key improvements required negligible time and effort (literally minutes!), for example, updating info text on the user registration page, or tweaking automated enrollment emails to ensure linkbacks worked.

The results were eye-opening, as if the program had been missing one critical ingredient up until that point: within a few months, user registrations, enrollments and completions were doubled, then quintupled within another quarter. The program gained wider awareness and reach across key customer accounts, and had a much stronger impact to the business from then on.

How easy is it for learners to engage with your education program? Learning Experience matters!