How Docebo helped PowerDMS improve customer onboarding time

The Challenge

Guaranteeing instant access to training for their growing customer base

When software platform PowerDMS launched, the company grew quickly. Within a few years, they knew that they needed to set up a learning management system (LMS) to onboard their customers and teach them how to get the most out of their software.

Director of L&D Patty Costley explains:
“When I first started with PowerDMS, we had no training team. The customer teams were taking calls and repeating the same thing all day, every day,” she remembers. “We were getting ready to grow really quickly and it wasn’t going to work long-term.”

PowerDMS wanted to improve the time it took to onboard new customers and make sure that all customers had fast, convenient access to training.

They also needed to tailor to different user profiles. For this, they needed an LMS with Salesforce integration, so they could automatically define which content was applicable to which type of user.

Unfortunately, the first LMS solution they found fell short of their expectations.
“By the time we built our content and launched, we had already outgrown it,” Patty says.

Course uploads were slow and clunky, and the UX was not ideal.

But worst, their Salesforce sync faced huge delays: the LMS platform throttled the sync at 500 records per 30 minutes.

With over 200,000 users eligible to consume learning, Patty calculated that it would take nearly a year for everyone in her learner base to have access to a course.

Patty says, “Our customers were calling us to say that they couldn’t access their catalog. And when we went to [our previous LMS], they told us our sync was backed up for 27 days. I couldn’t work with that.”

To meet their original goals and reduce new customer onboarding time, PowerDMS needed to find an LMS that could handle their user volume.

And to make their situation even more challenging, the clock was ticking: PowerDMS needed to implement a solution within 90 days, before the contract with their first LMS ran out.

“We had to switch in 90 days. If we didn’t, we would have had to renew our contract with [the other LMS company], and we weren’t willing to do that,” Patty explains.

The Solution

A flexible LMS platform with the power to scale

After their negative experience with that first LMS, PowerDMS was nervous about committing to another system without testing it.

So they used a trial environment to test Docebo’s UX and integrations. Patty saw immediately that the Salesforce and Gainsight integrations would be a game-changer for PowerDMS.

The synching was much more efficient. Uploading courses was faster and easier, and users would be able to access relevant content immediately. “It would take 10 min to deploy a course in Docebo. Previously, it would have taken me over an hour.”

PowerDMS decided to make the switch. Their Docebo solution deployment manager helped them migrate their learning data and get their new system set up in less than 90 days.

“We had very clear expectations, and Docebo was very responsive. Being able to make that switch in less than 90 days was amazing,” Patty says.

After the migration, PowerDMS quickly saw their customer onboarding time begin to decrease. Customers no longer had to wait weeks, or even months, to access their learning modules.

But switching to Docebo offered many other advantages:

Docebo’s integrations gave customer service managers who worked in Salesforce the ability to access real-time information about the learning content their customers were consuming. “The data filters through Salesforce and Gainsight. When our implementation consultants are talking to a customer, the information is right there. They know exactly what they’ve enrolled in and what they’ve completed. That’s all visible to them, without ever having to log into Docebo.”

With Docebo’s language localization, PowerDMS could offer accessible Spanish learning to their customer base in Mexico.

Finally, Docebo’s intuitive UX and automation made life easier for the L&D team: they could define rules and set up learning paths for users, without spending hours inputting customer information manually.

The Results

119% ROI and nearly $150,000 saved in training costs

Since switching to Docebo, PowerDMS has managed to reduce customer onboarding time by 30%. “Having our customers onboard in less than 90 days is very important for us,” Patty says.

“We weren’t achieving that before because our processes weren’t scalable and they weren’t conducive to real learning. Since we’ve switched to Docebo, we’ve been able to hit that goal more consistently. That’s a big deal.”

In 2021 alone, PowerDMS University–powered by Docebo–saw 5472 course completions for 3572 customer accounts. That saved their customer success managers over 5420 hours of oneon- one training time, which translates to nearly $150,000 cost savings and 119% ROI.

The average volume of customer service calls has also decreased significantly, despite PowerDMS’ rapidly growing customer base.

From January 2019 to January 2021, PowerDMS’ customer base grew by 28.1%, but service desk cases decreased by 27.5% during the same period.

“The main change was the launch of Docebo,” Patty says. Finally, Docebo’s powerful analytics and data allow Patty to prove the value of L&D and customer training to PowerDMS leadership.

“There’s a lot of bad training out there, so you have to demonstrate the value of good training. With Docebo’s reporting, I can do that.”

The numbers speak for themselves: In under two years, PowerDMS has been able to speed up onboarding significantly, vastly improve customer training, and save thousands of hours of training time.

None of that would be possible without Docebo, Patty concludes.

“Without Docebo, I couldn’t do it. Our customer success managers would go back to having the same conversations five times a day. Our churn would be higher. It’s not a life I want to go back to.”