Thought Industries and ServiceRocket–a leader in tech-enabled services–recently announced a joint partnership that pairs customer learning software and services for organizations to improve customer success, product adoption and net revenue retention. This partnership reflects how demand for customer and professional education is ready to explode, and how Thought Industries and ServiceRocket are working together to bring the power of customer learning management to organizations around the world.
Robin Wadsworth, president of Thought Industries, and Bill Cushard, general manager of ServiceRocket, sat down to talk more about what the partnership means for enterprise organizations.
Q. Why did ServiceRocket decide to work with Thought Industries?
Cushard: Both organizations have the same goal: To help businesses drive customer success and revenue growth by getting the most out of customer learning. For us, that means focusing on what ServiceRocket does best — high-value, deep, tech-enabled services — and combining that with Thought Industries’ deep product development abilities. The nature of learning is to always improve and adapt, and the pace of that only accelerates when you’re talking about software, so we wanted a platform that allows users to continue to shape and build out their customer education programs. We subsequently decided to phase out Learndot, our own customer learning management platform, and transition those users to Thought Industries’ award-winning platform.
Q. How are Thought Industries and ServiceRocket working together?
Wadsworth: First and foremost, we’re each sharing our expertise to benefit our software customers’ customer learning journeys. Many organizations know that training customers is essential to the longevity of their business but lack the experience and expertise to establish a customer learning effort. ServiceRocket provides the on-the-ground expertise, helping extend the power of our platform. And, as ServiceRocket retires its Learndot platform, Thought Industries is giving those customers new subscription agreements to enable a seamless transition. Ultimately, we both have our customers’ education needs at the core of everything we do, and we both have significant experience serving global software vendors in helping them drive additional value through customer learning.
Cushard: Robin really hit on what’s key with this partnership: We’re combining the best in customer learning software and services. For ServiceRocket, that means we’re laser-focused on growing our customer education services practice, building on the Thought Industries platform and providing services that span implementation, support and content development, along with completely outsourcing customer and partner education programs.
It’s also important to note none of this is happening in a vacuum. As we migrate our Learndot customers, Thought Industries is constantly sharing with us how users are using their platform, whether it’s customer onboarding or self-guided assessments. It helps us to know how the platform’s being used to guide our services approach and how we help customers with new ways of enhancing and forming their customer learning models.
Q. How are customers responding?
Cushard: The response has been great so far. Our customers are pleased to know the Thought Industries platform will support their customer education journeys and grow with them, with our services layered on top.
Wadsworth: The migration to the Thought Industries platform isn’t happening overnight, but the response from ServiceRocket’s customers has been inspiring. As Learndot users become Thought Industries users, we expect engagement and conversations to continue as we help them get the most out of their customer learning management software.
Q. What are you learning from the partnership?
Cushard: Working with Thought Industries has been a fantastic education in the future of customer learning software and how to meet customers’ needs today while anticipating future challenges. We’re collaborating and drawing on each other’s strengths. Thought Industries knows how to shape a product that’s intuitive for a wide range of users, while we at ServiceRocket show companies how to develop and seamlessly implement and maintain a customer learning program through very targeted services.
Wadsworth: We’re developing new ways to drive value for our customers. This isn’t a one-and-done type of transaction. We’re confident in the value our customer learning management platform can deliver at scale over time, and as a services organization, ServiceRocket has its finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the market. We’re learning additional ways to drive value through ongoing services and support.
For our customers, they can be assured that while we sometimes won’t individually have all the answers, together we can find solutions so they can maximize value from their customer learning programs.
