Whether you’re a customer looking to achieve success in your role with our process mining software, a Celonaut — which is what we call each of our 3,000 employees, one of our 250 consulting or technical partners, or a student accessing training content — if you want to learn about Celonis, eventually you will end up on the Celonis Academy. As a result, the Academy is responsible for delivering a myriad of training options to a wide variety of unique audiences. You could say it has to wear a lot of hats.
To create and deliver impactful learning experiences, and meet our goal of providing dedicated enablement programs for each audience — we chose to modernize our tech stack with Thought Industries as our strategic LMS partner.
Mapping our LMS Needs to Market Demands
When we were comparing solutions in the market, it came down to adopting an LMS that was focused on enabling external education rather than internal or corporate training. With Celonis’ growing learner numbers and the maturity of our training offerings, we needed a more scalable LMS that had a strong focus on external audiences.
On our previous LMS, the overall development of the solution was targeted at internal enablement, which didn’t suit our goals for the Academy. One example was front-end design, which we wanted ultimate flexibility over, so that we could build a very custom front end for each of our four audiences. We were excited about a growing number of learners, and as a global enterprise — localization at the front end was also crucial.
We had long ago made a strategic decision to provide the majority of our training content for free, but we wanted to offer additional paid options such as partner certifications, practitioner exams and more. These would become a direct revenue stream for us, and offer greater value for Academy users to succeed in their roles. To make this happen, we knew we had to streamline the eCommerce experience, integrate with payment processors and tax-compliant providers, and alleviate the overall friction for both learners and employees.
Another important goal was to achieve true extensibility, as our previous tool relied on heavy usage of API endpoints, and we wanted to create automated workflows that reduced the reliance on cumbersome processes. It was quite a wish list! After researching the market, we found that Thought Industries’ roadmap was best aligned with our own focus areas, and offered the flexibility we were looking for in an LMS.
Measuring the Results in Our Learner Engagement, CSATs and ROI
Since our Academy migration, scale has become easy to manage, and we’ve doubled the number of learners we serve, offering an optimized learning experience unique to each audience, using Thought Industries’ multi-tenant offering, Panorama.
The Academy hosts role and goal-based training tracks, courses, microlearning videos and articles, webcasts, and certification exams. We have custom instructor-led training (ILT) for different audiences, and we offer partner masterclasses and practitioner exams, too. With the help of Thought Industries’ built-in eCommerce capabilities, such as a new Stripe integration, we’ve facilitated 49k partner certifications since the migration! The authoring tool makes it easy to maintain, expand and localize materials, which means many assets are now available in six languages across 200 regions.
As we have ultimate flexibility over the content we provide, we can offer unique training options, such as our test and play environments, which are a real differentiator for us. These provide hands-on access to software so learners can directly apply theory in practice and solidify their learning in the moment, without being afraid they’re going to break something. The improved learner experience is reflected directly in our 80% CSAT scores, and we’re hoping to continue to boost this by building personalized, multi-channel content recommendations, and leveraging AI-based learning to even better serve our audiences and their distinct needs.
With a more modern tech stack, we’re automating a lot more than we ever could in the past, leveraging integrations such as Salesforce, Zoom, and Transifix to make workflows more efficient. Altogether, we’re a lot more agile, so when customers or partners come to us with additional requests like having courses integrated into their own LMSes, or making content available outside of a traditional login environment — we can make it happen. These custom use cases are essential to growing our business, and they couldn’t exist without a flexible, modern LMS.
I also want to shout out the Thought Industries’ Reporting Hub, and integrations with BI 1.0 and 2.0 for reporting and analytics. The value of training is increasingly measured against the impact we’re having on other business metrics. We’re currently leveraging both learning insights on focus accounts, as well as post-analytics on specific customer-facing initiatives — with the ultimate goal of making our customers happy and successful with Celonis.
By leveraging insights and then sharing them with internal and external stakeholders, we build trust and get buy-in for new content formats and contributors – and it’s the visibility we have through Thought Industries helps us to do exactly that.
If you’re interested in building custom learning experiences that cater to specific audiences from a single, modern LMS, reach out to schedule a demo of the Thought Industries platform.
About the Author
Leonie Martin, MSc works as a Lead Learning & Enablement Analyst at Celonis, a company that offers a Process Intelligence platform to improve business processes around the world. Leonie joined the company in its start-up days and helped grow their learning platform from about 2k to more than 200k learners within a few years. Today she focuses on learning analytics helping the team understand their audience and show the impact of learning on business outcomes.
