Degreed

Challenge: Providing customers with easy-to-use ways to interact more deeply with their data and differentiating Degreed in the learning systems space.

Results: User-friendly analytics deliver value to L&D teams quickly, while attracting new customers and expanding relationships with existing ones.

Workforce learning and upskilling platform Degreed specializes in making it easy for companies to track what skills employees are learning. The company’s Learning Experience Platform was designed to bring together learning that happens everywhere, both internal and external, in one place. 

The platform provides insights into employee behavior and development and aims to help its customers think more strategically about their upskilling initiatives—what skills do they need in the organization, and what skills do they have already today?

Degreed heard from customers that they were eager to do more with their skills data. “They want to play with the data. They want to explore the data, and they want ways to visualize the data and combine our data with other data sets,” said Todd Tauber, SVP Strategy at Degreed. To fulfill this customer need, Degreed looked for an analytics partner that could help combine the skills data that it collected with other sources of data to give customers a never-before-seen view of their organizations.

Partnering with Visier

When it started looking at expanding analytics, Degreed knew that it couldn’t make the massive investment in building analytics from scratch, so finding a partner was essential. 

It wanted to give customers a “different lens” on their learning and skills activity than they had traditionally gotten, and that meant combining with other data sets to understand the relationships between inputs and outcomes. “A lot of those other data sets start with other kinds of HR and work data. And so Visier was a natural, obvious choice,” said Todd. 

As Degreed began working with Visier to determine the shape and scope of the embedded analytics, clear and thorough documentation on the details of the project and the business case became essential. The team assembled answers to dozens of common questions—like “why we’re doing this in the first place and how this all works”—to help internal stakeholders get up to speed quickly. 

“Once we did that, things started getting unblocked because then everybody had the context they wanted, they now knew what they needed to do and they knew where to go to get the answers to the questions that had been answered 20 times before — like how we handle PII or what the use case are,” said Todd. 

Serving easy analytics to inexperienced users

Most Degreed customers don’t have analytics backgrounds or dedicated analytics team members, so it was paramount that the analytics Degreed offered be simple and easy-to-use. “Some of our customers don’t even know what to do with the data that they’ve got already,” said Todd. 

Through its partnership with Visier, Degreed developed analytics that take out the guesswork. “We’re giving them an easy way to get started exploring their data and answering questions that they didn’t even know they were supposed to ask,” said Todd.

And it lets Degreed users, many of whom are in HR, answer their own questions on their own time, instead of waiting for months for help from overtaxed internal analytics teams. 

“With the guidebooks and presentation tools, they can start using this on day one, without doing a lot of heavy data manipulation on their own. The goal is, customers don’t even need to know the questions that they need answered necessarily. As we identify common questions and challenges, we’ll build out dashboards and guidebooks to take a lot of the effort out for them,” said Todd.

Customized guidebooks represented an easy entry point for customers to begin playing with their data, and they compressed the “time to value” to a few hours or days, compared to weeks and months with other analytics solutions. 

Rolling out analytics as part of the sales strategy

Degreed has used the enhanced analytics as an opportunity to cross-sell to its existing customers. “We’re starting to now introduce this as a logical migration path for customers who have started to get more of the full value out of the base product and are starting to look for the next thing they can do with us,” said Todd. 

And the analytics have been packaged in with net new business opportunities and are an attractive selling point to new customers, as well. 

As Degreed brings the product to more customers, it has been training the sales team on the new vocabulary around analytics and the use cases that will be most relevant. And they have seen growing excitement among the sales and client experience teams as they get more familiar with the product. 

“When we started showing the sales people how this can connect back to the problems that customers are articulating in sales conversations and in client engagement conversations, they started getting excited,” said Todd. 

Exploring diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging data 

With the Degreed product rolled out recently, customers are eager to dig into diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) analytics. 

“Aside from just doing some basic DEIB-type training, our customers didn’t really know what their role was there. And what we wanted to do was try to help them see how they can be more impactful if they start thinking about these problems more comprehensively,” said Todd.

Degreed built out a guidebook to show customers how they can use data from Degreed to understand what skills are relevant to their organizations from a DEIB perspective (e.g. empathy), who has them, who’s learning about them, and where the gaps are. Customers can then manage investments in training and development and track their progress. 

“They can take an iterative approach to driving meaningful progress in creating the kinds of inclusive cultures that they want, through learning targeting the skills that matter most,” said Todd.

Those analytics have been a powerful use case in sales conversations and have helped the company stand out, said Todd. “We’re able to show clear differentiation and value quickly.”

Final thoughts

Degreed is continuing to bring its analytics to market, and that has meant selling and implementing a solution that no one at Degreed has ever sold before, Todd said. Visier support has been invaluable in helping Degreed think through the process and engineer a successful sales and client experience. 

“Every time we go back to [Visier] with these questions, there’s either somebody or something that makes it somewhere between a little bit easier and a whole lot easier,” said Todd.