CASE STUDY
ZoomInfo Increases Customer Renewals 15% With a Strategic Commitment to Customer Education
The Enterprise SaaS company has used the Thought Industries Customer Learning Cloud to focus on its ‘North Star’ – proving the connection between educated customers, product usage and renewals.
ZoomInfo supports revenue teams with their Go To Market (GTM) strategies, delivering detailed information about prospects and partners, and helping Sales, Recruitment and Operations companies to engage with them. The business has experienced tremendous growth over the past six years, moving from 2,000 to 30,000 customers, with more than 300,000 end users across these accounts. The company recently went public, and made a number of strategic acquisitions, growing to 3,000 employees.
ZoomInfo initially started out on Litmos, an LMS built specifically for employee needs, with customer education as an afterthought. Customers had to be onboarded, receive a single training session, and have their completion marked on an Excel spreadsheet. This wasn’t the right approach for a rapidly growing business, and ZoomInfo looked for a more customer-focused solution.
In 2019, ZoomInfo adopted the Thought Industries Customer Learning Cloud, a platform that was purpose-built from the ground up for customer education. With the help of a Business Intelligence resource, they were able to create foundational customer success metrics around product adoption, completion rates and increasing the number of trained accounts.
Replacing their previous messy, complicated system with Thought Industries helped ZoomInfo progress through the Thought Industries Maturity Model from stage 2 to stage 4, owing to personalized learning, tight integrations, and vastly improved insights into learning analytics – all thanks to the Thought Industries customer learning platform.
Just some of the key results from ZoomInfo’s work with Thought Industries include:
- More than 30,000 customers signed up to Panorama, each integrated with Salesforce
- 350 new certifications distributed each week
- 108% growth in product adoption for customers who have completed a course
- 15% increase in renewals for customers with at least one user completing a course
- 5-10% uplift in upsells for customers engaged in learning
Tom Studdert, Vice President of Customer Onboarding & Education, ZoomInfo
THE CHALLENGE
ZoomInfo needed to replace their messy, outdated LMS with a modern, customer-focused learning platform, giving them greater control over the learning experience and deeper insights into learning business impact.
THE SOLUTION
The Thought Industries customer learning platform supported a complete overhaul of ZoomInfo’s customer education program, giving them access to a wealth of invaluable learning analytics at the touch of a button.
The Challenge
ZoomInfo’s previous employee-focused LMS was not a good fit for their customer education program, and it was proving time-consuming and increasingly complicated to deliver high-quality customer learning to a rapidly growing user base. The Customer Education team was seen as a cost center, and they knew that they needed to prove their worth beyond the satisfaction scores and smile sheets. To do this, ZoomInfo needed a new platform that would put customer learning first, helping them make an impact on renewals, upsells, and product usage.
Tom Studdert, Vice President of Customer Onboarding & Education, ZoomInfo
Tom Studdert, Vice President of Customer Onboarding & Education, ZoomInfo
The Solution
After reviewing 35 learning platforms, ZoomInfo chose Thought Industries to create the ZoomInfo University and Knowledge Center, based on their focus on customer learning. They quickly got to work building out all of their online customer training on the Thought Industries platform, including webinars, virtual instructor-led training (VILT), customized videos and more, along with smart tagging and filtering to reach the right people at the right time. ZoomInfo can also create co-branded courses for enterprise customers, and a tight Salesforce integration and single sign-on ensures that customers never have to leave the ZoomInfo platform for a more streamlined learner experience.
“We had partnered with other LMS vendors along the way, and we never got the uplift or adoption that we’ve seen with Thought Industries, both internally and externally.”
—Henry Schuck, CEO, ZoomInfo