SPS Commerce Improves the Learning Experience and Boosts Customer Retention by 30%

SPS Commerce simplifies the retail process by providing cloud-based supply chain software services for suppliers, retailers, third-party logistics providers and partners. SPS products help these parties spend less time managing systems and chasing partners, and more time serving customers and selling products.

Using SPS products requires a deep understanding of the platform and its capabilities. What SPS found was that it wasn t able to consistently provide the personalized training and support its customers needed to be successful in their unique business environments.

While the product and challenges are complex, the solution is the exact opposite. SPS needed a robust learning management system (LMS) that’d allow it to personalize training for more than 40,000 customers, increase product adoption, provide value and improve retention. 

The only things standing in its way? The right LMS solution.

Enter Gainsight Customer Education.

Retail is the largest industry in the world, with people buying millions of products every day. Although this is music to every retailer’s ears, its sheer size makes it incredibly complex to manage. Historically, retailers drudged through these layers of complexity with manual processes and mundane tasks related to supply chain management, vendor management, order management and more.

Here’s where it gets challenging. SPS’ software is intricate and constantly evolving. In addition to that, each customer uses it differently, tailoring it based on their needs. So, not only is training essential, but SPS’ customers needed it personalized to their use case.

Unfortunately, SPS’ Support and Customer Success teams have finite bandwidth. With tens of thousands of customers, this level of personalization and attention is hard to scale. No matter how hard they tried, it wasn’t humanly possible to give each customer the personalized support they needed. As a result, product engagement dropped, key customers churned and top-line revenue plateaued.

The key to SPS’ success was its ability to create an intuitive learning center — SPS Training Center — that delivered custom, diverse and engaging training materials 
 to its global customers. Here’s how Gainsight Customer Education helped SPS do that:

Contextual Learning

Each of SPS’ customers is different, which meant that its 
 team couldn’t mass produce content and upload. Instead, it needed to deliver the relevant content unique to each customer.

With Gainsight Customer Education, course structures are entirely adaptable, allowing SPS to group them to be accessible to specific groups of customers that had the same learning needs. With Gainsight’s API, SPS could segment and enroll users at scale while ensuring only applicable courses were open. This flexibility allowed it to create a personalized learning experience that generated better engagement.

Learner-friendly Interface

SPS could spend hours creating content and developing intelligent automation, but if the actual learning experience wasn’t easy as pie, it’d all be for nothing.

Gainsight Customer Education provided a custom, modern, on-brand and intuitive interface so that SPS’ customers could seamlessly progress through the content. It was also crucial to SPS that people could navigate the content in as few steps as possible, so UX efficiency was key.

Ongoing Training and Support

As the retail industry evolves, SPS’ customers’ learning behaviors, needs, and preferences change. To account for these shifts and ensure SPS can maintain a high level of learning for its customers, Gainsight continually evolves its core offerings with new features and capabilities. When we make these updates, SPS must know what they are, how they impact its customers, and how they can take advantage of them.

The Gainsight team provides comprehensive product expertise, experience in the SaaS and technology fields, and extensive knowledge around training techniques and best practices. Gainsight’s dedication to customer success gave SPS peace of mind that its LMS vendor would align with its program and customer’s needs.

With Gainsight Customer Education, SPS could retain more customers and continue growing. Creating a complete learning experience with total control over content creation and delivery allowed SPS to increase customer retention by 30% in just one year.

1. Improved Engagement and Adoption

Since 2015, SPS has enrolled more than 42,000 customers and has seen substantial engagement from those who accessed the content, allowing it to drive more product adoption and usage.

2. Reduced Support Calls

SPS sees each engagement with SPS Training Center as a support call that’s been avoided.

SPS bases this perception on the premise that as it trains and educates its customers, they become more knowledgeable and find greater value in the platform. They become more self sufficient and confident using the product and less reliant on SPS’ support teams.

3. Increased Operational Efficiences

From an operational standpoint, Gainsight made designing content fast and easy — with no requirements of design or expertise.

Since Gainsight Customer Education enabled the team to design course activity templates for reuse, SPS saved a tremendous amount of time creating resources they could reallocate to other high-impact business activities such as strategy.