Slack (NYSE:WORK) is the collaboration hub that brings people, information, and tools together to get work done. With over 12 million daily active users and customers ranging from the Fortune 100 to corner markets, Slack has quickly become the platform we all know and trust for collaboration and communication.
Given Slack’s stellar growth, it’s no surprise that they value the development of their global workforce and embrace learning as a competitive advantage.
With Slack’s rapid growth has come understandable challenges surrounding onboarding and the ongoing development of their employees. Expansion throughout their 16+ global offices meant that Slack needed a learning solution that would not only allow them to move quickly, but also be easily adopted by all teams across the organization.
“We needed something that was flexible enough to leverage different mediums. Whether I just want to create an article natively in Continu, embed a document, reference an external resource, or even bring in a SCORM package, we can easily do all of this in Continu. This has made the barrier to entry really low for all types of content creators, from beginners to experts and everyone in between. It’s really nice to have a system that can accommodate learners and creators of all types.”
As the Manager, Global Sales & Success Enablement, Bradford Jordan describes “Before Continu, we had videos living in one place, onboarding content in another place, and reporting in another. It was really difficult to decipher and interpret where we could make changes and how to best serve our learners. There were too many places to go and it was just really hard to have a single source of truth.”
“One of the things I was so excited about Continu was the ability to build content that can be leveraged across the organization with an added layer of bespoke elements that can be contextualized for different roles. Being able to do this while maintaining universal tracking and analytics has been a total game-changer for us at Slack.” - Bradford Jordan
Transitioning to Remote Work with Continu
Slack as a company has always embraced remote work, after all, their collaboration software enables communication for anyone, across any device, in any location, and has been the catalyst to enable countless companies to work remotely.
With a global team representing over 16 offices worldwide, providing a reliable and tailored learning experience to all new and existing Slack employees was paramount with the recent shift to remote work. Slack heavily relied on Continu to ensure all employees received effective onboarding and an uninterrupted development experience that has been critical to their ongoing success.
“We didn't even have to miss a single onboarding class when we shifted to remote work because we were able to leverage Continu to take the content that was typically happening in-person and easily adjust it be effective in a remote-work environment.” Said Kelly Pearce, Slack’s Learning Operations Coordinator.
"Continu really helped Slack shift to remote work without skipping a beat."
The flexibility and power of Continu has been extremely valuable for us when it came to that shift to remote work for Slack.
Powering Sales and Success Training
It’s no doubt that Slack has one of the most successful Sales & Customer Success teams in the industry. With Slack's annual sales on track to surpass $1 Billion, it's undeniable that their growth is not slowing down anytime soon. This scale has magnified the importance of ensuring sales & success representatives are effectively onboarded and efficient in their role.
As Bradford describes, “The majority of learning tools on the market are not built for sales and actually fall apart when used for sales audiences. Having separate tooling for L&D and Sales implicitly and explicitly creates a divide. With Continu, we’re able to have all training in one central platform, which makes it easy to collaborate and share training resources across the organization”
By using Continu, Slack is able to effectively enable their sales team from day one by automating the entire onboarding process, delivering training in a central location, and providing a truly blended experience. Slack can successfully manage the entire training experience and there’s no time wasted navigating through disparate systems. Additionally, Sales managers have real-time insight to track their teams training progress directly within Continu and Salesforce. Using Continu has resulted in decreased ramp times, increased time to value, and decreased training costs for Slack.
“If you had asked me historically what it's going to take to get reps to learn about incident management, software development, and the other critical areas of their role, I would have said, 'a miracle'. After building and distributing these training sessions with Continu, we saw a 100% completion rate globally across sales in addition to a bunch of thank you’s from our reps and managers.”
Leveraging Continu & Slack for Just-in-Time Learning
Given Slack’s mission to help companies get work done, they needed a learning platform that would deliver training where and when their employees need it most – right within the Slack application.
As Kelly Pearce describes, “a really big factor for us when we were thinking about the future of learning [at Slack] is the concept of just-in-time learning. For us this means being able to easily find relevant information.” Kelly continues, “we've received very positive feedback about Continu especially with the ability for our employees to find training content right within Slack. This has been extremely helpful to all teams across the organization and allowed teams to be more efficient with their time.”
By providing an easy way to search and be notified of upcoming learning right within Slack, their employees are able to access learning information without the need to search within other platforms. This results in a richer learning experience and a significant time savings for end users. Additionally, with Continu’s auto-notification and escalation features, Slack managers can be kept up to date in real-time when training has been completed or is overdue. This ensures managers are always proactively kept up to date without the need to manually check in on training progress.
Speed matters a lot. The ability to spin up and modify content in realtime is a huge differentiator.
Krista Wiederhold, a Sales Enablement Project Coordinator at Slack describes their need for a learning platform that moves at the speed of Slack, “Our business changes a lot, so our training needs to be updated often and quickly. The way in which Continu allows us to create and refresh content in both a dynamic and granular way has been huge for us.”
A Deeply Integrated Learning Platform
In addition to using Continu’s deep Slack Integration, the Slack team relies heavily on Continu’s other powerful integrations to run their team training in a seamless and powerful way.
One integration that the Slack team has been leveraging a lot with their recent switch to remote work is Continu’s Zoom Integration. As Kelly Pearce describes “Continu’s Zoom integration has really helped us shift to remote work. With attendance automatically being tracked and assignments set to trigger after a session, our facilitators who run these sessions don’t even have to think about anything but teaching. On top of this, the whole experience is also just as seamless for the end-user.”
Continu allows us to make great use of tools we're already investing in... you don't often see this from an LMS. This has been huge for us.
A Seamless, Blended, Learning Experience for Slack
In partnership with Continu, Slack is able to create a truly blended learning experience that is seamlessly connected with the growing needs of their organization. By leveraging Continu’s powerful integrations with the tools they already use, Slack are able to provide a just-in-time learning experience that moves at the speed of their business and gives them a competitive advantage.
“Continu is a robust industry-leading product... but that’s not enough anymore. In addition to the product itself, Continu comes with an aggressive development schedule, an incredibly strong roadmap, and an extremely high-touch, engaged support team. This rounds out the experience of administering and building content in an LMS in a way that I've personally never experienced before and has made it so much more enjoyable.”
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