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Lemon Learning Executive Interview

Sheri Greenhaus, Managing Partner of CrmXchange met with Claudia Fernandez, Country Manager, USA, for Lemon Learning at Enterprise Connect 2022.

Sheri: Let’s start by telling me a little about Lemon Learning.

Claudia: Lemon Learning is a digital adoption platform and we make sure that everybody is onboarded into their business tools and has autonomy on their business processes from day one. The way that we do this is via interactive guides and interactive content that can help a user, the employee, the client understand all of the processes instantly. So, this means that we caught on the friction caused by tutorials, by PDFs, by videos, anything that will distract or interfere with the learning of the actual process.

We have been growing over the past eight years. The company was founded in 2014 and our headquarters are in Paris, but we now have offices also in New York and in Germany. And we have a team in Australia as well as a technical support team for follow the sun.

These are some of the teams that we affect more immediately after we begin working with a client. So it's the IT teams first and foremost, because they are the ones who are usually in charge of not only onboarding the users onto their tools, but also dealing with the support requests. Once the users have a solution like Lemon Learning at hand, they don't have the need to get their support from the IT team. They're much more autonomous and they can find their support from our solution directly. This frees up the resources from the IT team to do actual tasks and projects that move their mission forward.

Sheri:  Is lemon learning more for internal that would access IT? 

Claudia: It can be for the employees. It can be for the employees of an organization, but it can also be for the clients of that organization. For example, Chrysler uses us in their ERP to onboard new vendors. The way those new vendors are guided through their ERP is via the Lemon Learning solution. 

I want to talk about the learning and development division and the business leaders, so the learning and development or the training divisions, they are also very much benefited by our solution because it makes a content creation of their training content so much easier. That means creating, updating, and maintaining the content in Lemon Learning is three to five times faster than conventional content. For example, it has happened to everybody that they need to change something because now the software has a new feature or now they have updated this process and they have eliminated a step. This means that the video that you took eight hours creating is now useless.  With Lemon Learning, in just three clicks, you could already edit that content.

Sheri: So even if the videos have been created, you can still go in and add content?

Claudia: Not exactly, because Lemon Learning is not a video. The business leaders can get the most out of their own software, because having the user be trained and be onboarded so much faster and so much more thoroughly they can get the most out of their tools. So many times we find that our clients have only scratched the surface of what their tools could have given them.  Many companies only use about 60% of Salesforce or 40% of Workday, because their users don't see what other values and tools they have within their software.

Also, just to mention some of the key benefits that come from our solution. What we have is the reduction of support and training costs, as well as the improvement of the software use and the reduction of the delivery time. We also focus on the standardization of the processes to make sure that, especially in large companies, there isn't a big differences between how the sales division in Chicago use Salesforce and the sales division in California use Salesforce. Many times we find that with big clients, especially global clients, they don't have standardization. This is especially apparent when it comes to reporting and making global decisions, they don't have access to honest data.

This slide shows the ROI of Lemon Learning.  The three areas where we can make the biggest impact.  With training and costs our ROI on the training department is about 75%, and that's yearly. In the first year they would see a 75% ROI, under training budget, as well as 50% for their support budget, because this is the reduction that they see even after the solution has been comprehended into that budget. This has a very big, impact. We're taking our client's feedback into account. And of course, with the content creation, it can go up to 80%.

Sheri: The clients themselves do the creation of their content?

Claudia: We create it for them.

Sheri: You create the content? So if you work with multiple industries, you must be working with them very closely. 

Claudia: Very closely. That's right. Our process is to begin with a kickoff meeting and then after we have comprehended all of the technical aspects, there is a meeting between our pedagogical engineer and the resource who would be in charge of the content creation from their side. They would explain to us their process. This is what we need the users to understand. And this is our main points of friction, our main points of frustration. This is where the user calls for customer / support technical support. We then create that content. We create the guide and then the user can find the guide into their Lemon Learning solution.

Sheri: If they have a large knowledge base, do you incorporate that knowledge base in or you take that information and repurpose it into Lemon Learning?  How does that work?

Claudia: Both. We have a content library embedded into the solution. They would be able to find all of the videos and the decks that have been created before for them in this library. We also use that information to create our own guides.

Sheri: Can you expand on the three pillars of Lemon Learning?

Claudia: We have three pillars or three features of Lemon Learning. We have the layer on the first side. That's the interactive side of our tool. The editor, which is in the middle, is how we can create the content. All of our clients are also trained on how to create and edit content themselves. And the third pillar is the back office. The back office is where they can organize all of the projects, give their user's permission and add roles to them, open profiles for learning and categorize the information.  

This is taking you through the player where you have a catalog of the guides that will work as a GPS of your tool. So if a user needs to find a guide on accounts on Salesforce, they would just search accounts and they would get that catalog.

Sheri: So it's a keyword search?

Claudia: Yes. And here's our push notifications. This is one of the one features that is a favorite of our clients, because it allows them to cut through the noise of the communications.  This is a bubble that shows in the middle of the screen and can deliver news. It can deliver a new guide. It can inform users about a new feature or some new conditions that they have included in the processes. It is a way to communicate with their audiences. And it's also very, very customizable. It can hold any type of formats into their roles.

Sheri: So this pops up in the middle of the screen, or can they customize it? 

Claudia: Yes, of course.  Our optimization for data entry is also very relevant, especially to our banking and insurance clients. It allows the user to understand exactly what is being asked of them in each field. This is to avoid making mistakes or adding the wrong type of content in each field and just letting them know exactly what it is that is needed from them at all times.

Sheri: So for example, if they put in the zip code and it's the wrong amount of numbers, it will alert them?

Claudia: That's right. And this is about the customization of our tool. Everything in Lemon Learning can follow the identity of our clients. It can have their same colors, it can carry their logo. It can respond to the identity that they have already created and just make the tool so much more cohesive and so much more responsive to what they want to create. 

Here we can organize our multi project overview. So it means that we can have several projects. Several tools on each organization and several learning profiles for each tool. Let's say that you have your sales department, your customer support department, and your accounting department all working with the same tool. You want to make sure that they are all getting their specific content. You can do that from the back office. 

We also have a very powerful translation feature, which allows us to bring our content that has been created in English, and push that content into over 175 languages.

Our analytics also allow our clients to know which types of content have been more popular, which have worked best with their audiences and where they have been used geographically, or also based in a timeframe. 

This is just to show what the content creation time efficiency is. From a simple guide or a simple process, it can be between five and seven guides that can be created per day. For a more complex guide, it can be around three or four guides a day. That's about three times faster than it would be for somebody to create a video for somebody to create a deck on the same processes. 

For our support, we guide and we train our clients to be able to create their content. Most of our clients choose to have us create the content for them.  And all of our clients have a dedicated project manager that is in charge of their projects. This means that we don't create tickets in Lemon Learning. We pick up the phone or send an email and the problem gets solved.

Sheri: The success manager is with that company throughout the lifetime of the customer? If there's anything new, they automatically get the new features and are told how to integrate them?

Claudia: Exactly. And here is a look at our project management roadmap. A project would take from a one month to maybe five weeks to be deployed.  From the kickoff meeting until the moment where the users find the content in their devices, will take about a month. What goes on between those two moments is that we test the instance of their tool and make sure that it matches the version of our solution. We also create all the content and train our clients.  

Sheri:   What is it about Lemon Learning that makes it so much easier to use? What's the main thing?

Claudia: I would say it's just the applicability of the solution. It's really responsive. The way that it has been developed is that it's as intuitive as possible. It's a tool that understands the needs of our clients and understands that what we are trying to do is reduce the friction at every step of the way. Reduce the friction when the content has to be created. Reduce the friction by eliminating unnecessary steps in processes and make sure that all of the processes are easy to understand and easy to apply by everybody.

Sheri: Can this can be used throughout the organization - from top management, if they need some sort of skill training, agents or customer service reps?  Is it just different projects depending on what each different group would need? Reporting-wise, they have the tools, they have the training. Let's say a supervisor or manager wants to see what's going on. What sort of reporting did they see? What sort of dashboard is available?

Claudia: They can see how many times a particular guide has been deployed. They can see which users have deployed which guides and whether they have finished them or not. They can see geographically where a particular content has been more popular and they can see which ones are reducing their support requests the most. So that means they can correlate the use of the particular guides to the reduction of their support requests. And they can see how they impact each other.

Sheri: Is the training personalized for the different agents?  Let's say somebody needs more help on one thing.  Can they get one piece of information? How does that work?

Claudia: We can make the content as categorized as needed. You can have, for example, a category or users that need to be onboarded from this month to this month. And you can follow up on those needs of that particular group very closely and very easily. You can even make it per user, if you wish.

Sheri: Have you been able to track the difference between agents that have been using this and agents who have not?

Claudia: Yes, because at the end of each guide we add a questionnaire where they can put in their feedback. They can rate the help they received from the guide. They can also add something that they were missing or something that they would like to be added on subsequent guides.

Sheri: Since agents have been using guides, are companies retaining agents? Are they finding it helpful and making their jobs easier?  How is Lemon Learning helping agents with this?

Claudia: Well, the experience that we had with Teleperformance in Mexico is that their turnover was reduced and agents stayed longer when they received the support that they needed at the right time. That's an impact that we've definitely seen in terms of how happy agents are in their jobs.

Sheri: Are they finding it's giving them easy access to information or how to find something?

Claudia: Yes, of course. We also find, especially with the Teleperformance example, is that what the agents needed was to feel empowered and to feel autonomous.  There's a lot of frustration that comes from not understanding your tools and finding that you have to show that frustration by asking somebody for help and also interrupting their day to find your own answers. By having Lemon Learning as a solution, they can just get their own answers.

Sheri: Where do you see Lemon Learning going and what other things are they trying to build out?

Claudia: Right now for our roadmap, I can talk about the analytics. We are developing Lemon Analyze, which helps our clients know how their users are using their tools even without the existence of Lemon Learning. Even before Lemon is applied, getting them to know how their users are reacting and interacting with our tools. This is all to find out where are the points where the most friction and frustration is happening. This is all to make sure that we create the content that is the most needed and to address the biggest issues. Also, we have our chatbot, which will allow the users to get their answers from within a guide that has already been created so that even if they don't want to launch the guide, they can get the answers they need. We want to, since we're here, we want to be global, by the end of this year.

Sheri: What sets you apart from other companies?

Claudia: What really sets us apart is the applicability of our solution because our business plan or business method is so much more beneficial to companies that have several tools that they want to help their users onboard in. For example, other competitors have one price per tool that is onboarded. For us, it's a flat rate for all of your tools. This makes it so much more interesting for our clients. And it makes the users happier because they know that they're going to get the same quantity of support everywhere they go.

Sheri: Is there anything we haven't discussed or I haven't asked you that you want our audience to know?

Claudia: Many of the times our clients didn't know that they had this issue as clearly, or as vividly as they did. Our clients we work with are nice big companies that involve themselves in the training and onboarding and care of their clients and their employees. And they put in so much time creating content and creating videos and creating PDFs. The truth of matter is that audiences are not reaching out to those materials. So this is a waste of their own resources. And it's just not connecting the way that they wish it would. Lemon Learning is the way to make sure that they can connect their important news and they're important training content with their audiences in a way that works.