The origin story of Connect: Docebo’s cure for learning integration headaches

• 5 min read

Docebo Connect - Learning Integrations

Hybrid and remote-first workplaces are driving fundamental shifts in how organizations structure their teams and their tech stacks. Now, more than ever, there is a need to connect people, systems, and processes together to create seamless workflows.

The average company uses 137 different SaaS products, according to a recent SaaS trends report. And every year, new sub-markets and niches emerge that can further silo and segment workflows and data pools across an organization.

Often, that means that companies need to find ways to integrate all of the different tools and data they have at their disposal in order to keep the business running efficiently, optimize costs and improve employee and customer experience.

Unfortunately, many organizations may not have access to the skills, budgets, and resources required to build and maintain the integrations needed to run their tech stacks efficiently. This is especially true for learning, historically siloed into its own platform with little to no data, workflow or process sharing with the rest of the revenue tech stack.

To break down these silos, learning admins have had to rely on integrations. And as anyone who has worked with integrations can confirm, they’re often expensive, time-consuming, technically messy, and one of the biggest bottlenecks when implementing and delivering an enterprise-level learning strategy.

A growing need for automation and integration

Despite the headaches, however, the need for automations and integrations to improve experiences for both internal and external audiences isn’t going away.

In fact, according to Workato, in the next two years, 64% of surveyed business professionals plan to build automations that focus on improving the employee experience, and 57% say the same about customer experience. Unsurprisingly, a whopping 97% of users at enterprise organizations say that they would rather use a unified platform for integrations and workflow automations rather than rely on several systems.

Many companies are looking at a situation where their workforces and market will shift rapidly into new methods of work. Still, their tech stacks won’t be integrated enough to handle the information and operational needs of that acceleration. This is true for learning and will affect internal, external, and hybrid audiences.

“Without integrations, learning programs will continue to be siloed away from the rest of the business, making it difficult to prove impact and secure additional resources,” says Andrea Lorenzon, Docebo’s Senior VP of Product. “Given the importance of upskilling, reskilling, customer training, and partner enablement, this is a cause for concern for anyone struggling with integrating learning into their tech stack.”

But never fear. That’s why we created Docebo Connect.

Tackling the LMS integrations challenge head-on

About two years ago, a team of Docebo engineers was working to find a way to simplify how people integrate their tech with Docebo Learn.

We wanted to create a solution that would help our customers:

  • Enable a comprehensive yet easy-to-deploy integration strategy that helps customers level up their L&D programs tenfold
  • Build and reinforce a culture of learning by making it clear that they value their employees’ development
  • Make learning experiences feel more personal and human
  • Facilitate the two-way communication of data to fuel learning personalization and applicability to internal and external users
  • Keep learning audiences engaged and educated by making learning impactful and applicable
  • Optimize tech costs by making integrations easier to deploy and less resource-intensive to maintain
  • Create a streamlined and cohesive tech stack that works together toward common business goals
  • Reduce the time they spend on manual, administrative tasks so that they can focus on more strategic learning initiatives
  • Maximize the impact of learning at their organizations by connecting it to their other data and measurement systems

Our new product had to be powerful enough to automate and integrate complex business systems but usable by people with limited technical or engineering skills. Learning admins would need to easily integrate their platform with others in their tech stack with limited help.

A complicated problem needed a simple solution.

With that in mind, our engineering team started to explore the world of low code/no-code development. During this phase, the team realized that the best path to driving immediate impact for our customers was to use an iPaaS model (Integration Platform as a Service).

iPaaS integrations allow users to build and deploy integrations and automated workflows within the cloud without the need to install or manage any hardware or middleware. In other words, you can create the integrations and workflows you need to connect different tech stacks at your business without the need to physically install or customize a codebase or third-party application.

The reason for that choice was simple: the industry is growing fast, and there’s an increasing demand for faster deployment, scalability, business agility, and digitalization of workflows. iPaaS allowed us to offer all of those benefits in a user-friendly manner.

So, our team got to work. Fast forward a few months, and we had all the elements in place to allow customers to connect Docebo Learn with their tech stack in just a few minutes.
That new platform was called Docebo Connect.

Connecting learning to your tech stack

Docebo Connect offers an incredible opportunity for customers to bridge the gap between data and action by connecting external systems to the Docebo Learning Suite.
Our Integrations Marketplace of more than 400 free and paid native iPaaS integrations enables people with limited technical know-how to use a no code/low code interface to develop and deploy automated workflows and integrations quickly and easily.

With Docebo Connect, customers can:

  • Automate user set up, making it easier to manage learners at scale
  • Get learning data where it needs to be by automatically pulling information from Docebo and pushing it to other systems
  • Automate learning processes that touch other systems in your business, such as creating sales leads based off of learner sign ups
  • Create flexible workflows that work for their unique business needs
  • Take ownership of their tech stack by removing the IT bottleneck
  • Spend less time worrying about overhead and maintenance and more time focusing on strategy
  • Swap out or edit their existing integrations when needed without change requests or hefty fees

Here’s an example of how that might work.

Your company has a CRM that houses all of your customer and partner data. That data needs to be seamlessly integrated into your learning system so that you can automate user management. Currently, that’s done manually or through data imports, which is eating up significant people hours.

In this case, Docebo can connect with your source-of-truth (CRM) system to speed up implementation and data transfer. For example, when a user is added to the CRM, a workflow can automatically create that user in Docebo Learn and enroll them in the appropriate courses.

The best part? You can get these integrations and automations up and running in minutes, not months.

Whether you’re a start-up or scale-up needing to implement integrations quickly without leaning on your IT team, or a large company needing to connect several enterprise systems, Connect is a widely applicable tool that centralizes your data-flow management, automates simple and complex workflows, cuts integration costs, and saves time.
Eliminate the many challenges of integrating learning into your tech stack, seamlessly connect learning technology to your essential systems, and ensure your learning strategy becomes a more meaningful and integrated part of the business.

Ready to take the headache out of learning integrations? Book a demo today to see Docebo Connect in action.

 

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