Proving the Value of Your Academy on Retention: Where to Start
One of the most powerful, but often complex, stories we can tell is how Customer Education contributes to retention and revenue. If you're looking for ways to start tying your academy activity to customer outcomes—particularly renewals and expansions—this post is for you.
While there's no one-size-fits-all solution yet, a number of our customers have started exploring indirect or inferred influence between CE activity and retention metrics. Below is a lightweight but effective approach you can adapt to your own context using data you already have access to.
The Approach: Match CE Activity to Account Outcomes
Start with your Monthly Course Activity (MCA) report and Excel:
- Pull course completions over a set time frame (e.g., past 12 months).
- Extract domain names from learner email addresses using Excel's
TEXTSPLIT. - Compare the list of domains against:
- Renewed accounts
- Churned accounts
- Expanded accounts
What to Look For:
Positive Signals
- Renewed + course completions → Possible positive influence
- Renewed + no CE activity → Is this a smaller number than the one above?
- Not renewed + course completions → Are there patterns in engagement level or roles?
- Expanded accounts + CE engagement → Look for a correlation between completions and ARR growth.
Negative Signals
- Churned + no CE activity → A potential gap in engagement
- Churned + incomplete/low usage → Could signal low value perception
- Churned + high course completions → Dig deeper—did they skip ILTs, ignore key courses, or face friction elsewhere?
Why This Matters
This isn’t about finding a perfect formula. It’s about starting the journey of showing how learning engagement can impact real business outcomes. By testing and iterating on these theories, you'll start building a data-backed narrative about your Academy’s influence.
And even if the first pass doesn’t show a clear correlation, don’t be discouraged. The real goal here is to uncover trends, ask new questions, and get closer to the story your data is trying to tell.