Setting Sail for Voyage, Personio’s New Educational Brand
In May 2023, we launched our new educational brand, Voyage by Personio. With Voyage, we’ve created a central destination to enable our customers — and, more broadly, the HR community across Europe — to build their careers. Voyage helps HR professionals access reference docs and resources, learn new skills, and connect with other professionals.
Why did we build it, and what’s involved in launching an initiative like this? Let’s take a voyage of our own to learn more.
Growing and scaling with our customers
In Personio’s early days, with a customer base of mostly German small- and medium-sized businesses, our Customer Experience team took a very hands-on approach to onboarding our customers.
But with a rapidly scaling customer base and company, we ultimately needed to make a change. Now we have people in more specialized roles to implement our customers, who can support them when they need help and strategically manage their accounts. (Read all about our Customer Success Management journey here!)
In this new setup, the Implementation Manager works with the customer to set up their account during a defined onboarding period, then makes a smooth transition to the Account team, who work with the customer after a successful implementation.
At the same time that we were scaling our company, we were also expanding our product offering with new features and components. While these additional features added to the overall value our customers were getting from Personio (always a win), they also added additional complexity to the onboarding process.
For example, a customer who has never used a fully-featured HR platform before is unlikely to know exactly how they want the system set up, which processes and workflows to implement, or how to configure the product to be compliant with various laws and regulations.
This lack of knowledge — all perfectly understandable — meant that our Implementation team was faced with a paradox: how do we advise customers to make the right decisions on how to configure Personio without also educating them on all parts of the platform so that they understand the implications? As you can imagine, if we were to do all of this in the same onboarding meetings with customers, it would end up being a pretty overwhelming experience.
That’s why we knew we had to start scaling our implementation program, especially around product education. This makes our training and guidance more consistent, and gives our Implementation Managers and customers more time to work together on configuring the product in more meaningful ways.
Scalable education
The first version of scalable education came through a program we called Implementation Masterclasses, a series of webinars covering key parts of the platform. This was already a great step, but our customers continued to tell us that they wanted more.
Questions and scenarios continued to arise that weren’t covered by the courses, like, what if they couldn’t come to the webinar at the allotted time? What if they were onboarding a new member of the team after implementation and needed a different type of product training, one not focused specifically on implementation but on the core functionality of the product after it was set up? What if customers needed to make more implementation decisions after the defined implementation period — what would be the best way to get the information they needed to make those decisions?
We’ll come back to those questions in a moment, but for now let’s pivot to a different story that was evolving in parallel.
Connecting the dots between docs, community, and training
When I first joined Personio in early 2022, I was encouraged by the fact that the company had already made a strong investment in our customers by building a robust help center, fostering a customer community, and offering our customers guided training activities during implementation.
One reason we had already built these programs into the core of our customer experience was the different needs and preferences of our customers. According to a 2017 study by the Harvard Business Review, “81% of customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a service representative.” I imagine that, especially with the rise of remote work in the past few years, that number has only increased.
Whether our customers were finding answers in our help center or asking other customers for advice on how they set Personio up for a certain use case in our Community, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to find a clear answer in a timely manner.
And while we could see our customers’ usage of these resources growing month over month, we heard from our customers that they often needed to look in too many different places to get the information they needed — or that, sometimes, they didn’t even know where to start.
Knowing that these programs would be better together, we formed a combined Customer Education function at Personio. This function brings together the teams who work on our Help Center, Community, in-app and email communications to our customers, customer events like our user group meetings and Personio product updates, and even enabling our CX team to be better at serving our customers.
Now we had an opportunity to align our efforts and make it easier for customers to get what they needed, no matter where they were. But we also realized that there was still a missing piece: customer training.
Bringing it all together in one place
Perhaps you can already see where I’m going with this. On one hand, our Implementation Managers needed a better way to scale their onboarding trainings. On the other, we needed a way to bring our educational channels together so the customer could find things all in one place.
That’s how the idea for our educational brand, Voyage by Personio, was born.
We started by bringing our existing channels together, making it easier for customers to find what they were looking for. Then we invested in better search functionality so that customers didn’t have to worry about navigating our different sites.
Currently, we’re also evolving the way we connect with our customers: not just focusing on being comprehensive and accurate, but also building more human connections and focusing on how we can drive real-world outcomes for our customers. Our users can see those concepts threaded into the content and programs across the Voyage brand.
The biggest change we made was adding a new program of online, on-demand learning modules so that customers can have access to these resources at any time. This is what we call our Voyager Academy, a place where customers can build valuable product and HR skills.
Of course, we didn’t want to make this a dry experience for our customers, so we added some special touches to make it more interesting and meaningful.
First, we decided to not just launch a customer portal, but a full educational brand, with a name and a brand identity. When we look at successful educational brands across SaaS products — Salesforce Trailhead, Hubspot Academy, Miroverse — we see that they make it easy for customers to get the resources they need, but also make the experience lively and engaging. Who says learning HR software has to be boring?
While the Voyage brand lives within Personio’s overall corporate brand, it does give us room to connect with customers in different ways, and creates a more inspirational, sometimes playful, experience. Working in HR can be lonely, after all. Even though we spend our days working on topics that are about people, we aren’t always connecting with people. So we aspire to make Voyage by Personio a little corner of the world where you can do just that.
Secondly, we decided to launch a credentialing program. We started with our first badge, Personio Essentials, that users can receive by completing our learning path in the new Voyager Academy. This lets you show your skills to the world and even prove to your employer that you have the skills to make the most of Personio.
Already, customers have begun earning badges and sharing them on LinkedIn. If you want to prove your Personio skills and earn a valuable credential, you can earn your badge, too!
What’s ahead on our Voyage?
We’ll continue to add to this ecosystem over time. Having a brand and a credentialing system sets the stage for us to expand beyond just the implementation or product training use case. We’ll add education on Personio’s new products over time, to make sure our customers can get the best usage of them.
But we’ll also use our Voyage brand to help our customers — and the broader community of HR professionals — become better at what they do. We envision Voyage becoming a destination for HR knowledge, best practices, and connections.
Just like Personio aims to enable better organizations through innovative technology, Voyage by Personio embarks on a journey to bring change to the HR profession by connecting and empowering the people who do this work every day.
Do you want to help us bring that change? Join our team! Check out our open roles on our careers page.
