Docebo increases analytics adoption five times by embedding Amazon QuickSight on their Docebo platform

This is a guest post written by Laurent Balagué from Docebo.

Docebo, founded in 2005, is a global provider of learning management systems (LMS). Our platform is used in various industries by more than 3,800 customers, supported by more than 900 Docebo employees. From onboarding, compliance, and workforce training to customer education, partner enablement, and talent development, Docebo is a foundational provider for employee, customer, partner, and member education programs. In this post, I explain how our partnership with Amazon QuickSight allowed us to embed powerful off-the-shelf and bespoke analytics dashboards within Docebo Learn across three different packages.

At Docebo, our differentiator has always been providing an experience that enables our customers to learn effectively. Increasingly, this means differentiating ourselves—and innovating—through technology.

For instance, we pioneered the use of AI within our industry, implementing it in our solution all the way back in 2018. Machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing made our platform more personalized, responsive, and easy to use.

The next step was to offer embedding analytics dashboards within Docebo Learn. We had seen a clear need from the market to be able to display, track, and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics about their learning programs in our Docebo platform.

Our customers wanted a single source of truth for their learning analytics to make fast, accurate, data-driven decisions.

The need for a new partner

Prior to QuickSight, our initial attempt to incorporate embedded analytics into our platform using different business intelligence (BI) providers encountered several challenges:

• There were limitations to embedding the analytics within our Docebo platform, which led to slow and complex development—particularly an issue for us with such a large customer base.
• Working globally and across many different industries, we needed to offer customization within our analytics and deliver for a variety of use cases. Our customers found direct authoring of their analytics difficult, which required a good amount of expertise and resources.
• The Docebo pricing and package structure required a scalable solution because it could become prohibitively expensive with the previous solution, and we didn’t want to increase costs for our users.

Based on this experience, we recognized the need for a new analytics partner that could offer industry-agnostic solutions and a highly intuitive and customizable user experience (UX), while maintaining cost-effectiveness for our analytics operations.

Enter QuickSight

To ensure we made an informed decision that would best serve our customers, we embarked on a comprehensive evaluation process. We analyzed eight analytics providers and conducted proof of concept (PoC) projects with three of them. This process involved cross-functional teams from Docebo, including security, architecture, engineering, data, product, finance, marketing, design, and accessibility.

After thorough assessment, Amazon QuickSight emerged as the optimal choice for our needs, primarily because of three key factors:

• Integration and simplicity: Embedding QuickSight’s powerful analytics into the Docebo platform was remarkably straightforward compared to other providers. It aligned precisely with our requirements and used AWS technologies that we were already proficient with.
• Robust security: Security was a top priority, and QuickSight offered robust row-level security capabilities out of the box. This ensured that our customers would be able to distribute analytics to their own customers, partners, and internal stakeholders in a scalable and secure way.
• Collaborative partnership: From day one, the QuickSight team demonstrated a genuine enthusiasm and commitment to a collaborative partnership, which resonated with our team.

With our decision made, we were eager to commence the implementation process.

A new era for learning analytics

We started work with QuickSight to develop Docebo’s Insights capability—a powerful analytics module embedded within the Docebo platform itself.

Within six months, we deployed a private beta version of Insights for our customers to provide feedback on before moving into a wider-ranging open beta.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the project was working in collaboration with our users. It meant that we could finetune the UX to be as intuitive as possible and ensure that the right functions and metrics were offered before a full launch.

The following figure shows the home page with pre-built and customized dashboards, with a pop-up window to facilitate feedback.

Data architecture was also a key focus for us in the development phase. All of our more than 3,800 customers draw from their own tenant database, requiring a lightweight, powerful backend to produce the best possible results. The managed, serverless architecture from QuickSight was the perfect solution.

Security was a top priority, but we didn’t want to make access difficult for users. The strong row level security within QuickSight, combined with fully embedding the technology into Docebo Learn meant that our customers faced no extra steps or additional logins to be able to access their analytics, centralizing the process in a single place.

A multi-tier approach that delivers huge adoption rates

Finally, we launched Docebo Insights: a powerful, embedded analytics tool within our Learn platform for all our customers. Users can access interactive QuickSight dashboards to view, track, and gain insights on important data about their learning programs.

To support the variety of customers and industries that we serve, we split Docebo Insights into three levels that include pricing and different functionalities in each level:

• Engage: Pre-built dashboards provide fast time-to-value for customers. Currently, this covers course enrollment and completion, learning plans, time spent on learning, instructor-led training (ILT), and certifications. And there’s more to come—we are developing new dashboards and datasets in consultation with our customers.

• Elevate: Access to all the pre-built dashboards plus additional customization through visual library provided by QuickSight and access to a manager dashboard.

• Advanced Analytics Pack: This pack is available to all Docebo Elevate customers, and Enterprise customers are within this group. The Advanced Analytics Pack contains two products:

• Advanced insights: More advanced capabilities with full authoring mode (full BI inside Docebo)
• Learn Data: An automated integration of the learning data into any data ecosystem (ready to analyze data, inside the customer’s BI tool)

Larger companies and enterprises usually have two different needs:

• Learning and Development teams want to be able to build their visuals from scratch and having a BI tool inside Docebo allows them to build the analytics tailored to their needs.
• They need to add learning data into the data ecosystem alongside other data coming from CRM, ticketing, etc., adding learning data to their business analyses.

In the Advanced Insights screenshot above we can see that customers can customize their visuals, and choose exactly the metrics they want, like a full BI tool, but inside of Docebo platform.

Advanced Insights takes the data visualization to the next level with its comprehensive authoring mode. Create your own metrics and dashboards that precisely align with your business objectives. Define visuals, data representations, formatting, and interactivity at both visual and dashboard levels. Tailor-made metric calculations provide the granular insights needed to drive informed decision-making across your organization.

Adoption skyrockets

Using QuickSight to embed analytics into Docebo has overhauled how our customers engage with their learning data. It’s the next step in ensuring we stay the pioneers of the learning management system space.

The biggest proof of the product delivering value for end users is in the adoption rates we’ve seen. In just three months, we’ve seen five times the adoption rates of our previous analytics offering, which had been available for two years.

The ability to offer pre-built, customizable, and fully authored analytics dashboards has drastically reduced our implementation time by approximately 60%. And with our growing number of pre-built data sets, it’s simplified maintaining and updating what we can offer. The way we’re able to package the analytics offering also helps us to support customers with different data maturity and develop with them because it’s scalable and ready to support their growth.

The support of the QuickSight team and the smart architecture that powers it has allowed us to deliver a competitive, value-led package. It enables us to focus on developing and enhancing Docebo to be the best learning platform it can be, securing in the knowledge that we have the partnership and technologies in place to do so. Early signs show an increase in revenue and customer satisfaction scores, which is very exciting.

Looking ahead

As we continue to evolve, we’re thrilled to explore additional innovative solutions that can deliver even more advanced and diverse capabilities to better align with our customers’ evolving needs. We’re in the process of exploring the integration of generative BI with Amazon Q in QuickSight. This will empower Docebo users to build and analyze datasets through natural language queries, creating an unprecedented level of ease and accessibility in the customer experience.

Exploring QuickSight

To explore QuickSight and how its cutting-edge features can deliver new applications, reduce in-house development time, and make data analysis faster, smarter, and more accessible, visit the Amazon QuickSight page.

About the Author

Laurent Balagué is the Vice President of Products, Analytics and Measurement at Docebo. He is a thought leader in learning analytics and the former CEO and Co-founder of Formetris. Laurent has helped hundreds of companies improve learning performance through pragmatic, ambitious, and customized evaluation strategies. At Docebo, he is in charge of all products related to data, measurement, and analytics.