Introduction
This document provides step-by-step instructions to teach you how to use Skilljar’s Gainsight integration to pull training data into the Gainsight CS platform. After completing this setup, you’ll be able to unlock the power of Gainsight by leveraging Skilljar training data to scale your Customer Success team initiatives.
This integration will help you:
- Build a comprehensive customer health score that includes engagement with learning content.
- Give your go-to-market and Customer Success teams visibility into training consumption
- Trigger automated communications out of Gainsight based on Skilljar training data including course completions, achievement notifications, or health score changes.
What You’ll Need
To set up this data integration, here’s what you’ll need: .
- A Skilljar admin dashboard account with “Global Administrator” permissions.
- A Gainsight admin dashboard account with permissions to access the platform integration settings and data designer feature.
Step 1: Turning on the Data Exports feature in Skilljar
What to Do:
- In the Skilljar admin dashboard, navigate to https://dashboard.skilljar.com/data-export/ and confirm you see the “Create” button or a set of access credentials. This page is only available to users with the “Global Administrator” dashboard permission. If you don’t see this page, reach out to your lead admin to confirm you have the correct permissions.
- Click the “Create” button to start the provisioning process for the S3 bucket data export. The access credentials will immediately display on the next page, but it may take up to 30 minutes for data to be available in the bucket.
IMPORTANT: Save the displayed S3 bucket, S3 Prefix, Access Key, and Secret Key values somewhere permanent before exiting this page. The secret key value will be hidden on return visits to this page, but there will be a button to regenerate it if need be. If you regenerate your secret key, you’ll need to reconnect the S3 bucket to Gainsight with the new key.
Step 2: Connecting Gainsight to the Skilljar S3 bucket
What to Do:
- In the Gainsight admin dashboard, use the left navigation bar to expand “Administration” > “Integrations” and click “Connectors 2.0”.
- On the next page, click the “Create Connection” button in the top right and select “S3” as the connection type.
- Input the access credentials from step 1 into the form using the following mapping:
| Gainsight Form Field | Input |
| Name of the connection | Skilljar Training Data |
| Bucket Name | “S3 Bucket” URL from step 1 |
| Access Key | “Access Key” value from step 1 |
| API Secret Key | “Secret Key” value from step 1 |
- Click the “Save” button to complete the connection setup.
Note: If you click the “Test Connection” button, Gainsight may return a false error even if the credentials are correct. The Skilljar S3 bucket is hosted in the ‘us-east-1’ region and this may differ from your Gainsight default, hence the error. You can ignore this error since we will confirm the connection works in the next step.
Step 3: Pulling the Skilljar Student object into Gainsight using the data designer
Now that we have connected the S3 bucket to Gainsight, it’s time to use the data designer to pull in Skilljar training objects. We recommend starting with the Student, Course Progress, and Published Course objects which will allow you to see the courses that students have enrolled in and completed.
What to Do:
- In the Gainsight admin dashboard, use the left navigation bar to expand “Administration” > “Analytics” and click “Data Designer”.
- On the next page, click the “New Design” button in the top right.
- Input a name, select a folder storage location, and add a description (optional) for your data design in the next form.
- Click the “Prepare” button.
- In the data designer, select “Amazon S3” in the “Data Source” field and then use your mouse to drag the S3 bucket name you defined in step 2 into the canvas on the right.
- In the flyout widget that appears, click into the search box and paste in the “S3 Prefix” value generated in Step 1 from the data-exports page. Hit enter to search.
- Select the folder returned that matches the prefix value you are searching with. This is the folder that contains your specific Skilljar data.
- Within the folder, select the “students” CSV file and click the “Continue” button in the bottom right.
- In the “File Properties” flyout, set the “Escape Char” setting to “double quote” and then click the “Save and Import” button.
- This will open the fields selector where you can choose the data fields you want to import from the Student object.
- Click every field and then hit the “Select” button in the bottom right to move on.
- You are now in the field mapping layout where we can define Gainsight display names for each field on the object. We recommend adding the object’s name to the front of each display name field. Example: “Student Email”.
- After you have defined your display names for each field, click the “Save” button to complete the import process for the Student object.
Step 4: Pulling in the Course Progress object and joining it to the Student object
What to Do:
- Return to the data designer page and select “Amazon S3” in the “Data Source” field again. Use your mouse to drag the S3 bucket name you defined in step 2 into the canvas on the right.
- In the flyout widget that appears, click into the search box and paste in the “S3 Prefix” value generated in Step 1 from the data-exports page. Hit enter to search.
- Select the folder returned that matches the prefix value you are searching with.
- Within the folder, select the “course_progresses” CSV file and click the “Continue” button in the bottom right.
- In the “File Properties” flyout, set the “Escape Char” setting to “double quote” and then click the “Save and Import” button.
- Click every field and then hit the “Select” button in the bottom right to move on.
- In the field mapping layout, add “Course Progress” to the front of every display name field just like we did with the Student object. Example: “Course Progress Completed At”.
- Hit the “Save” button to complete the import process for the Course Progress object
- We now want to merge the Student and Course Progress objects together to make them easier to use in reporting and automations. To do this, click the three dots next to the Student object in the data designer canvas, select “Merge”, and then select the Course Progress object:
- In the flyout widget, select “Left” for the join condition and then select the “Student ID” field from the Student object and the “Student” field from the Course Progress object. This will use the Student ID field on both objects to link them together.
- Hit the “Save” button to complete this process.
Step 5: Pulling in the Published Course object and joining it to the Course Progress object.
What to Do:
- Return to the data designer page and select “Amazon S3” in the “Data Source” field again. Use your mouse to drag the S3 bucket name you defined in step 2 into the canvas on the right.
- In the flyout widget that appears, click into the search box and paste in the “S3 Prefix” value generated in Step 1 from the data-exports page. Hit enter to search.
- Select the folder returned that matches the prefix value you are searching with.
- Within the folder, select the “published_courses” CSV file and click the “Continue” button in the bottom right.
- In the “File Properties” flyout, set the “Escape Char” setting to “double quote” and then click the “Save and Import” button.
- Click every field and then hit the “Select” button in the bottom right to move on.
- In the field mapping layout, add “Published Course” to the front of every display name field just like we did with the Student object. Example: “Published Course Title”.
- Hit the “Save” button to complete the import process for the Published Course object
- We now want to merge the Course Progress and Published Course objects together so we can access information about the course. To do this, click the three dots next to the Course Progress object in the data designer canvas, select “Merge”, and then select the “published_courses” object:
- In the flyout widget, select “Inner” for the join condition and then select the “Course Progress Course” field from the Course Progress object and the “Published Courses Course” field from the Published Course object:
- Hit the “Save” button to complete the data designer setup. Feel free to pull in and merge any additional Skilljar objects using this technique. You can always come back and update your data design at any point.
Step 6: Activating your data design for global use in Gainsight
What to Do:
- In the data design, click the “Configure” button in the bottom right corner which will open the settings page:
- Following the screenshot above, toggle the slider under the “Universal Data Space” heading to “Yes”. This setting will convert your data design into a Gainsight MDA object that can be used in standard reports and automations.
- To ensure your data design automatically pulls in new Skilljar data once a day, toggle the slider to “Yes” under the “Schedule” heading. Select “Basic Scheduler” as the “Schedule Type” and choose “Daily” for how often to run this schedule.
- Set the “Starting From” date to today’s date and set the “Till Date” to whatever you would like (example: three years from today’s date). Set “Schedule run time” to “Once” and leave the run time set to “12:00 AM” in your timezone.
- Click the “Done” button in the bottom right when you are finished which completes the Skilljar to Gainsight data integration process.
Step 7: Using a data design in Gainsight reporting
Now that you have published your data design, you can start to use it to build reports in Gainsight that showcase Skilljar training data. At this point it is recommended to partner with your Gainsight operations team to strategize on how best to use this data, but below you will find a basic reporting example.
What to Do:
- In the Gainsight admin dashboard, use the left navigation bar to expand “Insights” > and click “Reports”.
- On the next page, find the folder you stored your data design in during step 3 and open it. Click the data design in this folder based on the name you gave it earlier. It will have [DD] at the start of the file name to denote that it is a data design.
- In the reporting interface, use your mouse to drag the fields you want to add to the report into the “Show Me” box:
- The screenshot above provides a recommendation for the fields you might want to start with to report on Student enrollments, course progress, and completions.
- Click the “Run Report” button to generate the report and then continue to adjust the fields until you are happy.
You have now created your first Gainsight report using Skilljar data. Congratulations! If you need additional support, please reach out to solutions@skilljar.com.