Introducing the Bandwidth Learning Lab

It started with an idea. A simple ‘what if.’ What if we made it easier for our customers to find answers to their questions and to get acquainted with our ever-evolving provisioning portal? We formed the Customer Education Taskforce and it took off from there.

It was a no-brainer when we decided to create a library of easily digestible video segments on a single topic pertaining to features and functions that often come up in the life cycle of a Bandwidth customer. We wanted to create a solution that you could watch on your own time; something flexible, easily accessible, and something that you can refer back to when you need a refresher.

As the Onboarding Specialist here at Bandwidth, I facilitate one-hour portal demos with each of our new customers and their support teams.  Our customers are busy people and sometimes it’s not feasible to get your whole team together in the same room at 2:30 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. Somehow the VoIP Engineer seems to have a meeting that runs late, the Customer Success analyst gets caught up in an escalation, or the guy on your LNP team suddenly has a dentist appointment manifest out of the depths of his calendar.

In the past, if these folks missed the portal demo, which they have before- your VoIP Engineer wouldn’t know how to create Sub-Accounts and Locations and the Customer Success Analyst wouldn’t know the best practices for placing backorders. Now, thanks to the Bandwidth Learning Lab, your LNP guy doesn’t have to sacrifice career development for dental hygiene. Why? Because now there’s this video on how to submit your ports.

I’m excited about this program because it has the potential to reduce your onboard times. As much as I cherish the time I spend with my new customers, I know that time is often of the essence. The Bandwidth Learning Lab gives you the opportunity to train quickly and on your own schedule, so you can test your traffic and ramp-up quickly if you’re on a tight deadline.

From early customer feedback about the Bandwidth Learning Lab, I learned that one of our new customers completed his onboarding from the comfort of his own back patio while grilling a steak. I like that. Scratch that, I love it. The flexibility that this offers to my customers has me over the moon. A medium rare Sirloin with a healthy side of managing orders in the Bandwidth Dashboard.

The best thing about the Bandwidth Learning Lab, in my opinion, is that we’re not stopping. We’re so jazzed about what we’ve made that we want to watch it catch fire and grow across our operations teams. The Customer Education Task Force has expanded.  You can now look forward to quarterly releases of additional video content.