By Kelly McNamee, Director of Customer Learning at PointClickCare, and Sara Iannuzzi, Senior Manager of Learning and Technology at PointClickCare
Like many people drawn to careers in the care sector, Nurse Julie went into healthcare to help people. But now she spends the majority of her day searching through electronic health records and documenting her work. To reduce that administrative load, she doesn’t want to attend a long course to learn how to click through the software she uses. What she needs is an answer to her questions, right in the workflow, so she can focus on doing what she was born to do: care for her residents.
At PointClickCare, our approach to helping our customers learn how to make the most of our platforms and tools worked...until it didn’t. Our solutions, workflows, and update release pace were all changing too fast for our learning model—and at times, our customer learners—to keep up.
To modernize learning to support the needs of people like Nurse Julie, we started by asking: what do our customers actually need to deliver exceptional care? For Nurse Julie, the answer is outcomes-focused learning in the flow of work, at the moment she needs it.
Technology is moving fast—very fast. But technology doesn’t dictate our priorities. Nurse Julie does.
Get Honest About Where You Are
Before we could define where we wanted to go, we needed an honest look at where we were.
The old model deserved credit: a large eLearning course catalog, a full live training calendar, and an LMS at the center. When customers found the training, they loved it. We also had plenty of engagement data. What we couldn’t see was whether it helped customers succeed.
And the same issues kept popping up. Customers couldn’t find what they needed. Courses fell out of date. We were challenged with where to focus our efforts. Admin needs piled up.
As Kelly McNamee, Director of Customer Learning at PointClickCare likes to say, “You can keep pulling the same weeds every week, or you can figure out why they keep coming back. My Six Sigma Green Belt brain doesn’t handle constant weed pulling very well.”
So we dug into root causes, then asked what each one cost our learners. Here’s what we found:
One-size-fits-all training no longer matched how customers and employees worked
Learning was disconnected from real workflows
Manual admin ate time our team could have spent on learners
500+ courses had become nearly impossible to keep current as releases sped up
Internal workflows had picked up extra steps over the years and never been redesigned
Learning data was scattered, so we couldn’t connect education to outcomes
Naming those gaps gave us a solid foundation for deciding what had to change.
Try this: Pick one recurring frustration on your team and ask “why” until you reach something structural, like a process or a handoff. Then ask what that costs the people you serve.
Define the Vision Before the Roadmap
Once we understood where we were, we resisted the urge to start building. That was harder than it sounds!
Before we looked at a single tool, we followed a deliberate sequence: future-state vision, success measures, and then the roadmap.
The vision came together at our first onsite as a new leadership team, and it hasn’t budged since:
PointClickCare customers and employees easily access workflow-driven learning, in the flow of work, at the moment of need.
That vision also had to connect to what mattered most across the company, so we looked at where learning could make the biggest impact, including high-priority launches and areas of higher churn.
It also meant rethinking how we define success.
According to Sara Iannuzzi, Senior Manager of Learning and Technology at PointClickCare, “Impact over activity is one of our favorite phrases because it changed how we measure success. Completions and views are easy to count, but they don’t answer the question we care about: did it actually help the learner reach their goal? Product adoption and customer outcomes are what we look at now.”
Try this: Before you build a roadmap, write down the future-state experience you want and the measures that will tell you whether you’re getting there. Then use them to evaluate every new project and tool.
Transform People, Process, and Technology
We approached modernization across three connected areas: people, process, and technology.
People
We reshaped roles around outcomes, built AI fluency across the team, and deepened our understanding of customer environments and workflows through a “PointClickCare in Practice” enablement series. We also created a team charter and core values together, so we’d have a clear sense of how we’d work to achieve our vision.
As Sara explains, “Learning new technical skills was the part everyone could see. The bigger shift was in how we saw ourselves. We stopped thinking of ourselves as people who build training and started thinking of ourselves as partners in whether customers succeed.”
That shift turned out to be one of the biggest of the whole transformation.
Process
Before introducing automation, we built the foundation for scale with a needs-analysis framework, design and QA standards, and content governance.
Kelly puts it bluntly: “AI scales whatever process you give it. If the process is broken, congratulations, you now have a broken process at scale. So we fixed the foundation first.”
We also made this a company-wide effort. Product, Professional Services, Sales, and Customer Success joined the conversation, which gave us a shared blueprint and common language.
Technology
Once our people and process were in place, we looked at technology. We explored ways to improve the learner experience, considered how existing tools could be used differently, and brought in new technology where it earned its spot.
Then, as we like to say, AI happened. And kept happening.
Take our Storyboard Agent. We built it, then realized Claude combined with a new content development tool was a better approach, so we switched.
Then, oops, it happened again. We were nearly done with a tool trial when we learned about MCP, so we pivoted and tested an MCP-based approach. At the same time, moving our support portal and community to a new platform created new possibilities for omnichannel content delivery.
Our goals moved too. We started out aiming to cut content development time by 20%. Then TSIA research showed that 62% of AI-adopting organizations saved up to 40 hours of their 60-hour+ development process, so we raised our targets to match top performers and keep checking our gains against them.
We revisit our objectives every quarter. Defending a number set six months ago doesn’t help anyone when the technology, the industry, or the business has moved on.
AI sped up content development, admin, alignment to customer outcomes, and consistency in quality. Projects, tasks, and timelines changed, but the strategy itself stayed grounded in the people we serve and our goal of becoming a stronger strategic partner.
We could move fast with AI because we already knew which problems we were solving. AI became useful because it had a specific, defined job to do.
Build Momentum Through Customer Outcomes
We started small, one project at a time. For each one, we worked backward from the outcome we wanted and the metrics that would prove it, then built, promoted, and iterated. Small wins gave us room to learn, show value, and build relationships across the company.
The rule of reciprocity (give first, ask second) helped a lot here.
As Kelly tells it, “Before we asked any team for their time or resources, we asked what they were trying to solve and where learning could help. When you create value first, the next conversation gets a lot easier.”
Our in-product adoption videos are a good example. Product teams wanted more awareness and sustained adoption of new features. We wanted learning inside the workflow. So we partnered to create and promote short, targeted videos in the product, and measured success through feature adoption and sustained usage. The results showed that workflow-based learning can change customer behavior, and they built our credibility.
Sara remembers when things clicked: “These videos were our proof point. Now every product or major feature launch comes with a request for an adoption video. We’re not just the team that builds training anymore.”
That momentum earned us a seat at a bigger table. Recently, we launched an executive-level learning council, a two-way feedback loop that keeps learning tied to what matters most across PointClickCare.
Along the way, we developed a shared vocabulary around workflow-based learning, role-based learning, customer experience, adoption, and learning in the flow of work. We even fed our own language into Claude, which confirmed what we already suspected: if we had a nickel for every time we said “workflow-based,” we would need a bigger jar.
The repetition serves a purpose. When Product, Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and Services hear and use the same language, those ideas become company priorities, not just learning-team jargon.
Try this: Ask one partner team what problem is keeping them up at night. Then find a small way learning can help before you ask for anything in return.
Look for Early Signals
Business outcomes rarely show up on day one, so we started with what we could see. Yes, that included engagement metrics. They can’t tell you whether learning worked, but they’re great at telling you when something’s off.
We tracked month-over-month trends, watched for adoption signals on each project, and tested in-app job aids with Customer Success, Product, and Content.
At one point, a dip in engagement helped us identify an access issue we fixed before it became a bigger headache for learners. We continue to look for these signals through KPI trends.
Cross-functional participation was another useful sign. Partners from across the company joined our technology selection process, which helped us check whether we were speaking to priorities beyond the learning team.
None of this is the full picture of business impact yet. But it gives us a measurement habit that can grow as the transformation does.
Try this: Choose one leading indicator you can track monthly, starting now. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to tell you whether people are finding and using what you build.
Move Deliberately
The pressure to move faster is constant right now, and AI only adds to it. What we’ve learned is that speed helps most once you know where you’re going.
Start with the experience you want to create. Build the skills, processes, and governance to support it. Bring the rest of the company along. Then let technology speed things up.
Tools, projects, and timelines will keep changing. Ours did, more than once. A clear direction is what lets you adapt without losing your way.
For us, that direction always comes back to Nurse Julie. She wants to focus on the people she cares for, not digging through paperwork or a course catalog to find help. Every tool we test, every pivot, and every goal we set is about getting her the answer she needs, right where she’s working, so she can get back to her residents.
Kelly McNamee is a customer education and digital CS leader who loves turning complex SaaS adoption challenges into simple, scalable solutions that help customers and partners succeed.
A Six Sigma Green Belt with a knack for making process improvement feel human, she combines data, intuition, and real‑world experience to create experiences that boost adoption and drive growth.
Kelly is also passionate about coaching her teams to focus on the right problems and create education and success programs that demonstrate their unique value to the business.
When she's not on a mission to simplify, you'll likely find her reading at the beach, experimenting in her garden, or cuddling with her two rescued pitties.
Sara Iannuzzi believes the best learning experiences start with understanding how people actually work. Throughout her career in customer education and software training, she has focused on helping organizations bridge the gap between people, process, and technology by creating learning experiences that fit naturally into real-world workflows. She enjoys bringing people together to solve problems, simplify experiences, and challenge the status quo.
Outside of work, if she's not already on a flight to Italy, you'll likely find her trying a new recipe in the kitchen or in the backyard feeding her 25 chickens (and counting).
