SafetyCulture Boosts Retention by 18% with Amplitude

Insight/Action/Outcome: Training is crucial for every worker, and SafetyCulture's platform makes it quicker and easier for companies to onboard and upskill frontline teams. However, users were dropping off when using their course creation feature. Amplitude Analytics funnels helped the SafetyCulture team dive deeper into their data, identifying that the quicker users created a course, the higher their conversion rates of publishing that course to their learners. They also discovered that offering a fully-branded course experience to users from day one boosted user engagement. The product team used these insights to make adjustments, leading to a 20% increase in publishing rates and an 18% increase in 30-day retention.

From clipboards to cutting-edge tech, workplace quality, efficiency, and safety have come a long way. Gone are the days of pen-and-paper checklists. Today, frontline workers use mobile apps like SafetyCulture to speed up workplace inspections and upskill employees with the knowledge they need to be great at their jobs.

Our company started as a workplace checklist app in Townsville, Australia, in 2012. Now, it's grown into a full-blown workplace operations platform. It covers everything from training and asset management to inspections and even sensors. And we've expanded tremendously—from about 400 people on the team when I joined three years ago to nearly 800 today.

My job is all about empowering companies to better train their employees. I ensure our customers onboard smoothly and start creating training courses that equip their workers with the knowledge they need to get their jobs done whilst excelling and maintaining safety.

My daily data dive

When I joined the team, SafetyCulture was already using Amplitude, but it was new to me. I remember bugging the head of product about how to track feature adoption, and he pointed me straight to Amplitude.

Getting up to speed with any new software, especially when it deals with data, can feel daunting initially. So, at first, I spent some time exploring our data structure and taxonomy in Amplitude, and I can't thank Jamie Lim from Amplitude enough. She was amazing and always responded quickly on Slack whenever I had questions, making me feel like a VIP. With her help, I was able to get up to speed with Amplitude and start making data-driven improvements.

I started diving into Amplitude Analytics daily to support our product feature decisions, improve new user onboarding, and make it easier for our customers to create and launch training quickly. And by daily, I mean multiple times a day—my browser is always filled with different funnels and charts across many tabs.

Faster creation, more conversion

One of our most interesting Amplitude use cases is understanding how people use our training course builder. This tool lets users easily create mobile responsive, microlearning training courses for various industries—construction, manufacturing, retail, mining, hospitality, you name it. You can build courses in many ways, including starting from scratch, importing editable, expert-made courses from our library, generating via AI from a simple prompt, or using our new beta AI Document Converter feature. This last option enables training creators to turn existing materials into bite-sized learning courses within our app.

Before we developed our beta AI Document Converter, we had a PowerPoint Converter feature. We saw that only a few users were using the PowerPoint Converter, so we assumed it was less valuable to our users than the other creation methods. As a result, we didn’t put this feature front and center or prioritize enhancements. However, when I used Amplitude funnels to dig deeper into the types of courses that were actually published to learners, I found something surprising—the PowerPoint Converter had one of the highest conversion rates from creation to publication. If someone found it, they were more likely to use it to create a course, publish it to their learners, and engage with our platform making it easier to retain them as a customer in the long-term and lead them to publish more courses.

That was a breakthrough. Initially, we thought this feature was niche because usage numbers were low. But it turned out to be one of the quickest ways for users to get started, thanks to its short creation-to-publish time—and this speed increased their course activation and retention.

As a result of this discovery, we invested resources in converting various document formats, such as Word and PDF files, into bite-sized courses. Our latest feature, the beta AI Document Converter, now enables the conversion of PowerPoint, Word, and PDF files while enhancing the output with relevant quiz questions and imagery.

From days to seconds with data

Realizing that the less time it takes to create a course, the more likely users will do it, got us thinking about how to accelerate things even more. We brainstormed and developed a novel feature called AI Create: users just enter a prompt about their course topic and bam! AI generates the whole course.

We got AI Create up and running in just six weeks. Once we rolled it out, Analytics gave us real-time insights that helped us immediately see the impact of changes, and engagement metrics went through the roof!

Now, our users can whip up an OHS course in seconds instead of hours or days. And that's not all—our engineers also created an AI Quiz Creator. Training creators just enter a prompt, and it generates a selection of relevant quiz questions and answers.

All of those changes were born from insights gleaned in Amplitude. If we hadn't analyzed the PowerPoint Converter, we might have missed the link between fast course creation time, course publishing rates, and higher user engagement. Amplitude pinpointed where users were dropping off in our onboarding process, where they struggled with course creation, and surfaced opportunities for us to tackle.

Small tweak for strong conversion

Another high-impact feature we’ve improved, with Amplitude’s help, is our branding feature. A sleek design is vital for training course engagement. We learned via Amplitude’s retention charts that incorporating a company’s brand theme, corporate logo, imagery, and colors makes learning effective and engaging. Our analyses show that learner retention and engagement skyrocket when courses have a branded look and feel. Branding adds a personal touch, boosts credibility, and makes users feel they get custom-made content.

Seeing this, we were determined to help more users brand their courses. Previously SafetyCulture instructional designers handled all the course branding, but we sought to make it self-serve. But when we introduced the feature, hardly anyone used it. We looked at segmentation charts and funnels to understand the percentage of users who were creating courses and how many had added a logo or their brand colors via course settings. Luckily, Amplitude revealed that users needed help finding the branding options buried deep in the course settings.

To fix this, we automated the whole experience. Now, when new users sign up, we automatically pull their business domain from their email address and apply their logo and branding to their courses right from the get-go. Then, when they create their first course, it already looks branded. They don't have to lift a finger—no clicks needed.

Our publishing rate is now 20% higher for courses that use the branding feature than those that do not. Higher publishing rates mean hundreds, if not thousands, of more learners are taking courses and improving their skills and knowledge. And the act of publishing a course also indicates that the creator of that course has found value in the platform and has effectively converted. It was also found that those users who had used the new automated branding feature had a 30-day retention rate 18% higher than those who had not.

The flex of confident choices

My team and I use Amplitude to learn more about our users every day. What I like most about it—and I think many colleagues would agree—is the flexibility. Since Amplitude can display different chart formats and timespans, I can analyze past data to draw conclusions and look ahead to make proactive decisions, which significantly streamlines my work. I also love how hands-on I can be with the data in Amplitude. I don't need a data scientist; I don’t need other platforms. As long as I’ve defined an event and tracking, I can jump right in and track funnels, map out user journeys, and analyze conversions—all on my own. Plus, I can slice and dice the data any way I need to: group it into different segments, tweak timeframes, switch up formats—Amplitude Analytics has all the tools.

For a PM with an accounting background, having solid, democratized data is everything. It's what backs up every decision and justifies every investment. Data gives me the confidence and clarity to lead. Stakeholders trust my insights, my team listens to my direction, and everything adds up.

Honestly, I couldn't do my job without Amplitude. It's part of my daily routine. Without it, I wouldn’t be half as effective as a product manager.