How Watts Water made training a pillar of customer experience
Inside the Learn and Earn program: from 375 learners to 47,000 in five years.
47,000
253,000
$1.5B→$2.44B
PROGRAM SNAPSHOT
Company
Watts Water Technologies — plumbing, heating & water quality (NYSE: WTS)
AUDIENCE
Channel partners & customers: contractors, wholesalers, engineers
USE CASE
Extended enterprise education for the channel
PROGRAM
Learn and Earn, launched 2020
Goal
Acquisition, content consumption & advocacy to drive channel revenue
the challenge
Nobody can make a channel partner take your training.
Watts Water sells through the channel. The contractors, wholesalers, and engineers who specify and install Watts products also carry competing brands, and nobody can make them take product training. In 2020, the program that was supposed to build partner mindshare had 375 registered learners and about 2,000 course completions to show for it.
Product knowledge drives specification, and specification drives revenue — but only if partners actually show up to learn.
the solution
Learn and Earn, with Incentli inside the LMS.
Every learning behavior that matters – registering, completing courses, earning certifications, returning – earns a branded currency that partners redeem in a Watts-controlled rewards store stocked with Watts merchandise. Training stopped being an obligation and became something partners chose to do.
THE RESULTS · THE PROGRAM
Five years in, the numbers tell the story.
375→ 47,000
registered learners
2,000→ 253,000
course completions
Internally, the program changed the learning department’s standing: training went from a cost line to a visible part of how Watts manages its customer experience.
“Incentli has made a massive difference in our learner sentiment and completions, and opened my eyes to the power of positive incentives in terms of learner behavior, versus punishment.”
THE RESULTS · THE PROGRAM
A flat decade, then an inflection.
In the decade before Learn and Earn, Watts Water’s annual revenue moved between roughly $1.3B and $1.6B. In the five years since the program launched, revenue grew from $1.51B to $2.44B.
No single program produces growth like that, and Incentli doesn’t claim this one did. What Watts will say, and what the chart shows, is that partner education stopped being a side activity during exactly the years it was rewarded, measured, and woven into the company’s customer experience and marketing strategy. Mindshare became measurable. The rest is correlation worth looking at.
THE MARKETING DIVIDEND
A learning program that does double duty.
The same reward signals that drive completions give Watts a segmented, opted-in partner audience and a channel for campaigns – the pattern that led Gyorda to describe Incentli as a marketing tool, not just a training one.
“Incentli is a powerful learner engagement solution. Since our adoption, it is also proving to be an incredibly successful marketing tool.”