Podcast Summary “Creating Unstoppable Customer Engagement with Smart Learning Solutions with
Terri Maske of Vyne Dental®”
Terri Maske, Vice President of Client Education at Vyne Dental, brought a wealth of insight and strategic depth to her conversation on the Learning Leader Spotlight podcast. With over a decade of experience leading client education initiatives, scaling learning operations, and implementing learning technologies, Terri offered a detailed look at how thoughtful planning and a people-first approach can drive both operational efficiency and business growth. Here’s a summary of her episode that captures her key philosophies, lessons learned, and leadership advice.
Building Customer Education That Drives Real Business Outcomes
Terri describes herself as a senior leader focused on the intersection of customer experience, enablement, and education. Throughout her career, she’s led learning teams at tech-forward organizations, many of which supported multiple software products and required highly scalable learning infrastructures.
Her success has been measured not just by learning outcomes, but by hard business results: increasing net profits, reducing administrative costs, and boosting customer retention. She’s implemented or migrated six different LMS platforms, often working across internal and external learner groups, and consistently emphasizes the ROI of thoughtful technology selection. In one implementation, she reduced the administrative workload from 4.5 full-time employees to just 1.5. In another, she cut costs by $300K and boosted learning completions from under 500 to over 15,000 in just a few years.
Selecting the Right LMS: More Than Just Features
Terri’s approach to LMS selection is refreshingly pragmatic. Instead of relying on traditional RFPs (which she jokes just lead to “sales high-fives”), she recommends doing your homework first, such as exploring sites like Capterra, and then narrowing vendors down through focused 15–30-minute calls. The goal is to ask smart, targeted questions that reflect your real business needs, and then move only the strongest candidates forward into a deeper demo phase with cross-functional stakeholder input.
Key criteria she looks for in a learning management platform include scalability, automation potential, and the ability to eliminate manual processes. She emphasized, “If you’re going to invest in a platform, you need to see a return on investment.” That might mean improved customer engagement, increased learning completions, or a reduction in labor-intensive workflows.
Implementation and Migration: Plan, Communicate, Change-Manage
When it comes to LMS implementation and migration, Terri shared a detailed breakdown of the process, highlighting three critical components: planning, communication, and change management.
- Planning: Treat the project like a project with milestones, dates, and detailed task mapping. She recommends including teams like IT and marketing early to ensure data integrity, branding, and security are all aligned from the start.
- Communication: Be thoughtful, not overwhelming. Over-communication, especially vague or excessive updates, can lead to disengagement. Craft messaging that educates, excites, and clearly shows the “why” behind the change.
- Change Management: Perhaps her strongest message was about managing the human element of change. “You accepted this change months ago,” she said, referring to project sponsors, “but your users haven’t yet.” She suggests a tiered rollout of communications such as save-the-dates, value propositions, and go-live celebrations tailored for both internal and external audiences.
For migrations, she advises making strategic decisions about data: What users and courses are worth migrating? Is historical data really needed? In one case, they migrated user histories to track growth. In another, they didn’t, opting instead to archive key reports from the legacy system.
Measuring Success: From FTEs to Revenue Growth
Terri is data-driven when it comes to measuring LMS impact. She tracks KPIs such as:
- Reduction in administrative workload (e.g., moving from 4.5 FTEs to 1.5)
- Increased learning completions (e.g., under 500 to over 15,000)
- Revenue growth tied to LMS e-commerce functionality
- Time savings from process automation
She stressed the importance of revisiting your initial business case after implementation to show stakeholders tangible results: “Everyone pays attention when revenue increases.”
Out-of-the-Box vs. Customization: A Modern View
While older on-premise platforms required heavy customization, today’s SaaS-based LMS solutions are more about smart configuration. Terri cautions against platforms where you have to “hack” features just to make them work for your processes—like misusing a certification tool to build learning paths. Her advice: If the configuration is too time-consuming, it may not be the right system for your needs long term.
She also shared a valuable tip—when renaming fields or customizing data points, make sure those changes are reflected in your reporting engine to avoid confusion and maintain data clarity.
The Most Critical Leadership Skills? Listening and Learning
Terri wrapped up the conversation with a powerful reflection on leadership. The most important skill she’s developed? Listening. Early in her remote leadership career, before webcams were standard, she learned to pay close attention to tone, silence, and shifts in team communication patterns. That awareness helped her build trust and spot early signs of disengagement.
She also believes in learning from her team, not just coaching them. “I’ve learned just as much from my team as they’ve learned from me,” she said, sharing how team meetings often became spaces to share tips and creative approaches that improved training delivery across the board.
Terri Maske’s conversation offered a masterclass in LMS strategy, customer-focused learning design, and people-centered leadership. Her blend of operational discipline and empathetic leadership style is a model for anyone navigating the complex world of learning technologies.
Trends in Learning & Development:
Insights from Learning Leaders
Ready to Work with Us?
Does your L&D team have more projects than people? TrainingPros has been named a Top 20 Staffing Company internationally by Training Industry, and recognized as a Smartchoice® Preferred Provider by Brandon Hall Group for 2025. We’re also proud to be named a Champion of Learning by the Association for Talent Development (ATD)—an international honor that reflects our dedication to excellence in corporate learning. These accolades underscore TrainingPros’ unwavering commitment to delivering high-quality, tailored training solutions.
If your projects need instructional design consultants, eLearning developers, or other L&D consultants for your custom content projects, reach out to one of our industry-expert relationship managers today.
When you have more projects than people™, let TrainingPros find the right consultant to start your project with confidence. Schedule a consultation today.
