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A customer learning academy that is structured, available, and engaging allows your customers to get the most out of your product or service. Creating a customer learning academy is one of the most valuable things a company can do to improve customer success and retention.
Creating a customer learning academy shows how much you value your customers. They’re powerful and allow your customers to upskill while using your products and services. Fewer support tickets? Yes, customer learning academies make that happen, too.
Let’s take a look at how you can create your own academy. We’ll cover:
It takes a highly skilled team to pull off an effective customer academy. It takes all types: content creators, subject matter experts (SMEs), and technical support staff.
There are two paths an organization can take when it comes to developing a customer academy: in-house or outsourcing.
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If you would like to develop an in-house customer academy, explore hiring a Director of Customer Education. A Director of Customer Education focuses on developing comprehensive onboarding and continuous education programs, which help with customer success and retention efforts by creating engaging, scalable, and innovative learning solutions. They also measure the impact of these initiatives and manage a team dedicated to creating a thriving customer community.
The benefit of building a team in-house is the ability to quickly pivot based on customer sentiment, troubleshooting, and feedback.
The main drawback is cost. A Director of Customer Education can demand a six-figure salary and, with their support staff, overhead costs can reach upwards of $200,000.
If you are a smaller organization or have budget constraints, consider outsourcing the development of your customer academy to specialists.
This will connect you with experts without all of the overhead costs and prevent you from spinning your wheels when determining the types of material to bring to your customers.
Skyepack provides customers with access to seasoned instructional designers who can take your existing customer insights and develop educational material and courses that enable greater use of your product/service. Services like Skyepack also provide an integrated content delivery platform and digital badging service to keep the learning experience cohesive and integrated.
All successful customer learning academies are built on goals. They have concrete purposes for the overall business strategy and to respond to a specific customer problem. They prioritize these goals and plan an academy to support achieving them.
Clear goals let you measure how the customer learning academy performs and what criteria must be met to know if the academy succeeds. For example, a top goal could be increasing customer satisfaction by training customers to leverage your product’s features and functionality.
Skyepack’s instructional design services can help you organize your thoughts and ideas into learning outcomes that are actionable and easy to understand.
Conversely, reducing customer churn through training may be a goal to retain power users of your product. If users know and leverage more features, they’ll be more likely to stay by using more of your application or service. Increasing product adoption by forcing customers to complete tasks inside an application or showing them how to leverage various features may be another goal, helping them reach a point in the product where you can upsell or cross-sell them.
Another common use for developing a customer academy is to attract new leads by producing accessible content. Many people seek out learning opportunities. Upskilling is vital. When visitors see your academy, they’ll engage with your product or service as they look to learn and grow. One example of this is the Hubspot Academy, where learners are able to earn badges and certifications for demonstrating competencies in key areas regarding sales, inbound marketing, and customer service.
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You have to know the audience to create content that speaks to its audience. Who are they? Why would they care about your content? How can you create something that’s there for them specifically? Research is your friend. Ask your users. Perform user experience research and determine who your customers are, what their needs are, and what problems they’re trying to solve. Create a solid profile of your users, their skill level or what they like to learn, how they want to know, and what errors they run into all the time.
Segmentation is a powerful tool that you can use to cater to different learning needs. First, you can segment your audience based on how experienced they are with the product or service. Doing so allows you to create content that resonates with people, meeting them where their knowledge base is and offering something valuable.
Skyepack has been developing learner-centric courses for nearly a decade; our instructional design team can quickly take your customer insights and design a course that suits your needs and connects with your customers.
For beginners, give a tutorial that covers basic use cases and common features. At the same time, more experienced users might be interested in learning about specific features and best practices that can deepen engagement with the product. People at different stages of learning should all find value in using the learning academy. Secondly, you can segment your audience based on age, geographical location, and professional background. Critical demographic factors can influence people’s learning preferences and accessibility.
There are all types of Learning Management Systems. While they all tend to carry similar feature sets, they all have their strengths. Here are three of the top Learning Management Systems and the industries they best serve:
Moodle is a robust open-source platform that embraces open-source methodologies and runs as a toolbox best suited for educational institutions. Its steep learning curve and technical know-how make it a tool that requires team members capable of putting the software to good use.
Skyepack is everything you need to get started with a customer learning academy right away. Not only can one of Skyepack’s expert instructional designers collaborate with you to create relevant, engaging content for your consumers, but the platform itself is easy to use. Create, host, and update your content all in one place.
Docebo is intended for large companies with thousands of employees. It’s a large, effective toolset that meets the needs of many companies but is often overkill for those looking to set up a straightforward customer learning academy that can be stood up quickly and easily.
You need the right Learning Management System (LMS) to deliver your content. Choose one that aligns with your objectives and is scalable, user-friendly, and feature-rich.
Scalability refers to the system’s ability to become larger by adding users or content.
Ease of use means that you (and your users) can administer it or learn it easily. LMSs with great integration can be connected, or ‘integrated’, with the other tools and systems you use. They provide dependable reporting tools and analytics to help track where users are and how they’re doing.
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Content is the kingpin of your customer learning academy, and everything else works around it when it comes to learning. The content must be insightful, educational, and relatable to your target audience. You don’t want to just ‘speak’ to the audience but also ‘listen’ to them. You want to engage them, get them engaged, and educate them. This can be done further by using a variety of content types to match the learning styles of different students by having video lectures, interactive quizzes, and downloadable content attached to them.
Sharing this type of content suits the nature of the medium – showing off complex processes or providing explanations via images is more effective than in a text format. Quizzes that boost learning through recall and encourage user engagement – keeping the process alive and fun – also fit within the traditional learning paradigm. The same applies to downloadable ‘goodies’ like PDFs, guides, and checklists, great for users to keep with them offline.
Some best practices include keeping content concise, visually appealing, relevant, and straightforward. When content is kept short – delivered in small bites, in a visually appealing way (i.e., with beautiful graphics and a clean-looking layout), and applied to the user’s needs and challenges in the real world – learners are more likely to keep their attention on the message, use it to their work and remember the value.
Keep content concise, visually appealing, relevant, and straightforward – including, whenever possible, storytelling and real-world examples to bring the content to life.
Creating a customer learning academy is important, but you must ensure that your launch and promotions are top-notch. Use a multi-channel strategy: email campaigns, social media, website, etc.
Email your customer base and craft personal messages that show how the academy benefits them. Use social media to reach your users and interact with them in real-time, which triggers interest, awareness, and excitement.
During launch, user onboarding is essential. For example, make instructions and support prominent and easily accessible, and offer guidance for getting started with your academy.
An onboarding guide or tutorial framed as a ‘how to’ helps offload some cognitive load for new users when registering and getting started. You might also offer new users an introductory webinar or live Q&A window so that they can immerse themselves in the platform and get started successfully.
The process of monitoring and iteration remains critical in ensuring an academy’s success. Measure your academy’s key performance (KPIs), such as user engagement, completion rates, and customer feedback, to determine its level of success.
User engagement metrics reveal how much users are actively using the courses. Completion rates assess the percentage of users who went through the courses successfully, so you can have an idea about the effectiveness of the content or its appeal. Meanwhile, customer feedback provides first-hand insights into the quality of the courses from users’ perspectives.
Continuously revise and improve your content using performance data and user feedback as a barometer for your success. Make sure your academy never stops adding value to your book of business. What about gamifying your academy? Think badges, pathways, or even extrinsic rewards like gift cards.
A customer learning academy helps companies communicate how much they value their customers. It increases user engagement and satisfaction. Bottom line: customer learning academies help boost sales by clearly communicating a product’s worth and alignment with a customer’s goals. That’s true retention power.
Skyepack’s team of experts can guide you through the creation, launch, and iteration of your customer learning academy.
If you’re looking to get started with the lowest cost, consider Skyepack. We’re equipped to provide instructional design experts to help develop and organize your material, align material with customer education goals, and deliver it through our content delivery platform.
If you’re interested in receiving a complimentary sample of your customer academy, we’d love to talk further. Simply select a time with one our team members, and you’ll be set to take a product tour of the platform!
Skyepack is a team of exceptional instructional designers and educational experts building custom learning solutions on our award-winning LMS.
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