4 Ways Companies are Using Customer Education to Drive Product Adoption

In their “State of Education Services 2021” report, the Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA) described five benchmarks and associated “rules” necessary for companies to drive product adoption. Here, we take a look at how Skilljar enables companies to drive product adoption through customer education, while observing every rule designated by TSIA.

Rule #1: You can’t drive product adoption if training is not in the hands of customers. (Access)

To place training at the hands of your customers when everyone is working from home or in a hybrid situation means operating a self-service platform at scale. Customers expect self-service in every aspect of life — whether it’s filling up your gas tank, booking your next flight, or checking out items at the grocery store. Customer education is no different. People want to be able to customize their learning on their time to fit their needs and their schedule.

This couldn’t be more evident than for Skilljar customer Handshake, a leading EdTech platform.

TIffany Taylor, Director of Education Success & Training for Handshake, had to pivot fast when the company’s career fairs were no longer possible due to COVID-19. However, just moving to virtual career fairs wouldn’t be enough. They had to focus on customer adoption of an entirely new medium of interaction.

“We had to change the way we did things to serve our primary customers. And we knew the way to do this was through training. But we had the added challenge of having to scale quickly.”                — Tiffany Taylor

Learn how Tiffany launched a new training platform and quickly got it “into the hands” of her population – resulting in the best performing course in the platform’s history.

Related: Meet Tiffany Taylor (Handshake), Randon Ruggles (Jamf), Maria Manning Chapman (TSIA), and many more at Connect 2021 – Customer Education’s premier industry conference! Register here.

Rule #2: You can’t drive adoption if people do not consume content. (Engagement)

With any targeted initiative, it’s not enough to create great content, you have to help your users find it. This is especially true for customer education content.

Beyond support content, there are many opportunities to develop content that will compel your users to action. Conversational relationship platform Intercom uses various content types and course structures to build customer relationships and create an enjoyable experience. They also engage directly with their community to identify the type of content they want to see in the following ways:

• Internal teams such as Sales, Support, Content, and Product are consulted to understand where customers could benefit from educational content.
• The Intercom Messenger is used on Intercom Academy to ask learners to leave feedback and suggest courses they’d like to see.
• There’s also a module asking for course recommendations right under the list of available courses which integrates with Intercom’s Custom Bot product to take suggestions in real time.

• Intercom reviews conversations and reaches out to users of their customer forum, Interconnected, to assess customer needs that could be addressed through course content.  

“It’s in our interest that every customer is as successful with Intercom as they can be, and with this content being on-demand, it’s ideal for educating at scale.” — Danielle Swanser, Product Education Manager for Intercom

Learn more about how Intercom engages students to help build customer relationships so that they’ll actually want to consume your content.

Rule #3: You can’t drive product adoption if content does not align with an adoption curve. (Segmentation)

Not all content is the right content for everyone. A very common strategy among Skilljar customers is to segment the content they produce by stage of the customer journey, or by industry, or by ways of learning — or by countless other ways to make it feel more exclusive and drive product adoption among different groups.

Segmenting your learner audience ensures that you can deliver the right kind of education experience for each group of users.

One way Year Up designates groups based on the user’s engagement with their job training and placement platform is to segment based on whether the user is new or returning, and then deliver a tailored experience in terms of the level of information provided. They’ve also created a dedicated portal experiences for their largest clients, actually segmenting a group based on company.

“Segmentation is so essential and one of the big factors that drew us to Skilljar. The Catalog Pages feature on Skilljar allows us to effectively segment and have a foundation of content that may flex across different user groups.” – Kim Wheeler, Year Up

Learn more about how Year Up is using Skilljar to segment their audiences to help drive product adoption.

Rule #4: You can’t drive product adoption if you don’t collect and analyze data. (Measurement)

Everyone wants a return on their investment and customer education is no different. So how can you prove customer education drives product adoption?

For Skilljar customer Jamf, the most critical requirement for an LMS was deep integration with their CRM, Salesforce. With Skilljar’s Salesforce integration, Customer Education data is shared across departments providing members of Customer Success, Support, Sales, and other teams greater intelligence about customers and the training they are consuming and completing. By connecting Salesforce and Skilljar, Jamf gains a deeper understanding of each account’s unique needs, program capabilities, and opportunities for expansion.

“We asked, ‘What is the best LMS out there to integrate with Salesforce and the answer, for us, was Skilljar. Not all Salesforce integrations are created equal and Skilljar does it best.” — Randon Ruggles, Manager, Curriculum and Content Development at Jamf

Learn more about how Jamf uncovers actionable data insights for product adoption and more.

Once users collect enough data over time, Skilljar’s Data Connector is an added technology that can maximize data collection. Data Connector is essentially a real-time copy of your database, hosted in the cloud. You get exclusive access to this database to which you can hook up your tools and pull data right into your data warehouse. Most tools can read natively from the Data Connector platform, which can be turned on at any time, revealing your data history for all time.

Learn more about how Skilljar customers are using Data Connector to measure the success of their customer education program.

The TSIA advises that you must master the basics of your training program and content before you can expect to drive product adoption. Making sure you are observing these four rules of the customer education and training game can help.

Ready to learn more about how to use customer education to drive product adoption?

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