Building a Knowledge Management Solution
When building a Customer Education program as part of a customer engagement strategy, it can be helpful to provide some inspiration to your executive sponsors and adjacent teams using real examples. Since these kinds of customer education techniques are often new for an organization, seeing real life examples can help you paint a picture of what an initial or scaled version of a program looks like.
If a picture is worth a thousand words then a live example URL is worth 100 powerpoint slides.
Kissflow
Customer Education Academy URL: https://academy.kissflow.com/
Kissflow is a workflow management tool. This is a good example of a lightweight customer education academy. The public facing experience shows a few courses and several certificate bundles. The interface is simple and easy to navigate. Not a lot of complexity. This would make for a great example to send to a UX designer for inspiration if you are just starting out and have only a few courses.
Asana
Customer Education Academy URL: https://academy.asana.com/
Asana is a project management tool. You can see that they have a bit more diversity in terms of their educational content compared to others. They have links to these different modalities along the top. And then they place their highest value courses down below. You can see here that new user onboarding must be an important part of this academy since the first tile is the “Getting Started” content.
This example shows what you can do once you start to scale your team. Webinars, Videos, and live instruction are all examples of content that usually needs a manager to oversee. As you add those capabilities, guess what? You can just add a whole separate area using a link at the top of the page. (If you're wondering "what content should I build for my program?" check out this resource)
The question is: How can all these activities be tied back to learning objectives? As a program grows, that becomes one of the most important questions to answer with your solution. This podcast does a great job of describing how to think about the challenge.
Seismic
Customer Education Academy URL: https://university.seismic.com/
Seismic is a sales enablement solution. This is what a fully functioning Learning Management System (LMS) looks like. It is designed to support multiple different training modalities. The program has also clearly established it as a driver of business value. The content is gated and likely part of a priced package. This means the program is both delivering on behavioral aspects like customer retention but also SaaS metrics like Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
Which Customer Education academy solution is best?
I recommend evaluating Customer Education program software on the following criteria:
How easy is the reporting?
How well designed is the data architecture?
Does it work with multiple admins?
Do they offer professional services to help you scale?