SaaS Education Software

We’ve all been there. 

We purchase a shiny new piece of software that we hope will live up to its promises and commitments. Unfortunately, we hit a roadblock. 

It turns out the new SaaS product isn’t quite as intuitive as you would’ve hoped and you’re left floundering because the company that developed it doesn’t offer enough educational resources and support. 

No SaaS company wants its customers to be in a situation like this. 

Fortunately, there’s a remedy to the situation, and it doesn’t require a total revamp to the user interface (UI): SaaS education software. 

SaaS education software can take many forms, but it’s most commonly associated with learning management systems (LMSs) (aka cloud-based LMS and academy-building software). With an LMS, you can quickly and easily build high-quality SaaS product training materials for your customers.

Here’s an example: Sally works at a SaaS company and has heard many complaints about their product from customers. She’s also seen the number of support tickets steadily increase. 

Obviously, there’s an issue. 

So, she decides to research solutions that provide an educational path for customers to learn their software. However, to even begin building this path, she needs to find a solution to give her the tools to accomplish this goal. This is where an LMS, like Northpass, comes into play.

What is SaaS Education Software?

Now, you may be wondering: “What’s SaaS education software?” 

SaaS education software gives you the ability to create a learning experience that optimizes a customer’s onboarding journey. As your new customers purchase your products and services, they’ll start engaging your customer education platform and learn how to take full advantage of all the features and benefits of your SaaS product. 

The software world is dynamic, meaning that your SaaS education software should be dynamic, too. That’s why the best examples of SaaS education software will make it easy to update so that your customers can get the new training they need as your software changes. 

HubSpot is a great example of SaaS education. 

HubSpot offers separate onboarding training programs for its four main offerings. HubSpot also offers customers the opportunity to work with consultants and a special program for startups. Each of these programs is carefully designed to give their customers the tools and knowledge they need to succeed. 

It Starts with SaaS Onboarding 

If Sally is considering building a SaaS education initiative, she will have to start with an onboarding program. 

A SaaS onboarding program provides guidance and lays out the overall objectives for the new learning platform. In Sally’s case, the goal is to provide instructive and enlightening training for the SaaS products released by her company. 

The next step in building this onboarding program is to assemble the team. Depending on the size of her company, Sally will need to decide how many different roles she can fill in the training program —for example, a subject matter expert (SME), instructional designer (ID) or project manager. 

If she doesn’t have the skills, she’ll need to find someone else who does. SMEs are there to ensure that you have expert knowledge of how your SaaS products work, while IDs are the people who work with SMEs to build content that transmits their knowledge to customers. 

Project managers oversee the entire initiative and see that everything remains on schedule. If Sally works in a smaller organization, she’ll probably cover all these roles, but that depends. 

After that, you’ll want to outline the specific steps you want the customer to take as they proceed through your new onboarding training program. 

Identify how a new customer arrives on your platform and ensure the process is intuitive. Then, you pass the baton to the next step until your customers have reached the “ah-ha” moment. 

This will look different for different companies, but it always needs to be specific. 

Once you’ve identified these steps and found your “ah-ha” moment, you’ve got to get down into the actual content creation. 

Now that you’ve completed your customer education plan, you’re going to create the material that your customers will actually interact with. At this point, it can be helpful to implement an authoring and LMS tool such as Northpass. When Sally saw all of the features Northpass offered and how easy it was to build her content with it, she was sold and used it in her SaaS onboarding process. 

There are only two steps left in an onboarding program: Testing and launch. 

In the testing phase, Sally will be checking every element of her newly minted training program to ensure that the content is compelling and free of errors. She will also do some beta testing in which some people who are already familiar with her SaaS product will go through the entire program and share their thoughts. 

After that, Sally’s onboarding program will be ready to launch and release a training program into the environment that’ll start lighting the way to success for her customers. 

Benefits Of SaaS Education Software

Aside from facilitating and streamlining the SaaS user onboarding process, SaaS education software provides several additional benefits: 

1. Decrease Time To Value (TTV)

   One measurement that has a big impact on the success of your SaaS product is its time to value (TTV). TTV reflects the time that normally elapses between a customer investing in your product and then receiving the value from it they were hoping for. You want a low TTV so customers can quickly see how helpful your product is. SaaS education can help you lower your TTV by providing a clear and quick path for your customers to learn how to use your product. 

2. Product Adoption

   Product adoption refers to the process in which people go from not knowing about your product to using it and then succeeding with it. Here, SaaS education software can increase your product adoption statistics by providing additional ways for customers to learn about your product and provide them with content that updates as changes are made to the software.

3. Product Education

   Similar to both TTV and adoption, product education focuses on teaching your customers how to use your product so that they can use it to do whatever they need. The goal is to provide a quick and easy way to discover all the hidden features so that users and customers can go beyond novice and truly master your product. SaaS education software can help with this by providing the tools to build content that can deliver this education to your customers. 

This doesn’t even include how educational initiatives can increase your customer satisfaction scores, making customers more likely to leave positive reviews. These positive reviews can then be important marketing tools for generating additional revenue. As you can see, SaaS education software does much more than just make customer onboarding simpler!

SaaS Education Software

The best customer education software provides effective customer education tools. Northpass offers customers several LMS features:

1. Customizable design
2. Mobile optimized
3. Learning paths
4. Multi-content support
5. Email notifications
6. Surveys

A customizable design means that your training program will have your brand and voice at every stage in the customer education process.  You want to ensure that your customers get the best customer education for SaaS products and with Northpass, that’s what you’ll get. 

With her customer onboarding program complete, Sally’s customers enjoyed learning more about using her SaaS product. She saw the number of support tickets fall dramatically within a few months of the program launch and knew that it was successful. Her company also started seeing an uptick in positive customer feedback.

If you’d like to experience what Sally experienced, check out Northpass today.