Product adoption isn’t just important for SaaS companies—it’s everything.
While SaaS adoption continues to skyrocket—with 2024 stats showing 80% penetration across US companies and up to 70% of a company’s apps being SaaS-based—getting clients to actively use your software remains a challenge.
That’s where customer training software changes the game. By teaching users how to unlock the full value of your product, you transform adoption into retention—and even advocacy.
Below, we’ll break down how to leverage SaaS customer education tools to fuel growth, drive adoption, and maximize user value—boosting your bottom line in the process.
Why Customer Education Is Critical for SaaS Growth
Customer education in SaaS is essential because of the adoption problem. A Forbes overview on the “journey to churn” highlights how unexpected complexity, resource constraints, and poor support lead to value erosion, making churn almost inevitable.
Too often, users sign up for a trial or freemium version of a product or service but fail to register for a paid tier. The bottom line is that customers need to be trained to be retained.
Successful customer education programs reduce friction, maximize retention, and minimize support costs. Educated users are more likely to stick with products since they know how to use them, leading to sustainable customer success profitability.
In addition, self-service education empowers users and frees up your customer success teams to focus on high-value interactions. Different educational tools cover different use cases, but the general principle of applying SaaS technology for online learning is universally beneficial regardless of your niche or client base.
Essential SaaS Customer Education Tools
SaaS providers can benefit from implementing a learning management system (LMS). But not all SaaS LMS implementations look or work the same, so you should think carefully about which is best for your organization and your clients’ needs.
The five most impactful forms of SaaS customer education systems are:
- LMS built for customer education teams
- Knowledge bases and help centers
- In-app guidance and tooltips
- Webinars and video tutorials
- Community forums and peer learning
Let’s take a closer look at each one and when (and how) to use it.
Learning Management Systems Built for Customer Education
These are the most comprehensive systems. No matter your customer education goals, a system tailored to your user base will help you achieve them. It all starts during the customer onboarding process by making educational resources available to prospects, ensuring potential users know your value proposition ASAP.
Then, once users are on board, fundamental lessons and modules lead into more specialized and niche content areas based on specific features they’re interested in.
Thought Industries provides a platform for delivering and managing customer education content. It empowers users with progressive learning and milestone-based achievements, automates onboarding for swift adoption, and gamifies the experience at higher levels for optimal engagement. A robust platform will start learners early, encourage deeper exploration, and foster long-term satisfaction and retention.
Knowledge Bases and Help Centers
These systems use a self-service model, making training materials available for users to use. Documentation in long-form text works best when joined by visual aids, video accompaniment, or other multimedia elements incorporated.
Per a Forbes panel, self-service documentation is one of the top methods for reducing internal support tickets. Establish a clear and uniform structure to get the most out of this front-loaded feature. Make documents searchable, and consider bundling in artificial intelligence (AI) features like summaries and chatbots.
This customer education strategy should be used in conjunction with others below.
In-App Guidance and Tooltips
In-app guidance and tooltips are examples of contextual education similar in content to universal knowledge bases. Rather than accessing information in a central repository that might be hosted on a public-facing website, users get this intel right at home in the app or platform while using it. This makes it ideal to solve a problem as soon as it pops up, mitigating the immediate impacts of friction.
Tools such as Pendo, Userpilot, and Intercom offer effective real-time tooltips, walkthroughs, and interactive guides. Timely contextual assistance can improve feature adoption and retention while reducing reliance on external support.
Webinars and Video Tutorials
Another method of providing customer education is live and on-demand video (e.g., recordings of live events). Decades of research in traditional education have proven that people with different learning styles may benefit from video or audio instruction. Tools like Zoom, Wistia, and Loom can help meet people where they are, making learning modules accessible to the broadest possible audience.
Video can do anything text can—and in some cases, better. It’s particularly apt for tutorials and walkthroughs, as a narrator can dictate instructions while modeling the user journey from the user’s point of view. Video can accurately represent a question-and-answer exchange, and help keep deep content dives especially engaging.
For good measure, be sure to keep webinars short and interactive. Following up with additional resources ensures that attendees (and later viewers) won’t miss anything.
Community Forums and Peer Learning
Last but not least, community-focused learning through forums and discussion boards enables users to help and engage each other while forming connections through your app or platform. The immediate impact is a reduction in customer support workloads, but the added benefit of the community is nothing to sniff at.
Engaging users socially and helping them feel empowered to help each other shows a commitment to your product that’s hard to quantify. Users who are comfortable with their knowledge and happy with its value are willing to reach out and help others get the same value—one step short of an explicit endorsement or promotion.
And it all starts with an intentional design.
Companies leverage communication tools like Slack or hosting suites like Notion or Salesforce to engender this community. It doesn’t happen automatically.
To kick-start the social learning, try creating an active user forum. Consider having a leader or other high-visibility individual post a thread or engage everyday users in the comments. Offering incentives for top contributors is another great way to start.
Best Practices for SaaS Customer Education
While the different SaaS customer education tools above all fit specific use cases, there are some best practices that all customer training programs should use:
- Segmenting users by experience level: Create progressive learning paths for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users with milestones in between.
- Automating wherever possible: Leverage automated email sequences, chatbots, and in-app prompts to keep users engaged and active at all times.
- Leveraging data to refine programs: Track user engagement with content and adjust modules that aren’t being used or are ineffective.
- Personalizing the experience: Use adaptive learning paths, including AI-driven content recommendations, to tailor a bespoke user journey.
- Ensuring accessibility and usability: Content should be available in various formats and languages. Inclusive design makes a program ready for scaling.
Implementing these practices will help you maximize product adoption and customer retention regardless of your SaaS niche. Education is the key to understanding and satisfaction, ultimately leading to sustainable growth.
Measuring the Impact of Customer Education
You’ll need to monitor success over time to get the most out of customer education in SaaS.
Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep track of include:
- Activation rate
- Time to first value (TTFV)
- Support ticket reduction
- Feature adoption rate
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
An effective customer education program directly increases CLV by reducing churn, improving retention, and driving upsell opportunities. The more value customers get from your SaaS, the longer they stay—and the more they spend.
If you’re not seeing improvement across these KPIs, it’s time to reassess. Whether it’s refining content, optimizing deployment, or improving engagement strategies, a quality LMS partner like Thought Industries can help turn insights into action.
Optimize Adoption With Customer Education
Customer education is one of the best ways for SaaS firms to communicate and realize their value to clients. Teaching them how to use your products and services fast-tracks them to adoption, helps them engage deeper, and keeps them loyal for longer. Scaling customer training tools leads to happier users and lower churn.
Thought Industries facilitates all these outcomes by providing a powerful LMS platform, improving customer training, and aligning it with your business needs.
Get in touch today to audit your existing education program—or create a new one.
