Investing in customer education is now more important than ever. Educated customers are more likely to understand the value of your products or services. When customers feel confident in their ability to use a product or service, they are more likely to continue using it. This can lead to better product adoption, reduced support costs, and a more stable customer base. To drive your customer education strategy, you need a learning platform that’s optimized for customer education. Here are five practical reasons why Adobe Learning Manager fits the bill.

1. Integrate customer education into your existing web presence

Feature/capability that enables this: Learning Manager components in AEM Sites, Learning Manager APIs, Fluidic player

While the idea of setting up a brand-new customer education platform for your business may sound exciting, driving traffic to this new platform can be challenging in the real world. A better strategy is to integrate customer education into something you are already driving traffic through your SEO and SEM efforts – your business website or marketing platform.

In a study by Mckinsey, it was reported that average customer satisfaction fell by 40% over the course of an onboarding journey (source). The more touchpoints a customer needs to cover, the worse the overall satisfaction score. With a “headless” implementation of Learning Manager supported by a suite of comprehensive APIs, your customers don’t need to navigate to a third-party site to begin learning. You can create and integrate customer education right inside your existing web property that gets the maximum customer traffic. You can do this in three ways:

• If you already use Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Sites, Learning Manager is now available out-of-the-box within AEM. You can use the Learning Manager components within AEM sites to build your customer education platform and integrate it with your website in a matter of a few hours. This is a no-code/low-code approach to building your customer education platform where you can use the code available in the AEM Reference Site, and if needed tweak it as per your requirements.
• If you don’t use AEM Sites, you can use the power and flexibility provided by the Learning Manager APIs to create a bespoke customer education platform that’s part of your existing web property and has your end-to-end branding. Learning Manager is perhaps the only LMS that has the most comprehensive suite of APIs. Any functionality that is available in the native version of Learning Manager can be replicated through APIs in your bespoke customer education platform.
• If you just want to embed specific learning objects and track their consumption as part of your existing web content, you can do that too using the Learning Manager “fluidic player.” The Learning Manager fluidic player is an industry-first and the only content player that has a modular architecture and supports virtually any format of learning content be it videos, PDF documents, PowerPoint slides, SCORM e-learning content, and more.

2. Engage your customers by providing personalized learning

Feature/capability that enables this: Learning Manager recommendation algorithms, Machine learning and AI

As an organization looking to invest in customer education, it is likely that you have a complex product/service portfolio with multiple user personas tied to each of your products or services. Each of your customers might have purchased a different product or service and is leveraging a specific user persona that works best for their business. Further, your customers might be at different levels – beginner, intermediate, or advanced in terms of using a specific product/service.

In such a scenario, how do you drive learning recommendations so that it feels personalized for each customer without having to employ an army of learning administrators to manually drive the recommendation efforts? This is where Learning Manager’s new recommendation algorithm that pivots on products, roles, and levels and uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to drive learning recommendations gives you an edge.

Let’s get into a brief overview of the mechanics of how this works. As soon as a customer onboards your customer education platform, information is gathered by Learning Manager about the “products” the customer has purchased, the user personas or “roles” relevant to them, and the “level”–beginner, intermediate, or advanced, they identify as applicable to them. This information contributes to building a customer profile.

On the other hand, learning content authors within your organization tag each piece of learning content with metadata on the products, roles, and levels that the piece of content is most relevant to. This information contributes to building the content profile for each piece of content.

Behind the scenes, Learning Manager’s AI matches customer profiles to content profiles to display learning recommendations that are tailor-made for a specific product-role-level combination of your customers. To do this, Learning Manager uses both—explicit information provided by the customer and implicit information that it gathers by looking at customer activity within the platform, the number of enrollments for a piece of content, user ratings, recency, and peer activity.

Learning Manager fine-tunes the learning recommendations over time so that your customers always find learning that’s relevant to them in a Netflix-style user interface.

3. Boost your upsell, renewal, and marketing efforts with data from your customer education platform

Feature/capability that enables this: Marketo integration, Salesforce connector, Custom reporting roles

Your customer education platform captures data and insights about your customers, and this data is valuable. Three teams in particular from your organization can benefit from this data.

• The Marketing Team: Data from your customer education platform can provide insights to your marketing team to drive personalized campaigns to market both—your products/services, and paid training that bring revenue. Learning Manager supports seamless integration with Marketo, which means learner activity data from your customer education platform such as course enrollments, course completions, skills progressions and so on can be written into Marketo. Your marketing team can query this data in Marketo to select the right audience for your marketing campaigns. For example, let’s say you are launching a new product or service, you can find customers who have shown interest in similar products earlier from the learning activity data and create targeted campaigns for this set of customers.
• The Sales Team: Data from your customer education platform can provide insights to your sales team to drive upsell conversations. With the Salesforce connector which is available out-of-the-box with Learning Manager, you can export learning records such as learner transcripts, user reports, and skill reports to Salesforce. You can determine if the exported data should be linked with the ‘User’ table or the ‘Contacts’ table in Salesforce.
• The Customer Success Management (CSM) Team: Data from your customer education platform can help the CSM team identify areas where your customers might need support in better utilizing your products or services. Timely intervention by the CSM team using this data can help reduce churn and drive smoother renewals.

4. Make learning fun with gamification and social learning

Feature/capability that enables this: Built-in gamification, Social learning, Discussion boards, Learning Manager APIs

A majority of the learning activity on a customer education platform is self-driven. You probably won’t be able to make it “mandatory” for customers to take up your courses, unlike internal training. Therefore, it is important that your customers find value in the courses you offer, remain engaged, and find incentives to keep coming back to your customer education platform.

Research has shown that gamification and social learning are effective in improving learning engagement. While the quality of the learning content you offer will drive the value proposition, Learning Manager helps you create a structural gamification layer to drive better engagement. You can create a gamification strategy to boost and reward desirable customer behaviors such as accessing your learning platform on a consistent basis and consuming learning activities, downloading materials, posting, and commenting on the social learning boards, providing feedback and rating to courses, and so on. You can implement points, badges, and leaderboards available within Learning Manager to create your custom gamification strategy. Additionally, you can use Learning Manager APIs to connect to a third-party rewards redemption portal where learners can redeem gamification points for tangible rewards.

One of the ways you can use Learning Manager’s social learning feature is to create product-specific “discussion boards”. This can be a space for customers to ask questions, get answers from subject-matter experts, and provide their impromptu feedback about your courses or your products in general. This can help you keep a finger on the pulse of your customers and take timely remedial actions. Your Learning Manager admins can enable, disable, and monitor activities in social learning. Admins can track the social activity trends of your customers via a dashboard.

5. Robust reporting capabilities optimized for customer education

Feature/capability that enables this: User-groups, Custom reporting roles, Custom admin.

With Learning Manager, you can track training consumption by customers to a very high granularity and answer business questions such as:

• For a customer segment or even a particular customer, what does the training activity look like in terms of logins, signups, etc. (Indicating the level of engagement from a particular customer.)
• Which trainings have high sign-ups but low completions or low assessment scores? (This may indicate potential issues with the training content.)

However, in addition to detailed reporting on metrics such as customer visits, sign-ups, completions and more, Learning Manager packs practical solutions to reporting requirements specific to customer education that you are going to discover once your platform goes live.

Let’s take an example. Learning Manager enables you to create “user-groups” based on attributes. Therefore, based on the customer name attribute, all users on your customer education platform from Customer “A” can be aggregated into one user-group. You can then pull user group-based reporting data to get insights on the learning activity of this specific customer.

If you want reporting for Customer A to be available only to specific users within your organization, for example, Customer Success Managers aligned to Customer A, you can create custom reporting roles and selectively grant them access. Your customers would want the ability to pull learning reports relevant to their business as well. In Learning Manager, you can create admin roles with custom access and privileges so that your customers can access reports specific to their organization in a self-service manner.

Learning Manager provides many industry-leading reporting capabilities optimized for customer-education use cases. With Learning Manager, you can get your customer education platform up and running with minimal effort. You can gain valuable insights about your customers, increase your bottom line, support complex customer education use cases, and keep your customers engaged.

Learn more about Adobe Learning Manager/Customer Education