Customer education examples and case studies

Now that we've covered the techniques, tools and what to do to run a successful customer education strategy, we need to see examples and case studies of customer education being implemented, right?

Today we'll look at a few examples and what they've been doing in terms of customer education, the tools they've used and the techniques they've implemented. We'll look at Pipefy, Hi Platform and one of my clients, Utoo. Three startups that work in different areas with very different approaches.

The idea is to analyze their websites and look at their strategies.

Pipefy: a complete customer education suite

I believe Pipefy is one of the most complete examples and case studies of customer education in Brazil. They're a project management startup from Curitiba. I used them at launch (I think in 2012), but I only became a real fan in 2019, when we implemented it at a company. Their software is a joy to use.

However, and perhaps this is their biggest problem, to use even half of its potential you need a mind grounded in logic and processes.

What they use

Educational blog (https://www.pipefy.com/pt-br/blog/)

Their blog is divided into a few categories, ranging from Finance & Procurement to Customer Service and, of course, Process Management. The posts are quite introductory to a range of subjects, with themes revolving around "What is X," "How to do Y" or "Z Ways to W."

They usually don't go much over 1,000 words per post and all are well optimized for SEO. That lets them keep a good posting cadence, be quick for the reader and still generate new leads who fall into a lead nurturing funnel, probably steering them toward denser content.

User-generated content community (https://community.pipefy.com/)

The community was launched in early 2020 as a Q&A space where Pipefy users could ask questions and get answers from more experienced members and community moderators. Everything happens inside a forum system.

Today the community works as a place to get questions answered and to generate content and case studies (UGC). It's also a great channel for communicating with customers. Integrated into it is a series of tutorials and educational content that look a lot like conventional blog posts. So everything flows in the user experience and allows interaction, instead of jumping from platform to platform: it's all in one place.

Knowledge base (https://help.pipefy.com/pt-BR/)

They use a knowledge base with more platform-oriented tutorials, unlike the community, which has more business guides and best practices.

Courses and certification programs (https://www.pipefy.com/pt-br/programa-certificacoes/)

They have a university (using Teachable as the platform) and all courses are free. They're courses on process management and integrations and APIs. What's most interesting is that they promote it as a certification program, which gives it much more credibility. That way, professionals become brand ambassadors.

This is a strategy that RD and HubSpot use very well these days. Let's see how Pipefy grows with it.

Events (https://www.pipefy.com/pt-br/eventos/)

A webinar strategy usually aims to deliver more timely information, since it doesn't require much video post-production and can generate material for the future, in addition to live interaction with learners.

Pipefy's webinars are very much based on productivity strategies and how to think about efficiency with their tool. All videos are recorded and available on the platform.

Hi Platform

Hi Platform is a customer relationship platform born in Blumenau, Santa Catarina. They integrate conversations from social networks and messaging services, and also provide a bot, all focused on customer service and relationships. As the second of our customer education examples, Hi Platform is interesting because they have a very strong focus on customer success, but also because they opened a spin-off company.

What I imagine, since I also have clients facing this problem, is that they were a platform that trains companies' customer service teams. After all, it hardly matters if you have everything integrated, automatic messages and high efficiency if the service is bad. That's why teaching their customers how to serve better is so crucial.

So, as we'll see, all of their educational content is much more geared toward teaching their customers to be good service agents and to have a strategy for building and maintaining relationships than toward simply using their platform.

For deeper research, I spoke with Ingrid Ricetto, Customer Education Specialist at Hi Platform, who explained several points.

What is customer education for Hi Platform?

According to Ingrid, customer education today is there to make the customer's day-to-day easier when using the tool: education as customer success. It now works in a consultative way, providing benchmarks and cases of how other customers are using it.

They have three main fronts:

• Individualized online training for more premium customer tiers.
• Mass training, live classes on a pre-scheduled calendar.
• In-person training for companies.

What they use

Educational blog (https://medium.com/hiplatformbr)

When I was doing my initial research, I found their blog and assumed it was part of the customer education strategy. Ingrid clarified, however, that it is entirely run by the marketing team.

Their blog is packed with articles about customer experience, how customer service improves the buying experience, service and brand presence. Although posts aren't consistent, there's a post every week and some reach almost 4,000 words. Very thorough!

One point that stands out is the use of the Medium platform for publishing, without a system of their own. That has several advantages: no need to worry about system maintenance, so you're guaranteed a secure, always up-to-date system. Medium is also already very well optimized for SEO, which takes some of the load off constantly improving the code of their blog site. Finally, Medium distributes the content on its own, which can help reach more people.

University (https://hiacademy.com.br/)

A highlight of their customer experience university is that it's seen as a source of revenue, with some paid courses. They have a dedicated fan page, YouTube channel and LinkedIn page.

Hi Academy was not, as I initially believed, a consequence of intensifying customer education efforts and growing content. It started as a spin-off of Hi Platform and today is a separate revenue source, even serving competitors of Hi Platform. Of course, the two areas talk to each other and boost each other's business, but today Hi Academy is a company of its own.

It began as technical training to demonstrate authority, but grew into a revenue source and now even offers in-company services.

Podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/4Yhr1Cw2m5pZDEfRa5JSuY)

The podcast is hosted on Spotify, with a very strong focus on various customer service topics. It has zero focus on platform tutorials, with episodes like Relationships in Healthcare and Consumer Behavior and the Luxury Market, for example. So it's clear that the idea is to cover the different angles of customer service across industries, always with guests.

What's interesting about working with Spotify is, again, distribution. It becomes increasingly clear how they use customer education as a marketing and brand-building strategy, beyond direct customer training.

Ebooks (https://www.hiplatform.com/ebooks)

Finally, they use an ebook strategy, with landing pages that are well tracked with Pixel and super simple but effective. There's not much fuss, and it allows fast visitor conversion.

Utoo

Last among our customer education examples, we have one of my clients, Utoo. Utoo is an influencer network monetization platform for nano and micro influencers who promote partners' products available in its marketplace.

For them, the customer education demand reached me because they saw the need to train influencers on how to promote products and to educate companies on how to work with influencers beyond celebrities, meaning a focus on nano and micro influencers. All of this combined with a marketing and sales strategy.

We spent two months creating base content that would be advertised on Facebook and Instagram Ads, preparing the ground for creating online courses.

One month after the ebooks were created, almost 2,000 leads had been generated, and the online courses had 524 learners.

Let's go through the strategies.

Ebooks

All the content was first written and laid out as ebooks so it could be created and distributed quickly. I wrote the ebook in a week, collected team feedback and it was laid out and available for download the following week. I was also responsible for creating the landing pages and setting up the download.

The ebooks were very well received. We made 8 ebooks in 4 months, until we started the second phase of the plan, with the creation of Utoo University. The basic premise of the ebooks was to test which topics the audience would be most interested in, and also to generate content for social media, which still shows today. After all, a 2,000-word ebook can easily generate 10 to 15 social media posts.

We produced a total of 10 ebooks, 5 aimed at companies and 5 aimed at influencers, for a total of more than 23,000 words.

Free online courses

With the ebook content, two live sessions were coordinated with a major influencer from Curitiba. Hiring and scheduling were very simple, because we already had the entire lesson ready (the ebook itself). The live class served as lead generation and was recorded, to become part of our course catalog.

Next, we started recording the courses. With a very lean production, four ebooks were used to generate 2 hours of content, in addition to the 2 hours of live sessions. With that, we had the material to start building our Utoo University, the central tool for educating our customers and cementing the company's authority.

Customer university

Since I subscribe to a simple and very effective LMS, uploading and customizing Utoo University was fast and cheap. In under two weeks, we already had all courses, live sessions and ebooks centralized on a single platform, where people could create accounts to access them and enter the sales funnel. With that integration, we could tell who was a new lead and who was a current customer.

With the link in hand, we put more effort into promoting the main University link and selling the idea of a content hub, instead of isolated efforts.

Finally, I also took over control and management of the social networks.

Social media

With the pragmatic realization that customer education was a solid path to success, I took over social media planning, which had a very clear turning point in moving away from sparse content posts to align everything under the same strategy. That way, we managed to align the production of new content, reuse old content and have a more fluid, organized conversation between new leads and current customers, without looking like two different entities.

So today we can say that all of Utoo's customer communication and relationship strategy is based on education. It is not an isolated effort of a single area but a company strategy.

There are other customer education examples and case studies

Of course, there are some clear representatives of customer education in Brazil, such as Resultados Digitais, Rock Content and Leads2b, but if I were to cover them all, this post would never end.

My intention in covering a few examples and case studies of customer education is for you to see how a customer education strategy can vary a lot and take many forms. It doesn't have to be only an effort of the Product or Customer Success area; it can even be a source of revenue or a guiding strategy for the company as a whole.

Don't forget to visit the sites mentioned to see in practice how this can be presented. Of course, as this content was written in August 2021, a lot may have changed by the time you read it.

As a recommendation for your next read, I suggest the main tools in customer education.