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Customer Spotlight: Using Iteration to Create an Engaging, Effective Customer Academy

In this month’s customer spotlight, we spoke with Shira Moskowitz, Customer Education & Internal Enablement Manager at Hopin, and Adri Lueiro, Video Producer for the Customer Education team.

Shira manages the customer education program, which includes Hopin Learn, a customer academy hosted on WorkRamp, a knowledge base, and the internal Product Enablement team, and Adri creates the video courses for Hopin Learn.

Shira and Adri shared tips and advice from their experience creating Hopin Learn and highlighted the importance of iterating and updating your customer education academy after launch to ensure you’re providing engaging content to support your customers. 

Describe your philosophy for customer education. How have you applied these guiding principles when building and iterating on Hopin Learn? 

Shira: When it comes to customer education, our team wants to empower and inspire customers to use our product. We want them to become experts. As such, we focus our courses on the “why” and the “what for” and less on the technical how-tos. 

When it comes to the more technical aspects of using Hopin, we want to teach our customers the questions they need to ask and show them where they can find more detailed instructions, which is why we share specific resources and articles from our knowledge base. 

Both Hopin Learn and the knowledge base sit within our customer education team, and a big part of our strategy is determining the right moment to share the resources we create with our customers.  

Adri: We not only want to teach, but we also want to inspire them by showing the different ways that our product can be used. That’s why we usually include examples of how our customers have used the product. For example, by showing how our different integrations look in an event. 

We put a lot of energy into explaining why you should use the different features Hopin has and why they’re useful for our organizers. For instance, we don’t tell our customers to “use the self-check-in feature” we tell them “using the self-check-in feature will save you time during an onsite event, and this is useful because your attendees will have a smoother check-in and your team will be able to pay attention to other parts of the experience.” This helps paint the picture of what their event can look like. 

Speaking of iterating on Hopin Learn–it’s been through a couple of versions up to this point, and now you’re launching the latest and greatest that will be available to customers AND prospects. Can you share a bit about the evolution of customer education at Hopin and how you’ve gotten to this point? 

Shira & Adri: When Shira first joined Hopin and launched V1 of Hopin Learn, the intention was to provide customers who sign up for free or pay a small fee with the same level of knowledge and support as those with more expensive plans. 

Over time, we realized that customer education can benefit customers on all plans, just in different ways. We have now built Hopin Learn into our onboarding program for all customers to better prepare them for meetings with their Event Manager and to empower them to ask the right questions. 

Additionally, the content and the platforms we use to host Hopin Learn have evolved tremendously. The first iteration was hosted on a simple webpage that housed recordings of hour-long live workshops that our customers could watch on demand. As we prepared to launch V2, we brought Adri onto the team to elevate the video production and educational experience of the courses. Adri’s video skills helped us be more mindful of our customer’s time by condensing the essential information into shorter-form videos. 

The second iteration of Hopin Learn was the first time we used a learning management system (LMS), which made it easier for us to organize content so that customers could refer to specific lessons within the courses. This also enabled us to collect more feedback from customers on the type of educational resources they needed. 

As we launched Hopin Learn V3 hosted on WorkRamp, we could take our learnings from previous iterations and apply them to our new program. With WorkRamp, we can use a wide variety of content types that complement our videos to make our courses even more engaging for different audiences. Additionally, we can make Hopin Learn easier for customers to navigate. 

As Hopin Learn has evolved, any metrics or data points you looked at to inform the adjustments you made? At a higher level, were there any customer education industry trends you considered? 

Shira: The driving force behind our decision to migrate to WorkRamp was operational efficiency. While we saw very consistent rates of monthly active users on our previous platform, our biggest challenge was that we were creating duplicate content for internal enablement and customer education. Bringing both of these forms of education onto one platform better enables us to serve our employees and our customers with the most up-to-date information on our evolving platform. 

One industry metric we have used in preparing our content is the completion rate. Across the industry, about 30 percent of registrants actually complete the course. We use this metric in two ways. 

  • On the one hand, we think about how we can inspire customers to see a course through. We have done this by adding quizzes and offering completion certificates that customers can share on Linkedin. 
  • Our goal is not necessarily to see completion rates rise but rather to educate our customers so we ensure that customers can easily navigate our courses to find a single video or lesson that might be useful for them and thus help them get value from the course, even if they don’t finish it. 

What are some lessons you’ve learned throughout this process of growing Hopin Learn?

Shira: Customers crave self-serve resources. They want to feel empowered to use our platform and are excited to learn. We often get feedback that they love the content, but they want even more.

I’ve also learned that our curriculum and content can and will evolve, but it’s best to just get started, even when it’s not perfect. When we launched the first version of Hopin Learn, it was a simple webpage with links to video recordings on each topic. The videos were simple screen shares I recorded sitting at my desk. Today, we use a learning management system and have a full-time video producer (Adri) who creates engaging content with music, voiceovers, and easy-to-follow visuals. 

Adri: When creating learning materials for an evolving product, you need to be very strategic about the way you present the information. Otherwise, you might end up constantly editing old videos and will never have the opportunity to create more content for your customers. 

As such, when creating a lesson about a feature that we know will evolve, we think about using resources like knowledge base links, written content, or easy-to-change images, and we use videos to communicate big-picture topics.

Often, we leverage our product roadmap to help us make these strategic decisions. For example, we may pre-record parts of a video that won’t be included in the first version because the feature that we are talking about is not publicly available yet. But as soon as that feature launches, we’re ready with an updated video after a quick edit. 

Why are you excited to bring this version of Hopin Learn to market?

Shira: This new version of Hopin Learn gives customers an even more engaging experience. Using the different forms of content within WorkRamp, including quizzes, tips, videos, and more, make it easier for customers with all different learning styles to process the information and practice their knowledge. Additionally, WorkRamp makes it simple to build DIY experiences for customers so that they can get hands-on experience. For example, we are currently building a course that guides customers through a checklist for converting their event from a live event to an on-demand event. 

Even more so, now that we use the same platform for internal and external enablement, we’ll be able to use some of the product training content we design for Hopin employees for customers as well. Meaning that customers will have the most up-to-date information. At Hopin we’re constantly evolving our platform to make it even better for our users, and it’s important that our education materials stay accurate as well. 

How has implementing an LMS like WorkRamp helped you bring your academy vision to life? 

Shira: As I mentioned, our customers want more content, and we want to give that to them. By bringing both our internal and external enablement under one platform, we can do just that. Plus, WorkRamp was super simple to set up–from branding our webpage to designing guides, we were able to quickly build a platform that we are proud of and that is easy to navigate for our customers. 

Other LMS platforms require more advanced coding and technical knowledge, but WorkRamp offers a no-code solution which meant that our small-but-mighty Customer Education team was able to easily execute this on our own. 

What are some of your pro tips for creating engaging content for users? 

Adri: 

  • Keep your lessons focused and short. Each lesson should only cover one topic; when we add too many, it can be confusing and harder to follow. Keeping it short also helps reduce fatigue. If you are creating video content, try to make each video shorter than three minutes.
  • Make the content easy to find. Some of the ways we do this on Hopin Learn is by granulating the topics as much as we can. We also divide our video content into chapters so people can quickly skim through the video and find what they’re looking for. 
  • Explain why and what for. People don’t just want to sit through a course if they don’t know how it’ll be useful to them. Explaining why they’re taking the course or using that feature and why it matters, and the goals that they’ll achieve will create a higher commitment to the learning process. 
  • Don’t tell, show. Showing how your product looks when in use, and the different ways that your current customers use it, will fire your student’s imagination and inspire them to utilize your product in many different ways.

Any new Hopin Learn content you’re particularly excited about? What can your customers and prospects look forward to when they enroll? 

We’re very excited about the Onsite and Hybrid events with the Hopin course that we just launched. To create it, we actually traveled to an onsite event to record how our onsite features look in action. We have added those visuals to our course so our customers can see how the features can look at their event. 

We put a lot of effort into creating this course to make it easy to understand, engaging, and all-encompassing. We can’t wait for our organizers to go through it and to hear their feedback! 

Want to create more immersive virtual, hybrid, and in-person event experiences for your audience? Head to Hopin Learn to learn how to take your events to the next level! 

And, if you want to learn how you can use WorkRamp to create or iterate on your customer education academy, contact us to schedule a free, personalized demo. 

Complete the form for a custom demo.



Maile Timon

Content Strategist, WorkRamp

Maile Timon is WorkRamp’s Content Strategist. She has over 10 years of experience in content marketing and SEO and has written for several publications and industries, including B2B, marketing, lifestyle, health, and more. When she’s not writing or developing content strategies, she enjoys hiking and spending time with her family.

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