Customer Spotlight: Empowering Marketers with AI Skills Through Self-Serve Education

Jasper is on a mission to serve as AI co-pilot for high-performing marketing teams, and an important part of delivering on this mission means ensuring their users know exactly how Jasper’s generative AI capabilities can help make content creation a breeze. 

Enter Jasper Academy. In this customer spotlight, we sit down with Jasper’s Head of Customer Education, Sara Patel, to learn more about the educational content and certifications marketers can leverage to increase their generative AI proficiency for improved output and content creativity. 

Tell us a little about you and your role at Jasper

I’m the Head of Customer Education at Jasper. I manage Jasper Academy in our LMS (woohoo WorkRamp!), as well as plan and implement the curriculum map, manage courses from initial design to keeping content updated, and oversee the Jasper Certification.  

Read more: Why You Should Create a Customer Certification Program

What are some of your guiding principles for customer education, and how have you applied these when building out Jasper Academy?   

Customer education needs to be accessible. The content needs to be easily digestible and contain practical and easy-to-implement skills. People are busy with their day-to-day jobs. I want to create content that can fit into their already packed schedules and make their lives easier, not more complicated. 

I think about these factors whenever I’m creating new content for our academy. I want to keep courses under 10 minutes whenever possible, utilize gifs and quick videos to show rather than only tell customers how to do something in Jasper, and provide multiple modalities to learn the information.   

Read more: 7 Reasons to Create a Customer Education Academy

What are you hoping your customers and prospects will gain through the power of self-serve education? 

We know that customers love to have a self-serve option and get questions answered in real-time. Jasper can be a really powerful co-pilot for marketers, especially when you know how to use it to its fullest potential.

We’d love for Jasper Academy to be our customers’ go-to resource to learn how to turn it into that powerful tool for them–showing them how to seamlessly incorporate it into their current workflows, ultimately saving them time while increasing their content creativity and output. 

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

Before WorkRamp, our learning resources were pretty disjointed and ungated. We had an ad hoc customer training that included a video series, low-stakes certification, and live webinars. So we had two problems–we lacked one platform to send customers to so they could access all of our learning resources, and we were unable to collect any data on what customers were taking, the impact these courses were having on the health of our customers, were customer behaviors changing, etc.  

WorkRamp has unified all our resources and allowed us to collect data! Now customers can have a delightful learning experience, and we can know what is working for our customers and what isn’t. 

Can you give us an overview of your curriculum structure and progression and some of the courses, certifications, and resources you’re offering? 

Our curriculum currently includes multiple collections and a few paths for customers to follow based on their learning goals.

Collections are organized around the various features within Jasper, and Paths are designed to give end users an opportunity to deep dive into the entire platform or gain just the basics to get started quickly.  

We also offer live and on-demand webinars, including a ‘Get Started’ session and multiple sessions on how to accomplish high-demand use cases. We have a plethora of one-page downloadable resources available for customers to reference when working within the app, and finally offer a certification on the Jasper platform. 

What strategies have you implemented to make learning engaging and encourage active participation and knowledge retention? 

We know that everyone learns differently, and what may be useful and engaging for one person doesn’t work for another, so we have taken full advantage of all the options for learning resources within WorkRamp–Collections, Paths, Resources, Certification, and live and on-demand events. I love Paths in particular because containing the content for customers gives them a focused set of courses to complete. 

Additionally, we try to incorporate gifs to support the text learning as much as possible, embed a lot of video tutorials and walkthroughs, and keep our courses short. We also provide downloadable one-pagers so our customers can take a recap of what they are learning with them to be able to easily access later. 

I also am a huge fan of knowledge checks! I leave them ungraded but required to provide an opportunity for reflection on what they learned without feeling the pressure of needing a passing score.  Finally, our certification in Jasper requires customers to upload screenshots to demonstrate their knowledge of completing critical skills within Jasper. 

Read more: Make eLearning Engaging in 7 Steps

I’d love to learn more about Jasper’s certification! What does it take for someone to be Jasper certified, and why should marketers add this to their resume if they want to stay ahead of the curve? 

In order to get Jasper Certified, you need to pass a 60-question exam that includes 50 multiple-choice questions and 10 open-response questions. These questions require users to upload examples of their work within Jasper, demonstrating they know how to execute various actions using key features of Jasper. Users need to score an 85 percent on those 60 questions.

Marketers should add this to their resume/LinkedIn profile to show a couple of things:

1. They are willing to learn and embrace a new technology and can use it proficiently.
2. Generative AI is here to stay, and like many have said, it’s not about generative AI taking a marketer’s job–I don’t see that happening, but a marketer who uses generative AI proficiently will definitely have an edge over someone who doesn’t use it at all or doesn’t use it well.

Read more: How AI Can Transform Your Customer Education Program

How has establishing a certification within your learning program early on helped support Jasper’s position as an AI industry leader? Do you have plans to expand this certification program?  

Industry leaders become industry leaders because they build a product that focuses on what customers want.

Establishing a certification program early on sends the message: Generative AI is a game-changing technology that is here to stay, and we as a company are committed to building a product that will not only become integral to the way marketers work but, more importantly, streamline their workflow and improve their efficiency, making time for creativity. 

However, we know that in order for our customers to attain this, they need to know how to use Jasper and use it well. Because we are committed to our customers, we’ve invested the time early on to determine what metrics are needed for our customers to be successful using Jasper within their organization, provided a training path to help them get there, and a certification so they can show their network and future employers what they’ve accomplished. Industry leaders stay industry leaders because they give their customers the tools and support to use their product successfully.

We are currently building a Partner Program and have created a separate certification for those within our partner program. Beyond that, no current plans in the works, but have a few ideas percolating about what we should build next. 

Read more: Benefits of Customer and Partner Certifications

What has the initial response to your academy been? Can you share any early successes around engagement or testimonials from customers who have started to lean on self-serve learning?  

We’ve had a pretty exciting organic response to Jasper Academy! We’ve had nearly 10K users sign up and a 74 percent content completion rate. Recently, we made a big push for our webinar series and had over 1,700 users sign up in November alone! 

Additionally, so far we’ve had 292 people pass our certification, with nearly 800 customers enrolled. 

Finally, here’s a quote from one of our big customers:  “I was going through Jasper Academy again this morning…and I am so impressed with the quality and robustness of that material…I am directing all new users here.” This shows me that our content is serving our customers and helping them easily get onboarded to Jasper! 

How are you measuring the overall effectiveness of your academy in terms of customer knowledge acquisition, satisfaction, and retention? 

Currently, we have a dashboard that shows the health of customers who have completed a course vs. those who have only registered vs. those who haven’t done either. Overwhelmingly, customers who have taken a course are much healthier than those who have not, and even those customers who simply register for and maybe start a course are much healthier than those who haven’t even created an academy account. 

However, we’re aware this is just correlational data. Our ultimate goal is to map actions taken within the app so we can specifically measure if our courses are changing customer behavior, so overall, it’s still a work in progress.

What’s your strategy for keeping your academy content up to date and aligned with the latest product and industry developments? 

This feels like a million-dollar question! Not only does our app change so quickly, but the nature and capabilities of generative AI seem to change at lightning speed.

The current plan is to stay in lock-step communication with our product team and get early access to new features so we can create content that launches as soon as new features are released to the majority of our users or slightly after. 

We also host a monthly live webinar, “What’s New with Jasper?” which offers a great space to let our customers know what’s changed in the app and how to incorporate those changes into their workflows. 

If you could go back to the start when you launched your academy, is there anything you would have done differently? What’s your biggest piece of advice for anyone who wants to create their own academy? 

Great question–I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to have it perfect, and when it didn’t feel that way, we did a soft launch instead of making it very well known with our customers. Looking back, I recognize that the product changes so quickly, and as a result, the content will also change quickly, so perfect isn’t reality, and I would have launched it louder. Customers love self-serve education and need access to guided tutorials–that should have been the driving factor instead of perfection. 

So, in that vein, my advice is to lean in, be scrappy, and get an MVP out there–it’s OK if it’s not perfect!

One of our Jasper Values is: Be scrappy. Yes, starting an academy is hard and overwhelming at times. You want it to be perfect and pretty. You want all your customers to sign up and take all the courses. So you feel A LOT of pressure, BUT wanting the end result to be perfect can paralyze you. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, or as others say, done! 

What’s next for Jasper Academy that your learners can look forward to?

Learners should be on the lookout for new collections that provide deeper dives into common use cases, insights into the evolving roles of marketing with the advent of generative AI, and more courses showcasing our new features. 

Looking to take your marketing team’s speed and performance to the next level with the help of AI? Head to Jasper Academy to become a certified expert on all of Jasper’s tools and features! 

Then, chat with our team to learn more about how you can drive better product adoption through education with your own custom-branded academy in WorkRamp.