Published on: 16 Oct , 2024
On this page
It’s almost 2025, and companies are starting to see the vision and results a successful customer education engine can bring to the table. This shift in priority is pretty evident from the 174.3% increase in investments in customer education.
With that being said, how do you actually kick-start your customer education system in your company? Well, firstly you need a proper customer education strategy planned out. This strategy is going to be executed by customer education software. It’s wise to have a dedicated customer education team spearheading as they’ll be the ones interacting with your customer education software the most and can get the most out of it.
Customer education is the process of educating customers on your software to maximize the value they get out of it. A customer education software is a tool that helps in creating, distributing, and analyzing your customer education initiatives.
Largely, customer education software has been boiled down to a Learning Management System (LMS) but that’s not the case. An LMS helps existing customers master the software - one part of the problem that customer education aims to solve.
The other part of the problem is providing customer education throughout a customer’s journey. For example, a new customer might want to learn about the product’s features quickly in a knowledge base, while someone familiar with your features might expect advanced tips from your webinars. Since customer education is an ongoing process, having well-rounded content creation and management in your customer education software helps you update your content regularly.
So ideally, your customer education software should be broken down into three aspects - Learning Management System, Knowledge Management Software, and Content Creation Tools. These tools together allow you to have a smooth-running customer education engine.
Trainn is the all-in-one customer education platform that is designed to provide teams with everything they need to scale their customer education program. Trainn lets you create a Training academy and a self-serve knowledge base, with a built-in content creation suite to help you create amazing product videos and documentation within minutes.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
5-minute content creation process | Limited collaboration features |
Clip-based video editing | Absence of support for eCommerce |
No-code Academy setup | Limited integrations |
Learner-level analytics | |
No-code knowledge base (with in-app embed widget) |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
Starter - $49/month (only content creation suite) | Trainn offers a 14-day free trial with all features unlocked. No credit card required. Click here to try it out now! |
Plus - $149/month (only content creation suite) | |
Business - $249/month (Content creation + Knowledge base + LMS) | |
Enterprise - Contact Us |
Best For: ✅Small-Medium Businesses ✅Enterprise Businesses
Document360 is a knowledge base software that lets you create, and publish text-rich documents - be it software documentation, API docs, SOPs, or user manuals. They also provide AI tools to automate the document creation process.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
High categorization abilities | Editor can be buggy |
Ability to create API docs | Broken link issues were found |
The content types you can create within Document360 is limited |
Pricing Plans | Free Plan Features |
---|---|
Free | 1. Public + private knowledge base 2. 250 articles 3. 5 editors |
Professional - $199/month | |
Business - $399/month | |
Enterprise - Contact Sales |
Best For: ✅Small-Medium Businesses ✅Enterprise Businesses
Loom is a screen recorder for internal, asynchronous communication. It helps teams create and share personalized videos internally. On top of the video automation process, the Loom AI add-on helps you refine the videos and automates the post-video creation processes.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Upto 4k resolution recording | The editing interface is a bit clunky |
Live rewind while recording | No voiceovers available |
Edit by transcript | A disconnect between the desktop app and the Chrome extension |
Seamless integration with Jira | Videos can be downloaded only with the premium pricing |
Pricing Plans | Free Plan Features |
---|---|
Free | 1. Upto 25 videos/person 2. 720p video recording 3. Upto 5 minutes/video 4. Cannot add Loom AI |
Business - $12.50/creator/month | |
Enterprise - Contact sales | |
Loom AI Add-on - $4/creator/month |
Best For: ✅Small-Medium Businesses ✅Enterprise Businesses
Absorb LMS is a learning management system provider as the name suggests. They aim to help customer educators create, deliver, and manage personalized and gamified learning courses for customers in different learning paths.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Personalized course recommendations | Steep learning curve |
Learner leaderboards | Admin-side reporting is limited |
LMS mobile app offers offline learning | Reliance on add-ons for content creation |
Historical learner choice-based AI search |
Pricing Plans | Free Plan Features |
---|---|
Absorb LMS tailors your pricing plan based on your usage and needs. Contact them for more info. | Absorb LMS offers a free trial but specifics of it are not available |
Best For: ❌Small Businesses ✅Medium-sized and Enterprise Businesses
Scribe is a tool that helps you create step-by-step guides. It helps you convert the screen recording of your workflow into a guide and adds titles, descriptions, redactions, and more.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Auto-redaction of sensitive information | Cannot create interactive product documentation. |
Ability to add tips and alerts | It does not provide a knowledge base or LMS |
Multiple options to share the guides | It does not provide an in-built repository. |
Supports only one format of content creation - guides. |
Pricing Plans | Free Plan Features |
---|---|
Basic - Free | 1. Limited guide creation 2. Can only capture web processes 3. Basic insights 4. No redactions |
Pro Team - $12/seat/month (starts at 5 seats) | |
Pro Personal - $23/seat/month (starts at 1 seat) | |
Enterprise - Contact sales |
Best For: ✅Small-Medium Businesses ❌Enterprise Businesses
Trainn vs Scribe: A Comparison
Archbee is a product documentation software for tech-heavy tools and tech-savvy readers. Their text editor provides various features to help writers add code-related inputs inside the document.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
AI-powered search and writing assistant | Spaces analytics not available |
Integrations with code-related apps | Cannot create user groups for segmentation |
Ability to create multiple Spaces (document categorization) | No LMS or video authoring features |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
Growing - $50/month | Free Trial is available with all features unlocked. No credit card required. |
Scaling - $200/month | |
Enterprise - Contact sales |
Best For: ✅Small-Medium Businesses ❌Enterprise Businesses
Camtasia is a desktop video creation software. While it boasts a pretty good editing suite, it can be hard to edit your product videos without a video editor.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Advanced cursor editing | Only a desktop app is available (1.28 GB) |
Motion path animations | The learning curve for non-video editors is steep |
Transition effects | Basic AI features like AI voiceovers and translations, and unlimited video hosting are locked behind higher pricing plans |
No LMS or knowledge base provided |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
Camtasia Essentials - $179.88/year | Free Trial is available for 7 days with watermarks on the produced videos. |
Camtasia Create - $249/year | |
Camtasia Pro- $599/year |
Best For: ❌Small-Medium Businesses ✅Enterprise Businesses
Trainn vs Camtasia: A Comparison
Docebo is a learning management system that enables customer educators to deliver, manage, and scale personalized learning experiences for various user groups. It supports various training needs, from formal courses to informal social learning.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Gamification of courses | Some integrations are inefficient |
Adaptive learning paths | Has a steep learning curve |
A huge content template library | Limited functionality in the mobile app |
Advanced analytics | Video authoring is not available |
Pricing Plans | Free Plan |
---|---|
Docebo has three tiers - Engage, Elevate, and Enterprise. All of these tiers have a custom pricing based on your needs. | Docebo does not offer a free plan. |
Best For: ❌Small Businesses ✅Medium-sized and Enterprise Businesses
LearnUpon is a Learning Management System that aims to provide a seamless training content delivery experience with multiple portals for different customer segments, enabling companies to up their customer education game.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Automated user creation | Minimal content authoring options |
Gamification | Limited customization |
Discussion forums | No knowledge base feature |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
LearnUpon has three tiers - Essential, Premium, and Enterprise. All of these tiers have a custom pricing based on your needs. | You can potentially get a free trial by talking to the sales team |
Best For: ❌Small Businesses ✅Medium-sized and Enterprise Businesses
Trainn vs LearnUpon: A Comparison
Clueso is a content authoring software that helps you create product videos with AI voiceovers and step-by-step articles by recording your workflow. You can either launch this content on their knowledge base or export it separately.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
AI screen recording | Cannot edit existing videos to update the content |
Slides to video conversion | Cannot embed knowledge base on your product |
AI-powered search | Has a timeline editor that makes trimming and splitting not intuitive. |
No LMS | |
Cannot create interactive documentation. |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
Starter - $120/month | They have a 7-day free trial with 15 minutes of video export and watermarks. |
Growth - $200/month | |
Enterprise - Contact sales |
Best For: ✅Small-Medium Businesses ❌Enterprise Businesses
Skilljar is a learning management system dedicated to customer education. It aims to provide a streamlined, centralized, and structured learning experience. Its integration with Salesforce helps you understand the LMS’s impact on support teams.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Salesforce integration | Admin experience could be improved |
Benchmark insights | Requires coding for customization |
LinkedIn Certifications | No built-in content authoring tool |
It is a developer-dependent tool |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
Skilljar offers custom pricing based on your needs. | There is no free trial available |
Best For: ❌Small Businesses ✅Medium-sized and Enterprise Businesses
Trainn vs Skilljar: A Comparison
Gainsight Customer Education is a learning management system that helps companies provide personalized learning experiences to different customer groups.
Key Features:
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Send personalized messages | Reports can be more intuitive |
High customization | Knowledge base feature comes under a different Gainsight product |
No built-in content authoring tool |
Pricing Plans | Free Trial |
---|---|
Gainsight offers pricing based on your needs but provides unlimited learners, admins, and course content. | There is no free trial available |
Best For: ❌Small Businesses ✅Medium-sized and Enterprise Businesses
While planning your customer education strategy, determine the types of content you need to produce for your portals. Make sure your tool has an in-built content authoring facility that makes content easy to create and edit. When thinking of content, start from the basics like articles for your knowledge base portal to certification exams in your learning management system.
Make sure your platform can accommodate your current and future audiences. It is important to keep the scalability of the platform in mind so that your customer education engine is ready to face the audience growth spike.
To assess if the platform is scalable or not, look at these criteria:
If you’re someone who’s concerned about the branding of your customer education portals and wants to make your customers feel at home, customization is the feature you want to look out for. Find out if the platform offers great customization options that are easy to implement without the need for developer or designer dependencies.
Analytics help you assess the strong and weak points of your customer education engine. Look out for both content-level analytics and learner-level analytics to get a full grasp of the performance of your customer education initiatives.
As mentioned before, check if the analytics offered scale as you upgrade your plan during your scaling phase. Advanced analytics become vital as your customer base grows.
Determine and set the budget you can allocate for your customer education initiatives and platforms, this should help you asses what goals are under the top priorities and what feature would help with it. Boil down to a customer education platform that provides a scalable plan that fits your budget and needs.
Trainn is the only platform out there that provides all you need for your customer education platform under one roof.