8 Steps To Launch an Online Learning Academy For Your Customers

Online Learning Academy : 73% of people say that customer experience affects their purchasing decisions. This means that businesses today are looking for new ways to keep their customers happy.

How To Launch An Online Academy In 8 Steps?

Set a specific goal

When you begin your online learning journey, it can be easy to get lost in the possibilities.

For example, maybe you want to help your Customer Success (CS) team speed up onboarding.

You also want to reduce the number of support tickets and problems for your Customer Service team. And you want to increase the lifetime value (LTV) for your leadership team.

• Are you struggling to get them to use a new feature?
• Does engagement decrease after onboarding?
• Are your Customer Success Managers (CSMs) overwhelmed by support requests and tickets?

Find out what’s pressing you right now and start there.

Then solve that challenge, demonstrate value to internal stakeholders, especially your leadership team, and start solving more business and customer challenges.

Form your team

One could argue that building a team should come before setting your goals, or at least along with them, but for the sake of this article, I’m putting it here: look at goal setting and team building.

Just like you don’t want to spread your resources too thin by setting too many goals early on, don’t bring too many cooks into the kitchen.

Building your team

Subject Matter Expert (SME): The SME understands their customers, their challenges, and what they will need from the content to derive value from the product.

Instructional Designer (ID): The ID is someone who has design experience and training in content development to achieve specific learning outcomes.

Technical Expert – The technical expert ensures that the learning management system (LMS) or other learning technology is working properly, including integrations and data collection. They can also lead the change from legacy learning technology.

Executive Sponsor: An executive sponsor makes sure you have a line of sight in the boardroom and maintain alignment. 

In a perfect world, you would build a cross-functional team that has all of these roles filled. Actually, that’s probably not going to happen right now.

So if you’re embarking on this adventure, you should know that you don’t need a formal team to get started. You just need someone who is passionate about learning, some content, and customers who are excited to learn.

Consider an LMS

Most, if not all, established online learning academies rely on an LMS due to its ability to help teams create, manage, deliver, track, and optimize content at scale.

In turn, the CSM, Support, and Service teams manually pull the necessary levers to keep customers happy and getting value. For example, they may be required to submit onboarding documentation when a new customer signs the dotted line.

For newer companies immersing themselves in online learning, these teams could keep pace with this demand without sacrificing the white-collar service customers demand.

With a lifelong learning academy, you also allow your clients to learn when and where they want. Not only does this make sense for a remote world, it reduces strain on your teams by giving customers the opportunity to resolve their own issues without submitting a ticket or emailing your CSM.

Create content

When you’re just starting out learning online and ready to start creating content, you’ll fall into one of two groups:

Group 1: Have content

Group 2: No content

If you are in the first group, the main accessories: your release date is just approaching. The only step you’ll want to take now is to make sure the content aligns with you and achieves the right result (for example, helping your customers activate their accounts or use an advanced feature).

If you’re in the second group, I still support you, you just have a little more work to do. Fortunately, content creation isn’t as complex or time-consuming as you think.

Put everything under a microscope

Before launching, check all parts from your processes, team, and the LMS.

Team: Is your team ready to go? Does everyone understand their roles and responsibilities? Do they have a good understanding of the purpose of the academy and what they need to do to ensure the success of their clients?

Let it fly

It’s time to launch.

Shout it from the tops of the mountains

Along with, if not before, your launch, access Slack, email, the break room, Zoom, or any other way to connect with people and let them know what you’re up to.

Make it even better

I said it once, but it needs to be repeated: the online learning academy they are launching is not in its final form.

As everyone gets used to learning online, start getting feedback to get a clear point of view on how things are going.

• Is your computer running smoothly?
• Is your content effective?
• Are the videos the right length?
• Are your questionnaires missing the mark because they require customers to answer short questions?
• Do some content formats work better than others?
• Does the LMS work correctly?

As you gather this insight, make improvements to improve the learning experience and ensure you continue to deliver an experience that delights and helps retain your customers.