WEBINAR | Unlock sales success: The role of interactive content in sales enablement — save your seat! 🤩
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New users signing up on your product can often feel lost in a maze of features to explore. SaaS companies can make it easy for customers to get started within seconds of signing up with an intuitive self-serve training program.
Imagine a place where every user feels like a pro, navigating through your product effortlessly and driving deeper adoption. Sounds like a dream, right?
We chatted with Manasi Shukla, a product education specialist and the founder of Safrela Consulting, about building user-centric training efforts to make this dream a reality. Here are her insights on how to take your users from "How do I do this?" into "Wow, that was easy!”
Manasi talks about the evolution of training methodologies, emphasizing the shift towards self-serve models. She explains, "The self-serve model didn't exist. There was a lot of in-person training. In the last decade, it has really transitioned into a lot of SaaS companies that have come up with training methods — it's really changed the way that training is done."
The biggest driving forces behind this transition were the global scale of SaaS products and the urgent need for efficient + scalable training solutions.
One of the webinar's key discussions is around the challenges of implementing self-serve training. Manasi highlights the importance of product design and content investment. She warns against using training as a workaround for complex product designs, advocating for a design-first approach to ensure user-friendliness.
"One of the challenges is designing an intuitive product, not using training as a crutch to say, 'Hey, we'll just train them on it'."
She stresses that intuitive design and early investment in training content are crucial for a successful self-serve training strategy.
She also highlights the need to start with foundational training materials, like a detailed user manual, early in the product development process to identify and address user experience gaps proactively. This approach helps create a robust knowledge base and ensures the co-evolution of the product and its training resources.
Expanding on the concept of a knowledge base, Manasi talks about building a centralized repository of product information that users can access as needed — the knowledge base.
She describes the knowledge base as the "cake" of the training strategy, with other materials like videos and webinars serving as the "icing." This analogy highlights the foundational role of well-organized, easily accessible written content in supporting self-serve learning:
"The basis of it is really thinking about the workflows. It's not thinking about the feature specifically, but thinking about how this feature fits into their ecosystem."
Manasi's advice underscores the need for training content that goes beyond simple feature explanations to include comprehensive workflows and use cases. This approach ensures that users understand how to use individual features and realize how those features integrate into their daily tasks and objectives.
Manasi emphasizes the need to look beyond mere signups to gauge user engagement.
Active user metrics, such as login frequency and session duration, offer a more nuanced view of how users interact with the product. "It's not just about signups but actually about how many times they are logging in," she notes.
This distinction is crucial for understanding whether users find the product and its training valuable enough to return to it regularly. Here are a few key ways she advises SaaS teams to track success:
Establishing a feedback loop from customer success teams and users is crucial for identifying gaps in training content and areas for enhancement, ensuring the training evolves alongside the product.
For companies at any stage, Manasi recommends starting to think about training early in the product development process and investing in the training of the customer success team. This ensures that as your product evolves, your user education resources and strategies can adapt to meet the needs of new and existing customers.
New users signing up on your product can often feel lost in a maze of features to explore. SaaS companies can make it easy for customers to get started within seconds of signing up with an intuitive self-serve training program.
Imagine a place where every user feels like a pro, navigating through your product effortlessly and driving deeper adoption. Sounds like a dream, right?
We chatted with Manasi Shukla, a product education specialist and the founder of Safrela Consulting, about building user-centric training efforts to make this dream a reality. Here are her insights on how to take your users from "How do I do this?" into "Wow, that was easy!”
Manasi talks about the evolution of training methodologies, emphasizing the shift towards self-serve models. She explains, "The self-serve model didn't exist. There was a lot of in-person training. In the last decade, it has really transitioned into a lot of SaaS companies that have come up with training methods — it's really changed the way that training is done."
The biggest driving forces behind this transition were the global scale of SaaS products and the urgent need for efficient + scalable training solutions.
One of the webinar's key discussions is around the challenges of implementing self-serve training. Manasi highlights the importance of product design and content investment. She warns against using training as a workaround for complex product designs, advocating for a design-first approach to ensure user-friendliness.
"One of the challenges is designing an intuitive product, not using training as a crutch to say, 'Hey, we'll just train them on it'."
She stresses that intuitive design and early investment in training content are crucial for a successful self-serve training strategy.
She also highlights the need to start with foundational training materials, like a detailed user manual, early in the product development process to identify and address user experience gaps proactively. This approach helps create a robust knowledge base and ensures the co-evolution of the product and its training resources.
Expanding on the concept of a knowledge base, Manasi talks about building a centralized repository of product information that users can access as needed — the knowledge base.
She describes the knowledge base as the "cake" of the training strategy, with other materials like videos and webinars serving as the "icing." This analogy highlights the foundational role of well-organized, easily accessible written content in supporting self-serve learning:
"The basis of it is really thinking about the workflows. It's not thinking about the feature specifically, but thinking about how this feature fits into their ecosystem."
Manasi's advice underscores the need for training content that goes beyond simple feature explanations to include comprehensive workflows and use cases. This approach ensures that users understand how to use individual features and realize how those features integrate into their daily tasks and objectives.
Manasi emphasizes the need to look beyond mere signups to gauge user engagement.
Active user metrics, such as login frequency and session duration, offer a more nuanced view of how users interact with the product. "It's not just about signups but actually about how many times they are logging in," she notes.
This distinction is crucial for understanding whether users find the product and its training valuable enough to return to it regularly. Here are a few key ways she advises SaaS teams to track success:
Establishing a feedback loop from customer success teams and users is crucial for identifying gaps in training content and areas for enhancement, ensuring the training evolves alongside the product.
For companies at any stage, Manasi recommends starting to think about training early in the product development process and investing in the training of the customer success team. This ensures that as your product evolves, your user education resources and strategies can adapt to meet the needs of new and existing customers.
Whether it's a new feature walkthrough or guiding customers on how to navigate your product, you can do it all by yourself.
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Floik helps in creating customized self-serve interactive demos, product videos and step-by-step guides in minutes on a single platform
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