Building a Customer Academy for Education-Led Growth

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because enterprise learning involves multiple disciplines and perspectives, we regularly invite experts from other organizations to share insights. Here, Frances Kleven, Sr. Director of Core Customer Experience at LearnUpon, outlines a proven framework for customer academy success.

Why Customer Education Deserves a Blueprint

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about customer education? Many organizations treat it as a reactive support function based on a handful of product walkthroughs, a series of setup tutorials, or a basic guided onboarding path.

While these elements may be essential, they’re not enough to build long-term relationships. So, how can a customer academy help?

Today’s customer journey is more complex than ever. Long sales cycles, clunky onboarding, and neglected adoption opportunities often translate into unexpected churn that drains time, money, and trust. This is why a comprehensive approach to customer education matters.

Forward-thinking companies no longer view customer education as a nice-to-have extra. Instead, they’re treating it as a core growth strategy. In fact, last year, 93% of organizations told us they increased their investment in customer education, with 33% describing their investment as significant.

This shift moves education from a one-time “welcome” event to an ongoing business process that aligns learning with customer health metrics like adoption, engagement, and retention. In this more expansive context, a well-designed customer academy makes all the difference.

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Anatomy of a Successful Customer Academy

To help you navigate this transition, we’ve developed a blueprint for building an academy that spans the entire customer journey, as relationships evolve and expand. Rather than narrowly defining customer education as “onboarding,” this framework maps specific educational experiences to stages in the lifecycle:

1. Attract — Awareness/Acquisition Stage
2. Activate — Onboarding/Activation Stage
3. Engage — Retention/Loyalty Stage
4. Grow — Expansion/Advocacy Stage

Why and how does this approach work? Let’s look at each stage in more detail, including stellar examples from organizations with winning customer academy strategies…

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The Power of a Phased Approach

Phase 1: Attract
Leverage Education as a Brand Marketing Magnet

Traditional marketing focuses on selling through outbound “push” tactics. But today’s strongest brands focus on pulling-in potential customers with educational guidance that builds awareness and credibility.

The modern customer journey often begins long before a contract is signed. Especially in B2B scenarios, sales cycles can drag on for months. So, many prospects rely on digital channels to explore, learn, evaluate, and compare options online, even before the first sales call happens.

When you lead with education, you have an opportunity to gain trust and reduce friction early in the consideration cycle. And by offering certifications and expert content that solves real-world problems, you position your brand as a go-to authority in your category.

This strategy informs prospects, so when they reach out, they’re prepared to ask sharper questions and make buying decisions more quickly and confidently.

Proven Example: HubSpot Academy

In 2013, this popular all-in-one customer platform turned learning into a juggernaut marketing engine by offering free certification training, which quickly became its primary source of leads.

Lessons for Customer Academy Success

Keep top-of-funnel content free, visible, and highly accessible. Offer digital badges or shareable certifications to increase organic reach and visibility through social proof. The most effective way to measure success at this stage is by focusing on 3 metrics:

• Lead volume from academy content
• Percentage of participants who convert into qualified leads
• Average time-to-demo after course completion

Phase 2: Activate
Accelerate Time-to-Value

Onboarding plays a central role in the customer journey, with 36% of organizations investing in it as a customer education priority. Yet, too often, newcomers get stuck or overwhelmed by initial information overload.

This is where successful onboarding stands out. It unlocks early “aha” moments faster, with education that ensures a smooth setup and helps customers recognize a product’s value more quickly.

Strategic activation isn’t just about showing people where to find basic features or how to adjust dashboard settings. It’s about knowing the barriers between customers and the outcome they want your product to help them achieve. It’s also about empowering people to move past those issues with targeted, timely education.

By enabling customers to master products through structured learning journeys, this approach frees organizations from an over-reliance on costly 1:1 support that doesn’t scale. It also sets the tone for the entire relationship, with a consistent onboarding experience that builds confidence from day one.

Proven Example: LearnUpon University

By moving from one-size-fits-all onboarding to a role-based model, our own academy reduced time-to-launch for new customers by 12.5%. We also reduced support costs while expanding onboarding reach.

Lessons for Customer Academy Success

For effective activation, map out specific milestones that lead to customer success during the first few weeks. Use interactive elements like guided tasks or digital exercises to help customers develop knowledge and competence. Focus on metrics like these:

• Time to Value (TTV)
• Adoption rates
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT/NPS)

Phase 3: Engage
Strengthen Adoption and Reduce Churn

Once a customer is up and running, the challenge shifts to engagement. Many people only use a fraction of any product’s available features, but this often leads to a backlog of support tickets and stalled growth.

Continued education during this stage transforms customers into independent power users who are comfortable applying features to a broader range of problems.

By investing in education at this stage, your organization can expect several business benefits: It reduces the burden on your support team, even as it elevates long-term customer satisfaction. For instance, by making self-service “just-in-time” learning available when and where customers need it, you’ll decrease unwanted friction, as well as dependency on internal teams.

Proven Example: gWorks University

gWorks transformed engagement for over 2,500 government agencies, enabling learners to resolve 20% of support issues independently, while cutting support tickets by 18%.

Lessons for Customer Academy Success

For a strong engagement strategy, segment customers by role and responsibility, then assign educational content accordingly. This ensures that learning will be relevant and useful. Success during this phase is reflected in metrics like these:

• Reduced support ticket volume
• Higher feature adoption
• Improved retention rates

Phase 4: Grow
Turn Customer Success into Ongoing Revenue

A mature academy recognizes that growth isn’t just about acquiring new customers. It’s also about enabling existing customers to accomplish more with a product and expand their relationship with you.

If customers fail to realize the full value from your product, you’ll miss these expansion opportunities. Education at this stage helps people discover advanced features and new use cases, which means contract renewals and upsells are more likely to follow.

By offering advanced certifications and role-based learning, you boost customer pride, confidence and commitment. When customers feel capable, they naturally become brand champions who willingly promote your solution to others. Ultimately, this kind of loyalty and advocacy can transform your customer academy from a cost center into a strategic revenue engine.

Proven Example: Zapier University

Zapier continuously exposes engaged customers to new use cases and encourages them to deepen their skills. This reinforces retention and increases long-term revenue. By combining pro-level education with other incentives, Zapier maintains a churn rate of only 3-5% for this segment.

Lessons for Customer Academy Success

To drive continued growth, identify behaviors and outcomes that suggest a customer is ready for expansion. For instance, when someone’s usage surges or they complete an advanced workflow, it may be time to upgrade. Track impact through metrics such as:

• Renewal rate
• Expansion revenue
• Customer referral volume

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Moving Forward: Vision and Execution

It’s easy to publish a video product tour and some documentation. But that’s not a customer academy.

Without a thoughtful strategy that spans the entire lifecycle, learning experiences won’t adapt as customer needs evolve and grow. So, before you build, understand your “why” and define success metrics for each stage in the lifecycle. Then develop learning to align with those objectives.

Also, keep in mind that launching a sustainable customer academy is a cross-functional effort. It requires ongoing input from across the business: Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Support, and Product teams.

How can you persuade stakeholders to support your plan? Make comparative performance data your ally. Plenty of compelling evidence is available. For instance, in 2025, 89% of organizations reported direct ROI from customer education programs. Also, many organizations benchmark product adoption, retention, and customer satisfaction levels.

Finally, avoid going wide right out of the gate. Instead, start with a pilot program based on select “minimum viable” content.

Test it with real customer volunteers. Track participant behavior carefully, iterate regularly, and expand gradually. With this incremental approach, you can build a sustainable learning ecosystem that improves customer outcomes, as well as your own.

Want to learn more about structuring a customer academy for success? Download this ebook → How to Build a Customer Academy for Every Stage of Your Customer Journey.

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