SmartBear is a leading technology company that delivers tools for application performance monitoring, software development, software testing, and API management.

With a fast growing customer base, the business wanted to improve product knowledge and provide better onboarding and retention, in a scalable way. To reach this goal, they wanted to invest in a new learning management system so they could effectively roll out, manage and track customer training.

LearnUpon has proven to be the perfect solution for them, delivering actionable results for SmartBear and their customers.

The need to support customer success

SmartBear is a software company that takes customer success seriously.

For the past few years, they’ve been providing a limited number of paid courses to customers on technical, computer-based training through an LMS. A strategy they’ve found incredibly valuable for both the business and their customers.

However, managing this training was an arduous process. They had to manually add every single customer who purchased a course into their LMS.

They also wanted to reach more customers globally and enhance customer success. But, they quickly discovered that the LMS they were using didn’t have the capability they needed to reach their training goals.

SmartBear decided to develop free customer training courses that would increase product knowledge, help with onboarding, and boost retention. To achieve this, they needed to invest in a modern, user-friendly learning management system that would make training seamless for both admins and their customers, and would help them do all of this at scale.

A scalable way to build customer relationships

Powered by LearnUpon’s LMS, SmartBear built ‘SmartBear Academy: The Online Learning Portal’. Currently, training over 550 global customers and delivering 28 free and 5 paid courses, it’s helping them to increase product knowledge, adoption, and retention.

For the team, building the learning portal was simple. Using SCORM files, and manually adding content such as videos and certification exams they were able to seamlessly create courses in LearnUpon. The portal was customized too. Their logo and company colors were added to the LMS, creating an extension of their brand and an identifiable training environment for their learners.

Vitally, LearnUpon proved to be easy to use for both the Customer Success team and their customers. The UI was user-friendly and the Catalog feature allowed them to pick and choose what courses they wanted to offer.

One of the big draws was the creation of new learners. Now, when a customer buys a course, they automatically become a user in the LMS. There’s no manual task to be done – a big time saver for their administrators.

For SmartBear, delivering training has helped build relationships with global customers, especially as the business grows. With more and more customers using their services, they can provide an educational touchpoint that enables them to effectively scale customer success.

One extra, unexpected benefit for SmartBear is the creation of a new communication channel between them and their customers. Customers are rating the courses being provided in LearnUpon and the company appreciates this added way of capturing feedback.

Customer training is just the first step in SmartBear’s learning strategy. They’re underway developing training for their partners and aim to incorporate employee training in the future too.

It’s all going to be made possible using multi-portals within one single, solution – LearnUpon.