Help Scout Classes: Learning to Educate at Scale
When you work in SaaS, there is a never ending need for education surrounding your product or service. An account could be open for 10 years, but that company will always have new users that need to learn the ropes. Sometimes even existing users may take months, if not years, to adopt new features that exist just beyond their comfort zone.
When your company is just getting off the ground, you can afford to — and should — do a lot of individualized education, as you are learning from those early customers just as much as they are learning from you. But as you scale, giving one to one demos or help sessions becomes much more difficult.
Just imagine a company of 10 or so employees with a customer base of 1,000. It’s not realistic to expect every employee to be able to drop everything and train 100 customers on a new product release. And even if it were, what about the new ones coming through your virtual front door each day? Who will get them up to speed?
While the thought may seem overwhelming, there’s no need to panic. You can easily meet the demands of new, old, and prospective customers alike by turning one on one sessions into classes.
Customer education at Help Scout
Many years ago, as Help Scout was growing rapidly, we realized that we had to start scaling up our efforts to help folks get to know the product better. Connecting with every individual was still of the utmost importance, but it needed to be in a way that still felt personal when scaled out.
Hosting sessions in a “class” format seemed like the perfect answer. Classes take the pressure off of your team, while also giving each attendee a personalized and friendly learning experience. Questions can be addressed live in the moment, attendees can learn from each other, and if needed, you can personally follow up after the class with further, tailored education for any individuals who need additional support.
Once we knew that we wanted to move in the direction of hosting classes, we had to decide who would teach them. There are a lot of ways a company could go with this — sales reps, customer success and product managers, and engineers all bring valuable insight to the table. However, for us, turning the process over to our support team made the most sense. Our support team is in the position of not only knowing the product the best, but also knowing the job of customer support best.
We wanted to present Help Scout from that point of view - that of a person who does the exact same job as the human on the other side of the computer and deeply understands the problems that need to be solved by a support platform.
Once we knew which team would own the program, it was time to get to work!
Choosing a topic and creating a script
When launching an education program, the first step is to determine what topics you should cover. Obviously, we wanted to tackle all kinds of things like deep dives on specific portions of the app, new features, and app updates. However, the immediate need was for a full product walkthrough.
While it can be tempting to just “wing it” when it comes to giving a product walkthrough, it’s usually better to create a script. Scripts ensure that you cover everything you set out to in the same way, every time, ensuring that the information your audience receives is consistent, regardless of the session they attend. Of course, you may ad lib a bit if your audience has questions, but you still want that base experience to be repeatable.
When it comes to writing the script, we considered these questions:
What are the most important things for people to learn about Help Scout?
What have we learned from our years of answering emails from people who are just getting started?
What concepts do they most need to understand to be successful?
Once written, the script became a living organism that would continually be updated depending on trends of questions that were being asked not only within the Q&A at the end of every class, but also based on emails we received from people in the queue.
Class is in session
With the script in hand, it was time to decide how to deliver the information to our audience. There are plenty of video hosting platforms out there, but we settled on Zoom. Being a remote-first company, Help Scout had used it for 1:1s, team meetings, and town halls for years. The pandemic, however, is what solidified our choice for sticking with it for classes as well.
Ever since 2020, Zoom has become a tool that all generations from grandparents to elementary school kids are familiar with, so it relieves a lot of pressure that people might feel when joining a learning session. When someone attends a Help Scout class, we want them to be as comfortable as possible and there’s nothing less comfortable than struggling with new software!
From our side of the screen, the process we started out with is fairly similar to the one we use for classes today. We use Zoom’s webinar product and all we have to do is start the session, share our screen, and then we can run the class. Attendees can use the Q&A function in Zoom to ask questions as we go along, and then we answer all of those at the end of the session.
We’ve found that using an external monitor is helpful when teaching our classes. It allows us to have our screenshare and script side by side, with only the screenshare visible to attendees. Then we can have tabs open in our browser to quickly move between Help Scout the app and other sites we might want to show (like our knowledge base) as we go through the class.
Once we have answered all of the questions and the class is complete, we export the Q&A report from Zoom, and then follow up with each individual that asked a question via email. That allows us to send more resources to them or even record a video for them that goes deeper into a subject if need be.
If you build (and market) it, they will come
With a script in hand and video platform selected, you’d think we’d be all set to launch. But there was one thing we were still missing — marketing. We needed a landing page advertising our class as well as a way for potential attendees to sign up.
When you start from scratch you will be tempted to hack together the simplest solution, and that was definitely our approach. Six years ago, the classes page was a GitHub file and changes could only be handled by me or a member of our ops team. Thankfully, our process has evolved as our team and tooling have grown.
We currently have a classes page that was built for us by the marketing team. It’s both a repository for all of our on-demand classes (videos of previous sessions that folks can view whenever it is convenient for them) and a hub for all of the live classes we are offering at any given time. Attendees can use the embedded HubSpot form to sign up for the specific class they want to attend.
Our CMS, Contentful, even displays the time of the class in the visitor’s correct time zone so that no one has to worry about converting time zones when choosing which session to attend.
Once someone fills out the form to sign up for a class session, the information is passed on to our Zoom account. From there, Zoom handles sending out confirmation and reminder emails to the registrant. Then when it’s time for the class to begin, the attendee can click the Zoom link from their email and come right into Zoom for the session.
We’ve refined our process over time, but if you’re just starting out, it’s not a bad idea to start thinking about how you are going to expand the process as things grow. For instance, you may want to think about different ways to advertise your class offerings, such as social campaigns, mentioning them in your company newsletter, or even directly recommending them to customers.
Those few extra hours of work you put into designing how to scale can make a huge difference in the experience of both your team and their students.
No woman is an island
Speaking of scaling, there is another area in which you’ll need to focus on as you build your education program — staffing.
As I mentioned earlier, our support team runs all of Help Scout’s classes. Various people over the years have taught the sessions, but for three of the last four years, there was just one person managing our efforts — me!
Class creation, scheduling, and execution were all on my plate alongside my other day to day support responsibilities and during that time, I learned a lot. However, after a few years in charge, I started to get the itch to grow my role of customer education lead and dive into new projects. I didn’t want to completely abandon teaching classes, but I needed help.
Luckily, Help Scout (and our support team in particular) believes in employee development. While I was looking for the chance to broaden my experience outside of classes, we also saw the situation as a great opportunity for others to grow. After all, presenting live (or on video) is a great way to strengthen public speaking skills and build confidence outside of the Inbox.
So we threw the opportunity out to see if anyone, regardless of title or tenure, was interested in giving teaching a go. Some people were keen to try. Others have different interests such as deeper technical troubleshooting or a specific area of speciality within the product and wanted to keep their focus there. We encouraged everyone to try, but didn’t make it a requirement.
To those that raised their hands, we set them up with everything they’d need to get started: the script for the class, instructions on how to set up their screens, and access to step by step instructions on how to set up a webinar within Zoom. From there, we encouraged them to experiment within the tool and record their practice sessions for feedback.
In next to no time, what was a one woman production became a group of five people from our support team who now split the duties of scheduling, creating new classes, and hosting individual sessions. There was only one last thing to decide on — how to best communicate with each other.
Ultimately, we landed on spinning up a dedicated Slack channel just for those involved with classes to keep the lines of communication open — Is something within a class not working anymore? Is a particular time of day not as successful as others? Have new needs come up that we need to pivot towards? Whatever it is, we discuss it in channel to keep everyone involved and in the loop.
Measuring success
We are not beholden to leadership for specific numbers, as it is agreed upon across the company that customer education is something we want to invest in. One of our company values is “happy to help,” so from a business perspective, we believe teaching others — both about our product, but also about customer support topics in general — is just the right thing to do.
And while we didn’t have to justify our work, our team wanted to take things a step further and show the company at large the impact our customer education efforts have had on the bottom line. So we teamed up with our revenue operations team, who helped us link the signup form for our product walkthrough class to our database where we measure conversions.
From that integration, we learned that in the last five years, the class has converted — an attendee became a paying customer — at a rate of 54%. Of course, we knew there’d be a correlation between class attendance and a higher conversion rate. It’s only natural, given the time and effort these folks have put into learning more about Help Scout. Still, we’re pretty happy with the results and think it’s a metric worth keeping an eye on.
As an additional, albeit anecdotal success measure, we’ve observed that the vast majority of those who attend one of our product walkthroughs wind up staying for the entire session. That lets us know that we are providing valuable information throughout the entirety of the class, and that we’re doing so in a way that is actually keeping our audience’s attention for the full 30 minutes.
In a world where most folks can’t even watch a movie without scrolling through social media, we think that’s pretty impressive!
Are customer education classes right for your business?
At Help Scout, we currently offer anywhere from three to five live classes a week that cover various topics, all of which are open to anyone who wants to attend and learn. This includes those who are on the hunt for a new customer communications tool, new support pros that are onboarding with one of our existing customers, and even folks who have been using our product for a while and just want to dig in deeper.
If this sounds like something you might want to do for your own business, ask yourself:
What do our customers need to know to be successful with our product or service?
Is there a question we receive over and over again?
Identify that problem or piece of helpful advice, write a 10 minute script to cover the topic, and just start doing it live.
Of course there are a few logistical hurdles to get over. You’ll need a webinar license for your Zoom account, help setting up a signup page, and a few willing souls (or at least one!) on your team who are ready to give teaching a try.
And things will constantly be evolving. Having hosted live classes in various forms for more than 10 years now, I am still learning and iterating with each session. The key is to just begin and then keep an open mind — you’ll be surprised not just by what you’re able to impart to customers, but also by everything your customers are able to teach you.
