Airtable's Academy is key to their customer education strategy, providing training for users across various roles, including end users, builders, and enterprise admins. It combines video tutorials and interactive content to help users maximize Airtable's capabilities. Kevin Dunn, Director of Product Education, oversees the Academy, while Anne Marie Rützou Bruntse, Senior Manager of Customer Education, ensures the training materials engage users and align with product updates.

The integration of iorad’s interactive tutorials has been especially impactful, allowing Airtable to deliver hands-on, engaging learning experiences that significantly boost user engagement and retention. For Airtable, customer education empowers users to confidently use the platform and improve product adoption.

Challenges

Before integrating interactive iorad tutorials into their Academy, Airtable faced several challenges in educating their user base:

Frequent Product Updates

Airtable’s product evolves quickly, with small feature releases and large flagship launches happening regularly. Keeping training materials up-to-date—especially video tutorials—proved time-consuming and inefficient.

Inefficiencies in Course version control

Each time a product update occurred, Airtable’s team had to manually adjust or re-record training videos to ensure their courses stayed relevant. This was a resource-intensive process, and it led to delays in releasing updated content for users.

Kevin Dunn (Airtable):

"The biggest challenge we faced was keeping our training content up-to-date. Our product evolves quickly, and maintaining video tutorials was simply too slow and inefficient for the pace at which we release updates."

Lack of Interactivity in Training

While self-paced video tutorials are offered, users were primarily passive recipients of content. There was no opportunity for them to interact directly with the product as they learned. For the “how” style instruction, they wanted content that engaged learners actively in the how-to work flows and click paths.

Engagement and Retention Issues

Airtable’s team wanted to drive higher engagement with training content. With video-based training alone, users often didn’t apply what they learned in real-world scenarios, leading to low adoption rates for more advanced product features.

Solution

To address these challenges, Airtable integrated iorad’s interactive tutorial creation tool into their Academy to enhance their training offering.

Simulated, Interactive Tutorials
With iorad, users actively clicked through product workflows, gaining practical experience through step-by-step instructions. This hands-on approach improved knowledge retention and made users more confident in navigating Airtable’s platform. By engaging directly with the product, learners built muscle memory and applied their knowledge to real-world scenarios more effectively.

Real-Time Content Updates
iorad allowed Airtable to update tutorials dynamically, ensuring that content always aligned with the latest product version, without the need to re-record videos. This streamlined the process, eliminating the inefficiencies of manually updating tutorials with each new feature. As a result, Airtable could quickly deliver relevant, up-to-date training materials to users.

Enhanced Learner Engagement
Airtable leveraged interactive content to increase engagement and retention, encouraging users to apply their learning directly in the product. The interactive nature of iorad tutorials made the learning process more engaging than traditional video methods, leading to improved understanding and long-term retention. This shift helped increase learner satisfaction and engagement overall.

Embed Directly in Customer Academy LMS
Airtable integrated iorad tutorials into their existing SkillJar Academy, seamlessly embedding interactive content into the established learning paths. This integration allowed Airtable to manage all training materials in one platform, offering users a centralized, easy-to-navigate learning experience while maintaining their existing training structure.

Implementation Process

Seamless Integration with SkillJar

iorad tutorials were easily embedded into Airtable’s existing Skilljar platform, ensuring the integration didn’t disrupt Airtable’s workflow or learning paths.

Real-Time Content Updates

With every product release, Airtable’s team could easily create or update tutorials in iorad, keeping their content in sync with product updates.

Tailored Learning Paths

iorad tutorials were incorporated into Airtable’s learning paths, offering learners an interactive, hands-on experience that supplemented video content.

Results & Impact

Increased Engagement

Learners were more engaged with the content, as they could actively practice within the tutorial environment. This led to higher course completion rates.

Improved Learning Retention

Users reported a significant improvement in their ability to apply new knowledge. Interactivity in tutorials helped reinforce the learning experience.

Higher CSAT Scores

Learner feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many users appreciating the interactive learning experience. Airtable saw a marginal increase in CSAT scores for courses that included iorad tutorials.

Key Takeaways

Interactive Learning Boosts Engagement

By combining video with hands-on tutorials, Airtable increased user engagement, leading to better knowledge retention and higher course completion rates. The interactive nature of iorad’s tutorials encouraged active participation, helping learners apply concepts more effectively and enjoy their learning experience.

Real-Time Content Updates

iorad allowed Airtable to keep training content up-to-date with product changes, eliminating delays caused by manual updates to videos. This real-time adaptability ensured users always had access to relevant and accurate training materials, reflecting the latest product features.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

The integration of iorad led to higher customer satisfaction, with users appreciating the interactive learning experience. By engaging directly with the product, learners became more confident in using Airtable, which contributed to a more positive feedback loop.

Scalable Solution

iorad enabled Airtable to scale their Academy content efficiently, allowing quick updates and additions as their product evolved. This streamlined process ensured a high-quality learning experience without overburdening the instructional design team.