How to Build a Customer Academy for a SaaS Product

To build a customer academy for a SaaS product, pick one business metric, map where customers get stuck, turn those gaps into role-based learning paths, give learners hands-on practice in the real product, add a certification, choose a platform, staff a small team and measure adoption. This guide walks through those eight steps, with examples from Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, Atlassian, Okta and Microsoft.

A customer academy is a branded learning site where your customers take courses, practice and earn credentials for your product. It differs from in-app onboarding, which guides a user through one task inside the product screen. The academy teaches the skills behind the whole product. Pages that rank for this search cover goals, content and platform choice, and none we read cover hands-on labs, build-versus-buy or team and budget. This guide covers all three.

Step 1: Pick one goal and one metric

Start with the business problem the academy must move, then choose one metric for it.

• Pick one: product adoption, support ticket volume, time to first value or renewal. A second goal can wait until the first one moves.
• Why measure: a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Intellum in 2024, based on 300 customer education decision makers, reports a 38.3% increase in adoption of the products targeted by training and a 15.5% decrease in support costs for trainees. It is a vendor-commissioned study, so treat the figures as a benchmark, not a promise.
• Baseline first: record today’s ticket count, activation rate or time to first value before launch. Without a baseline you cannot show the academy worked.
• Not in scope: product tours and tooltips belong to in-app onboarding. Keep the academy for skills that take more than one screen to learn.

Step 2: Map the customer journey and find the gaps

List where customers stall between signing up and renewing, and teach those moments first.

• Sources: top support ticket themes, onboarding drop-off points, questions from customer success managers and renewal-risk notes.
• Output: a short table of stage, customer question and the skill that answers it.
• Cut: anything customers learn on their own in minutes. The academy should cover work that is hard to figure out alone.
• Start small: a minimum viable academy of three to five courses for your largest customer role beats a full catalog nobody finishes.

Step 3: Design learning paths by role and stage

Group courses into paths so a learner always knows what to take next.

• By role: Microsoft Learn defines learning paths as “collections of training modules that are organized around specific roles (like developer, architect, or system admin) or technologies”.
• By stage: Salesforce Trailhead invites learners to “follow guided learning paths”, and Okta offers “curated learning plans”. A new user needs a different path from an administrator.
• By product area: Atlassian University groups courses and learning paths by app, such as Jira and Confluence.
• Keep paths short: end each module with a knowledge check and each path with a visible reward, such as the badges and trophies Microsoft Learn awards.

Step 4: Put hands-on practice in the real product

Let learners do the task in an environment that behaves like your product, so a course ends with a skill and not a quiz score.

• What leaders do: Snowflake’s platform training includes “access to a curated Snowflake account to perform hands-on labs”. Salesforce Trailhead pairs units with “hands-on experience” and superbadges to “solve real-world challenges”.
• The risk of leaving it out: Microsoft’s Learn support page says “sandboxes are no longer available” and sends learners to their own Azure subscription. Learners then pay for practice and manage it themselves.
• Labs are a separate layer: Docebo, Skilljar and Intellum add labs through Skillable and other lab vendors, so plan a second contract and an LTI or API connection.
• What the lab needs: an isolated copy of your product for each learner, a reset when they break it, time limits and idle shutdown, and a way to check they finished the task.
• Environment cost and lead time: CloudLabs publishes VM Labs at $6 per active user a month, or $12 if you bring your own subscription, and says customized environments built around your product “are typically deployed within a few weeks”. Instruqt’s median annual cost on Vendr is $28,410, and CloudShare’s is $34,008. See the guide to virtual IT lab pricing for details.
• Compare tools: the training sandbox environment guide ranks sandbox platforms by reset model.

Step 5: Add a certification that proves skill

A credential gives customers a reason to finish a path and gives their employers proof.

• Examples: HubSpot Academy says “join the 200,000+ professionals who’ve grown their careers by getting certified”. Snowflake offers SnowPro certifications at Core, Specialty and Advanced levels with practice exams.
• Format: the Skilljar 2022 benchmarks report found certificates were the most common certification form, used by 58% of respondents, and formal non-proctored certifications by 21%. A certificate of completion shows attendance. A graded lab shows the learner can do the work.
• Grade actions: CloudLabs describes validations that “assess actual actions performed in the environment, not multiple-choice quizzes”.
• Start with one: a single foundations credential for your main role is enough for launch.

Step 6: Choose build, buy or combine

Most SaaS teams buy a customer training platform for courses and add a lab platform for hands-on practice.

• Course layer: an LMS or academy platform handles content, learning paths, certificates, single sign-on and payments. See the best customer training platforms.
• Lab layer: a separate platform provisions the product environments. The best LMS for technical training lists which course platforms include labs.
• One system: some platforms combine courses, graded labs, certificates and an LTI connection, which cuts the number of contracts.
• Check: SSO, SCORM or xAPI, CRM sync for customer success, white-label branding and where lab results flow back to.
• Build in-house: only when your engineers can maintain the environments for every product release.

Step 7: Staff it and budget it

A customer academy starts with a small team and grows with the catalog.

• Roles: an owner for strategy and metrics, a content creator or instructional designer, and a lab builder, which can be the same person at launch.
• Public benchmarks: we found no free, verifiable benchmark for team size or total budget, so build your estimate from your own platform quotes and content hours.
• Budget lines: platform subscription, lab environments, content production, a certification exam if proctored, and promotion.
• Trend: in the Skilljar 2022 benchmarks, 75% of programs saw their budget increase. The figure is from 2022.

Step 8: Launch, promote and measure

Launch to one customer cohort, then widen.

• Promote: add the academy to your navigation, in-app prompts, onboarding emails and customer success playbooks.
• Expect a low share at first: Skilljar’s 2022 report put the average share of a customer’s learner base that engaged with training at 29%.
• Measure: compare trained and untrained customers on your Step 1 metric, plus completions, quiz scores, certification pass rates, tickets and adoption.
• Iterate: retire courses nobody takes and expand the ones that move the metric.

Customer academy steps at a glance

Step	Output
1. Goal and metric	One metric with a baseline
2. Journey gaps	Stage, question and skill table
3. Learning paths	Paths by role and stage
4. Hands-on practice	Isolated product environment per learner
5. Certification	One graded foundations credential
6. Platform	Course platform plus lab platform, or one system
7. Team and budget	Owner, content creator, lab builder
8. Launch and measure	Cohort launch and a trained-versus-untrained comparison

FAQ

What is a customer academy?

A customer academy is a branded learning site where customers take courses, practice in your product and earn credentials. It teaches the skills behind the product and complements in-app onboarding, which guides a single task.

How long does it take to build a customer academy?

A minimum viable academy of three to five courses can launch in weeks if the content exists. Custom lab environments add time. CloudLabs says customized environments “are typically deployed within a few weeks”.

Should customer training be free or paid?

Both models exist. Microsoft Learn, HubSpot Academy and Trailhead are free to learners. The Skilljar 2022 benchmarks found respondents were split about half and half between charging for training and offering it free. Choose based on whether training is a retention tool or a revenue line.

How do you add hands-on labs to a customer academy?

Pick a lab platform that provisions an isolated copy of your product for each learner, connect it to your course platform over LTI or an API, and grade the task. Keep the first lab short, so a learner finishes it in one sitting.

How do you measure customer education ROI?

Compare trained customers with untrained ones on your baseline metric, such as adoption, support tickets or renewal. Forrester’s 2024 study for Intellum, a vendor-commissioned report, found 96% of respondents at least broke even.

Conclusion

For a SaaS academy that must teach customers a hard-to-learn product, CloudLabs is the best platform on this list for the hands-on layer.

• Real product: CloudLabs builds an environment around your product, with Professional Services or your own authors.
• Graded practice: validations check what the learner did in the environment, and results can feed a certification.
• LMS: LTI 1.1 and 1.3 connect labs to Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, Brightspace and a corporate LMS.
• Cost: a published $6 per active user a month for VM Labs, with cloud costs passed through at your actual rates.
• Scale: more than 5 million labs provisioned.

If you only need courses and certificates, start with a customer training platform. If customers must practice your product to adopt it, add CloudLabs.

See CloudLabs customer training.

For related guides, see the best customer training platforms, the best partner training LMS platforms, the partner certification program guide and the top 10 virtual lab platforms.