Case Study
increase in DAU to Knowledge Center
new user engagement rate for Academy
Dynamic content offers fresh experiences for users across the customer lifecycle
Easy no-code updates ensure monthly content is always on time.
Rapid iteration allows the team to test messaging on the fly.
Thought Industries is the world's premier software platform for customer learning management (CLM). Industry-leading learning technology allows Thought Industries’ customers to drive customer engagement with a scalable education and training solution.
It’s a phenomenal lift, and I think it’s in large part because of how Candu lets us promote our content. The whole dashboard reads like a colorful magazine now.
As a customer learning management (CLM) platform, Thought Industries (TI) helps organizations solve customer learning challenges by offering a single source of knowledge for product features and functions. Their goal: redefine customer success through customer education.
As of 2022, TI customers have generated nearly $200 million in learning revenue—with customers seeing up to 3x higher retention rates after implementing training programs.
TI had a rich content experience on their academy and website—but it wasn’t dynamic. The static in-product admin dashboard meant users saw the same content every time they logged in.
The Customer Education team needed an easy way to capitalize on this prominent space and combine their content and product experiences.
When Daniel Quick joined TI as VP of Learning Strategies, he came in with ambitious goals for the LMS provider’s thought leadership. He wanted to create great content for current users, but—more importantly—he wanted to make sure they’d see it. Daniel knew that TI’s content was strong, but their in-app experience was static.
On top of that, TI was hosting COGNITION, its first fully remote conference for customer training. Daniel and his team wanted to find a way to highlight content from the conference to increase engagement.
Ideally, he thought, he’d be able to publish new content to the user dashboard so that customers would see new and relevant information whenever they logged in. This would not only make the dashboard more engaging but also help them better utilize the TI platform. However, Daniel had no way to do this himself, and the engineering team didn’t have the time or resources to maintain anything so dynamic.
Fortunately, Daniel had been a Candu design partner from the very beginning. He knew this would be a great opportunity to kick the tires on Candu’s no-code product experience builder and create the dynamic dashboard of his dreams.
Daniel teamed up with Jessie Gold, Director of Product, and Alejandro Haydar, Lead UI/ UX Designer, to create a new, flexible dashboard that decoupled content creation from engineering sprints.
TI’s original dashboard had been designed as a simple, friendly welcome page for admins. It was updated quarterly with release notes and had links to resources outside the app. It was a well-designed, set-it-and-forget-it page that was easy for engineering to maintain. From a user perspective, though, it only changed every few months. Moreover, there were real limitations to performance and content testing because any changes required involvement from devs.
Now, multiple cross-functional teams can push updates directly to users whenever they need to. A new section for thought leadership allows Daniel’s team to deliver helpful tips, while announcements on upcoming webinars and events keep content fresh. The release notes are still there, but now product marketing teams can simply draft up the notes directly in Candu and publish them when the time is right—without having to nag engineering! Best of all, Daniel’s team can quickly test out a variety of messages and posts to see what resonates with users.
To further motivate users throughout their learning journey, the team experimented by introducing monthly themes and editions to the dashboard. Customers get the latest and greatest content—including product updates, marketing news, and training materials. Sharing new and relevant content directly inside the platform helps encourage customers to log in to the product for product-related information.
When TI launched a new Reporting Hub, the team updated the admin dashboard edition to reflect the big release. Videos, guides, and thought leadership content helped showcase the tool alongside go-to-market messaging that defined the value proposition. Candu-powered in-app content has been highly successful at not only enabling customer learning but increasing the awareness and adoption of core product features, education resources, and marketing initiatives.
One of the first Candu-enabled promotions was the TI Academy. The team saw a 101% increase in active daily users, and 80% of new users within the last year have engaged with it (compared with 5% before launching with Candu). Surfacing dynamic content has been highly effective overall, and the Flexible Dashboard has become an essential part of the TI experience. TI customers love to see a mix of new content rather than returning to the same experience each time.
Alejandro built tailored templates in Candu to streamline TI’s monthly updates. These templates continue to enable anyone—including non-technical team members—to unleash their creativity without coding.
“Candu allows me to easily create UI templates in line with our brand and design styles and empower colleagues to update our admin dashboard with new content every month. Our in-app dashboard 'editions' are now a core part of our product,” Alejandro said.
While the TI team regularly experiments and innovates on the fly with Candu’s UI components, they’ve maintained their core brand and design standards. No-code image, text, and link editing within Candu’s UI component builder ensures a quick and easy launch for each new edition without compromising style.
.png)