Illuminate Education:
Impacting Students' Lives Through Better Documentation
“I honestly believe that our help system (ScreenSteps Live) is a big piece of how we ultimately help kids. The fact that documentation, something that is so often thought of as a peripheral feature, is able to take a center-stage role as one of the ways we are impacting kids is really amazing.”
In 2009 Illuminate Education was launched to provide next generation web-based software and services to K-12 school districts. Though they were a new company they weren’t new to the education market. The co-founders had previously started and sold Achieve Data solutions which provided data applications to educational customers. The co-founders of Illuminate Education saw the potential of new web technologies and decided to enter the market again, purchasing back two products they had originally created and sold to Houghton Mifflin, and creating a new data and assessment management system. It was a new company but with a lot of experience behind it.
A Company With a Mission
The primary mission of Illuminate Education is to help educators have a positive impact on students’ lives. To accomplish their mission they needed to meet three goals:
- Deliver superior data collection and analysis tools to teachers and school districts
- Train teachers on how to use their technology but also on how to effectively analyze the data, make data-informed decisions, and produce meaningful outcomes in the classroom.
- Deliver their product and training at a cost that fit within the current budget restraints that so many school districts are facing.
Taking Care of Customer Support
There are two parts to customer support:
- Helping customers use your product (technical support)
- Helping customers be successful with your product (customer success)
Most new companies never get past customer support. Jenny Rankin, Chief Education and Research Officer, and the Illuminate team knew it was key to focus on both customer support and customer success:
“Teachers make decisions that impact students’ lives based on the data we provide them. But there are so many misconceptions on how to properly analyze that data. Our feeling is that if you just throw the data at teachers and don’t provide them with guidance about how to properly analyze it, it’s actually more harmful than if you never gave them the data in the first place.”
That is why Illuminate knew they needed to focus on both customer support and customer success. First they had to have a simple, scalable way of providing customer support. Until customer support is under control it is difficult to focus on customer success.
Illuminate combines Zendesk and ScreenSteps Live to make customer support simple. Jenny updates documentation instantly based on customer feedback and Illuminate’s support agents can instantly add links to that documentation into Zendesk support tickets.
Moving Beyond Customer Support to Customer Success
Because Jenny has been able to create customer support documentation in such little time, she has more time to focus on customer success.
“Response to Intervention (RTI) is a really big movement in education right now. We put together a guide on using our system with RTI. After I built that guide I added it to ScreenSteps Live and now anyone searching on how to use RTI with our product can find that information. So we aren’t just providing help on how to use the technology, but how to apply it.”
Providing this higher level of documentation just wasn’t possible before with the tools Illuminate was using:
“Before ScreenSteps Live it was so cumbersome to create documentation. All we would document was how to use the technology. But now, because creating documentation is so easy, we can add all of those extra help files on how to apply the technology.”
Lowering the Cost of Training and Adoption
“In education right now there is such a budget crisis. School districts don’t have the funds to provide the type of training for their teachers that they have in the past. Before they could afford to pull teachers out, hire substitutes and hire a trainer to do some kind of in-service on how to properly analyze data. But in many districts that isn’t practical anymore.”
School budgets were shrinking so Illuminate had to deliver better training at a lower cost. By using ScreenSteps Live they were able to both improve their training and lower the adoption and ongoing training costs for school districts.
“Because ScreenSteps Live makes it so easy to throw in extra lessons, we have a whole chapter on data analysis that will state a fact, point out common mistakes and show them examples of what they should do. We have a bunch of lessons that really help people analyze the data. Since the help system is at every user’s fingertips the teachers don’t have to wait for a training session. They can find out the answers on their own.”
Illuminate gathers all of the information that their teachers will need and presents it to them in their ScreenSteps Live site. This gives the teachers a single place to visit to get answers to all of their questions.
“ScreenSteps Live is the one place our clients know to go to get all of the information they need. It really works for whatever we want to put into it, a step by step lesson, a video, or a PDF document that we want to link to.”
Illuminate hasn’t totally replaced live training sessions with ScreenSteps Live. But by providing such a rich collection of information they are able to greatly reduce the time that teachers have to spend outside of the classroom to become productive with Illuminate Education’s technology.
Making a Difference With Better Documentation
ScreenSteps Live has helped Illuminate meet their goals of impacting students’ lives by helping them provide a superior help experience. Teachers who have used other products instantly notice the difference.
“Our clients love our help system. Our clients that have used other systems instantly see that difference. The other products either have a very limited help system or it’s out-dated because it is so hard to update. So our clients coming from other systems are wowed more than anyone else because they see that difference.”
But it isn’t just about providing customer support or helping teachers understand data analysis. Jenny explains how ScreenSteps Live helps Illuminate Education help kids:
“I honestly believe that our help system (ScreenSteps Live) is a big piece of how we ultimately help kids. I strongly believe that and I know my colleagues here do as well. The fact that documentation, something that is so often thought of as a peripheral feature, is able to take a center-stage role as one of the ways we are impacting kids is really amazing.”
“We’re not just selling paper. Our product is affecting kids’ lives. And it is pretty exciting that our help system can help us do that.”
