In the world of Customer Education, certification programs have long been considered a badge of success. They look impressive. They can drive customer engagement spikes. They give learners something tangible to share. 

But here’s the hard truth.

While a driver of engagement for some, certifications are not the best measure of Customer Education’s real value. 
 
In fact, when positioned as the primary goal, they can be a costly distraction from what matters most—product usage, customer adoption, and long-term value realization. 

Certification programs:
High effort, limited scope 

Let’s start with the reality: 

Building a certification program is a resource-intensive endeavor. From designing exam blueprints to developing assessment items, maintaining version control, and ensuring security and validity, it requires specialized skills, technology platforms, and significant ongoing investment. 

And yet, studies show certification uptake is often limited to a small subset of users: 

According to the 2023 TSIA Education Services Benchmark Report, only about 10–15% of users in most SaaS companies pursue optional certifications—even when offered for free. 

In other words: certifications create a powerful signal for a niche audience but do little to shift broader adoption curves. 

What actually drives retention and growth? Usage. 

Multiple studies consistently reinforce that product usage—not certifications—is the strongest predictor of customer renewal, expansion, and advocacy: 

  • Gainsight's 2023 Customer Success Index reports that customers who consistently use 80% or more of a product's core features are 4x more likely to renew. 
  • Forrester Research found that every 10% increase in product adoption correlates with a 20% increase in Net Revenue Retention. 

Usage isn't about how well someone scored on a test. It's about whether they're applying the product meaningfully, repeatedly, and in ways that integrate it into their daily workflows. 

This is where customer education creates real business value: 

👉 Are users activating key features? 
👉 Are they expanding their usage into new modules? 
👉 Are they solving their core business problems using your product? 

A shiny badge doesn’t answer those questions. Behavior does. 

Certifications can create the wrong success story 

When certification counts become your headline success metric, two risks emerge: 

  1. False positives

A customer earning a certification doesn’t guarantee they are using the product successfully day-to-day. They might pass an exam, hang a badge on LinkedIn—and then churn three months later because they never integrated your product into real workflows. 

  1. Misaligned resources

Teams focused on certs may overbuild for edge cases (the “power users”) while neglecting simple, scalable enablement that drives adoption across the full customer base—especially casual or mid-level users who actually make up the bulk of your revenue footprint. 

In short: you risk winning at the wrong game.

Certifications are a critical support—but not the star of the show

This doesn't mean you should abandon certification programs. They can play a meaningful role—when they are placed in the right context: 

  • Credentialing specialists need to partner closely with adoption owners to align certifications to real behavioral milestones (e.g., feature activation, project completions). 
  • Certification data should always be supplemented with usage data to understand downstream effects. Did certified users adopt faster? Expand quicker? Retain longer? 
  • Executive reporting should prioritize usage, adoption, and business outcomes first—with certifications framed as supporting metrics, not primary goals. 

When positioned properly, certifications enhance a broader adoption strategy rather than replacing it. 

Refocus Customer Education on behavior—not badges 

Certifications have their place. They can support career growth, create champions, and enhance engagement. But in Customer Education, our true mandate isn’t to mint graduates—it’s to create habitual users and product champions at scale. 

If you want to drive renewals, expansions, and referrals, keep your eyes on the real prize: meaningful, sustained product usage. 

Choosing the right platform matters, too. 

Rather than investing in tools that simply issue certificates, organizations should prioritize platforms that drive and measure real business outcomes—like usage, adoption, and feature activation. 

BrainStorm is built for exactly this kind of impact.

With adaptive workflows that guide users based on behavior, integrated usage reporting to link learning to software utilization, and a proven record of driving 10x more activations and boosting product usage by over 50%, BrainStorm helps organizations move beyond surface-level achievements to real, measurable success. 

Certifications can support your strategy—but platforms that fuel adoption at scale are what will truly transform your business.