How to Use Interactive Demos for Help Centers, Onboarding, and Training
Head of Growth & Product Marketing
According to our 2025 State of the Interactive Product Demo report, the third most popular use case for interactive demos was embedding them in help centers. And using them for onboarding and training was a close runner-up.
Instead of heavy text-based help centers or onboarding docs, interactive demos let users walk through the setup themselves, getting them up to speed quickly and boosting overall adoption.
How Interactive Demos Can Improve Training
Interactive demos primarily educate prospects and customers on specific product features, integrations, and the potential value they bring to users’ day-to-day.
But end users aren’t the only people who need to learn how your product works — employees need to know the ins and outs, too.
Leveraging interactive demos for documentation and training can help new employees become proficient faster and coach existing customer success and sales teams on new features before release.
For Customer Training: Reduce Need For One-on-One Training
Interactive demos are inherently self-serve, which means customers get instant answers to their questions without taking valuable time away from your support team.
Navattic customer Spot.ai has onboarded over 100 customers via product tours.
Their team shares, “We present interactive demos alongside videos to provide additional options for content. These self-serve training options have significantly reduced the need for our success reps to train individual users on the platform on calls.”
Before leveraging Navattic, Spot.ai’s success team hosted a training call with every user. Converting to a self-serve model with interactive demos has “freed up hundreds of support hours for the success team.”
SourceDay, another Navattic customer, has seen similar results. Their onboarding and training team explains, “After deploying Navattic product tours for user enablement, we saw a 90% decrease in the number of one-on-one trainings needed to activate new users.”
For Internal Training: Increase Employee Understanding of New Products or Processes
As we hinted earlier, interactive demos are an excellent way to show employees how your product works. Besides the self-serve benefit, interactive demos ensure everyone has a consistent learning experience. And they also help reinforce company messaging.
Navattic’s customer, Form, says, “We’ve used product tours for a variety of training use cases for internal teams around new processes in addition to external tours for large trials or new feature adoption.”
Even if you plan to do in-person training, you can still send interactive demos as a follow-up to live sessions, giving employees hands-on practice material.
Sydney Lawson, Product Marketing Manager at Athennian, says, “Interactive demos are a really useful tool for ensuring feature adoption and further enablement for our own internal teams."
3 Options for Training
To jumpstart your use of interactive demos for training, we’ve put together some ideas based on how one-on-one you want your training to be.
Option #1 (high reach) - Add interactive demos to help centers
You can embed your demos within an existing help center so that they open up in the same window or you can link to them and take users through the demo in another tab.
If you go this route, we recommend creating how-to demos for high-value features over short walkthroughs of every single use case.
Concentrating on unique, high-ticket features will save you time and allow you to dive deeper into what those features bring to the table.
Option #2 (medium reach) - Build checklist demos with multiple features
Checklist demos keep users on track by splitting longer demos (15+ steps) into concrete step-by-step lists.
While users or employees can run through checklist demos in chronological order, they also have the freedom to jump to different steps based on the features they want to explore.
Because users have the checklist to orient them, these demos can be longer than your average help center demo, highlighting multiple use cases (and their setup) rather than one specific feature.
Option #3 (low reach) - Create a demo for one specific account
This option has the least scalability but the most potential for long-term adoption.
Tailoring demos to the features or use cases a customer cares most about helps training feel relevant and valuable.
Similar to option #2, these demos can be longer, running users through an end-to-end onboarding flow and using tooltips to share best practices along the way.
If you have access to their workspace in your product, consider taking captures of their instance to make the demo more personalized. You could even customize the demo with their logos using Navattic’s find and replace.
3 Top Customer Onboarding Examples
Now that you have some ideas in mind, here are three examples to help you bring them to life.
JumpCloud
JumpCloud, a cloud-based directory platform for identity management, has a robust university with courses that guide users through common use cases and prepare them for official JumpCloud certification exams.
For some of these topics, the JumpCloud team uses interactive demos to show users how to implement more advanced features and integrations. The Windows MFA process is just one example.
In the demo, admins walk-through the end user experience of logging into their computer and then receiving and approving an authentication verification on their phone. The JumpCloud team even replicates the frame of a laptop and smartphone for extra immersion.
At the end of the demo, users are invited to check out more guided simulations of JumpCloud functionality or access more documentation pertaining to that use case.
Vitally
Vitally, an all-in-one customer success platform, integrates on-demand video courses with interactive product demos inside its Vitally Academy to educate customers and prospects.
When Academy visitors click into a course, they first see a short video that explains the feature or use case.
As they scroll down the page, they see a list of interactive demos directly related to the content they just saw in the video, creating an immersive “watch and try” experience.
Some interactive tours even start with an embedded video as another intro to the subject before letting the prospect or customer play with the feature themselves.
Making the Academy available to anyone who comes to the Vitally website has several benefits:
- It captures interest early. Prospects who may have bounced without the opportunity to try Vitally out themselves can experience it firsthand, often prompting them to book a demo.
- It reduces training overhead. No need to send long documentation or schedule live trainings – Vitally CSMs can just send a link to the Academy and let customers take the courses on their own time.
- It deepens product understanding. Interactive learning usually helps customers grasp key concepts faster and retain them longer.
Want to learn more about mixing product videos and interactive demos? Read about when and how to combine them.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel, a product analytics platform, embeds interactive product demos into its internal customer Academy as well.
Peishan Tan, Head of Customer Success at Mixpanel, explains: “We really wanted to build an entire Mixpanel Academy where we could walk users through how to use the platform. And we didn’t want it to be just text; we wanted interaction. That’s why Navattic is so good.”
In the academy, users get to experience the platform as if they had their own instance, learning how to build funnels and analyze retention, step by step.
The team found that interactive demos make training far more accessible than static videos. Per Peishan:
“What we liked about Navattic was that users can really go at their own pace. They can click, stop, and follow along on their own screens. Video recordings don’t allow that.”
Guided demos have helped Mixpanel:
- Replace dense help articles with hands-on, experiential learning.
- Speed up onboarding and improve user confidence.
- Reduce support tickets by helping users self-solve common setup challenges.
And they’ve also saved the team a ton of time. Over the past year, they saved roughly 160 hours by building 80 Navattic walkthroughs.
“The efficiency gains have allowed Mixpanel’s CS team to focus less on repetitive video production and more on higher-value initiatives,” says Peishan.
Read more about how Mixpanel uses interactive demos for customer education here.