Case Study
How 5-Star Students Scaled Personalized Support Across 800+ Schools
5-Star Students supports over a thousand K–12 campuses with a SaaS platform that tracks everything from hall passes to student check-ins. As the platform matured, scaling support became more complex for their lean, family-run team.
Chance Hroch, who helps lead operations at 5-Star, needed a way to provide timely help to educators without adding more Zoom calls or manual walkthroughs. That’s where iorad came in.
By integrating iorad’s interactive tutorials into their support workflow, the team reduced ticket volume, updated content in minutes, and delivered faster answers to common questions. For 5-Star, iorad unlocked a scalable way to support hundreds of campuses without adding headcount or hours.
Challenges
Before integrating interactive iorad tutorials into their platform, 5-Star Students faced a number of growing challenges as they scaled support across hundreds of K–12 schools:
Rapid Product Changes Made Videos Obsolete
As 5-Star’s web platform continued to evolve, even small UI tweaks required re-recording entire video walkthroughs. The team struggled to keep content current without spending hours redoing videos from scratch.
One-Off Support Wasn't Scalable
With each new support request came a screen share, a custom video, or a Zoom call. Teachers had different comfort levels with technology, and the manual nature of support led to long, repetitive workflows for the lean team.
Lack of Personalization—With Privacy Risks
Each school had unique configurations and needed tailored support. But showing real data in videos or live demos raised privacy concerns, limiting how personalized the help content could be.
Support Demands Outpaced Team Capacity
As the user base grew, support requests became more frequent and more varied—yet the internal team remained small. Without a scalable, self-serve option, the time spent on repetitive queries continued to rise.
These challenges made it clear that 5-Star Students needed a faster, more flexible way to create and deliver targeted support content—one that could adapt to change, scale with growth, and preserve user privacy.
I was doing a lot of screen sharing or recording videos for every question and then having to redo it when something changed.Chance Hroch (5-Star Students)
Solution
To address these challenges, 5-Star Students built an iorad tutorials page within their website to enhance their training offering.
Fast, Modular Tutorial Creation
With iorad, Chance and his team could create tutorials in minutes, update them easily, and trim steps that weren’t relevant.
Because tutorials are segmented by step, any change in the UI doesn’t require a full redo. Just update the affected portion
Personalized Support Without Screenshare
iorad enabled school-specific tutorials using real data, sent privately and securely. No screen sharing. No live demo. Just the exact steps they needed, shared asynchronously.
Interactive, Click-Based Learning
Tutorials offered learners control over pace and sequence, improving engagement and understanding.
Centralized, Self-Serve Help Hub
To make tutorials even easier to access, 5-Star embedded a help center directly within their app. Teachers can browse walkthroughs by topic, and choose how they want to learn: interactively, via PDF, or step-by-step slides.
Results & Impact
Meaningful Time Savings
Instead of repeating the same training manually, 5-Star sends links. Each tutorial they create saves 15 minutes or more.
Improved Teacher Experience
Teachers don’t have to wait for Zoom calls. They can follow a tutorial on their own, whenever it fits their schedule, and in the format that suits them best.
Organic Growth Through Word-of-Mouth
iorad’s tutorials didn’t just solve problems. They impressed people. Teachers started asking what the tool was, leading to word-of-mouth visibility and potential new business.
Key Takeaways
1
With iorad, the 5-Star Students team replaced static, time-consuming video recordings with editable, step-based tutorials. This shift eliminated the need for lengthy re-recordings, saving up to 15 minutes per tutorial and significantly reducing repetitive work.
2
iorad's flexibility made it easy to customize tutorials for each school’s setup while keeping sensitive data private. Instead of creating one-size-fits-all videos, Chance Hroch could adapt content on the fly—deleting steps, updating flows, and ensuring schools only saw what was relevant to them.
3
By embedding tutorials directly into their platform, 5-Star empowered teachers to self-serve based on their preferences. Whether it was a walkthrough or a quick reference, the help was always available—without requiring extra Zoom calls or support tickets.
4
Despite being a small, family-run company, 5-Star now supports hundreds of schools efficiently. iorad allows their team to scale onboarding and troubleshooting without increasing headcount, all while reusing tutorials across platforms like Teachable and Zendesk.
5
The response has been overwhelmingly positive, from curious users asking about the tool to internal teammates praising how easy it is to use. iorad has become a central part of how 5-Star delivers support and educates its users.
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