In this episode, we return to our Instructional Design 101 series, where we informally cover key concepts from the instructional design world and apply them to customer education.
In previous episodes, we’ve covered frameworks like the Kirkpatrick Model of Evaluation, which helps you measure the effectiveness of your course, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, which helps you define what types of knowledge or skills you’re actually teaching and how you’d expect the learner to put them into practice.
But neither of these models answer a key question we hear from Customer Education professionals every day: how should I think about structuring my course?
Steve Cornwell is CEO and Founder of Northpass, the LMS that powers learning experiences for some of the top SaaS, sharing-economy, and subscription-economy companies. He joins us for the return of our CEO series, where we get CEO-level perspectives on the Customer Education market.
In our discussion, Steve talks about the Evolution of Customer Education, pointing to the ways that it is maturing as a category. As the subscription economy matures, building healthy recurring business is more important than ever, which places a premium on companies’ user experience. One effect of this has been the rise of Customer Success as a more defined function. The onboarding and learning experience for users can also make a huge difference.
Just as Customer Success as changed and matured over time, Customer Education is growing and changing as well. It’s not just something you do when you’re one of the huge industry players; you can increasingly invest in Customer Education from earlier stages with fewer resources to begin with. In fact, for many companies, effective Customer Education programs can help them accelerate their growth from earlier stages. With improvements in technology to produce and host learning, it’s easier than ever to get started.
But your Customer Education program isn’t just about producing content. It needs a strategy too. Steve talks about the evolution of Customer Education strategy, and how it has moved from a competitive edge to table stakes for many businesses. You simply need to be educating your customers if you want them to stay. This has also spurred the rise of Customer Education within Marketing departments, where efforts to educate customers aren’t solely tied to feature usage or retention; Customer Education is also used to drive pre-sales efforts, including industry or category education. As Steve points out, Customer Education is really about a company’s products, services, and best practices – not just features. It’s a way to supercharge the customer journey with directed pathways, interactivity, and even achievements.
Steve also talks about Customer Education breaking through boundaries. For one, Customer Education is outgrowing the classic “Academy” model where everything lives in a single portal or homepage. Now, Customer Education spans multiple properties and is increasingly embedded in the product experience.
As Customer Education increasingly spans multiple properties and involves more technologies to drive its strategy, Northpass has been a proponent of Learning Ops: a discipline of driving learning across the org to support multiple use cases (such as internal and customer education), integrated and in-app learning, and analysis of learning-related data.
Listen to this episode to find out more about Steve’s perspective on the industry!
Does Onboarding Matter? That’s what Donna Weber, veteran Customer Education professional and President of Springboard Solutions firmly asserts in her new book, Onboarding Matters! She says: “Onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey, yet many B2B companies fail to act proactively at the start of the relationship.”
In her book, she outlines the reasons why onboarding is a crucial motion for B2B companies, especially those who experience churn or attrition later in their customer lifecycles. Improper onboarding contributes to low adoption, low satisfaction, and ultimately unhealthy business.
Brian Childs, a customer education leader with experience at Moz, TapClicks, and more, has developed a Maturity Model that emerging Customer Education teams can use. In this interview, he describes how you can use the Training Maturity Model to scale your customer education team faster. Brian Childs has been building customer and adult education programs for over 20 years. In 2020, he developed the Training Maturity Model to understand the common challenges faced by training team leaders and what drives scale. The secret is something many training practitioners know inherently but don’t have articulated into a repeatable framework. The secret is: Scaling a training program relies on capabilities across the whole organization.
Photo by Lance Grandahl – Two become one. (or one becomes two?)
On this episode of CELab we continue both our CEO Series and Customer Success Series as Michael Harnum, CEO of ESG Success, walks us through his journey to Customer Success as a Service. Typically, Education Services used to be standalone activities where customers would consume training credits, but that approach often left customers without access to proper training and providers with revenue recognition issues. In a world of SaaS software where training is a constant activity, that doesn’t cut it for most businesses anymore.
Product-focused afterthought!– that’s what most Customer Success clients get wrong about Customer Education according Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures.
But what does this mean, exactly?
In recent episodes, SaaS executives and investors perceive Customer Education as a growing and integral part of scaling their organizations. This begins our “Customer Success Series” where we’ll talk with prominent leaders in the Customer Success space, starting with Lincoln Murphy – Customer Success Growth Expert, Consultant, and Thought Leader.
Customer Education, as we know it today, is undergoing the same kind of Category Creation that Lincoln experienced in the early days of the Customer Success industry. And it’s even more critical as COVID-19’s “been like five years of change and evolution” to the Customer Success market.
In Episode 55 we explore:
how we have in common with Customer Success leaders the role of playing detective to uncover our customers’ core needs
how customer education fits into a customer success strategy
whether CSMs do training, or do we centralize that function into a Customer Education team?
And, of course, we get back to the question of what is product-focused afterthought!
Listen in for another great episode, or enjoy the full transcript below!
What are venture capitalists thinking about the potential for Customer Education and Customer Success? As the industry becomes more profitable, we’ve seen more investment activity in the space. Eugene Lee from OMERS Ventures joins us to talk about his view on investing in this market, and what he wants to see from Customer Education and Customer Success companies as the market develops.
Eugene Lee, a Principal at OMERS Ventures, a venture capital fund with $1B under management and 50+ investments in B2B and B2C tech companies including Contentful, Crunchbase, Hootsuite, Klue, Rover, Shopify, Vidyard, and Wattpad.
Prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Eugene was a VP of Business Operations at Copper, Google’s #1 recommended CRM. Prior to that, he founded and led the business operations team at Pinterest. Before that Yahoo and Pixate.
One theme that’s on the minds of many Customer Education professionals is learning how to “bridge the divide” between our teams and other education-focused teams. In Episode 19 (Sharing with Others) we kicked off this discussion. Growing organizations in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplace follow standard patterns, and begin to introduce Learning and Development (L&D), Sales Enablement, and Customer Education.
Ted Blosser, CEO of WorkRamp, continues our “CEO Series” into 2021, sharing his experiences as a relatively recent entrant into the Customer Education category. If you’re like us, you soon become (sometimes painfully) aware that you are not alone on the journey to help your customers. Unfortunately, many of us may be a bit “siloed” or so focused upon our own universe that we miss a golden opportunity in exploring consolidated learning strategies. In other words, the democratization of our education process.
Cross-department collaboration provides distinct advantages to all of us, leading to measurable savings of time, hassle, and money. Listen in as we discuss “Centers of Learning Excellence”, tying education to business outcomes, and the role that Customer Education will play in the coming years!
In 2019 we did our first “pause and reflect” style episode over the holidays, which was one of our top five episodes of all time. With this episode we, once again, let loose and do a “fun” episode to close out the year and start off the new one. And after this year, we definitely need to let loose a bit!
To bridge the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, we’re going to continue our tradition of asking what music and art can teach us about Customer Education. What can David Bowie teach us about Customer Education? And to honor our subject just a bit more, we’ve waited just a bit to celebrate his birthday (January 8th, 1947)!
Listen in as we relate the journey of David Bowie as he practiced his art over a lifetime. We all can relate to the changes he went through, forging through different styles before developing something unique and characteristic. Then continuing to experiment and grow to meet the changing demands of the market. Enjoy!
NOTE: We discuss the legendary interview Bowie gave to Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight about the future of technology, which you can see for yourself here.
On October 6th, we presented – live – at Thought Industries’ COGNITION 2020. This was a great event with many leaders from our Customer Education category.
In this recording we unveil our Customer Education Manifesto. This is composed of six guiding principles that we believe can help Customer Success organizations strategically accelerate account and user growth.
Most Customer Success organizations know, or soon discover, that acquiring customers is hard. But retaining those hard-won customers is even harder. Did you effectively onboard?If not, that translates to churn. Do you help your customers realize value? Again … that causes churn. Are you retaining and expanding your accounts? That churn can be slow and even more painful.
Just how many thousands, if not millions of dollars has your company spent to acquire customers and drive adoption? Surely, you’re focused on customer marketing and drip campaigns. You may have thrown a flotilla of CSMs at the problem, requiring them to perform ad-hoc trainings.
The simple, uncomfortable truth is this: Your customers don’t succeed if they don’t learn.
Listen in as we share the new face of Customer Education. We help growing XaaS businesses to change customer behaviors, reduce barriers to value, and improve the way people work.
Haven’t yet seen the Customer Education Manifesto? Check it out here!
Missed COGNITION 2020? The event is still online in on-demand form. For a quick recap, check out Episode 49 where we cover -in detail – the top events from 2020! If you’re a veteran or new Customer Education Professional, you’ll want to mark your calendars for 2021! We hope next year brings a return to in-person conferences and hope to see you there.
