Educate. Experiment. Find Your People
Today we step aside from our normal format to bring you the first of a two-part presentation that was given at the Bay Area Customer Education Meetup on January 31st, 2019.
A special thanks to Adam for organizing this event and to Christy Hollingshead of Heap for making this event possible.
If you’d like to see the visuals being talked about in this presentation, check them out on our CELab YouTube Channel here.
What trends are we seeing in the field of Customer Education? Join us as we chat with Linda Schwaber-Cohen from Skilljar. We talk starting with scale, federated search, free vs paid training, and measuring the value of training (with data!).
Linda leads Product Marketing and Customer Education at Skilljar, so she knows quite a bit about the Customer Education space! In this episode, she walks us through the trends she’s been seeing in the market as well as in Skilljar’s customer base.
One trend Linda highlights is that Customer Education teams are increasingly “starting with scale,” or in other words, building Customer Education programs that address broad audiences from the onset. This includes formats like online academies, help centers, and video, which can all scale to thousands or millions of end users.
Previously, Customer Education programs would start with low-scale activities like instructor-led trainings, one-to-one sessions with trainers or product experts, or classroom sessions. This has been true either because the technology to develop more scalable trainings wasn’t accessible, or because it was the easiest way to start training customers out of habit.
But that’s not cost effective, and it leaves many customers in the dark. So now companies are starting with more scalable, on-demands approaches. This is especially helpful as our customers onboard new users, who all need training at different times and paces.
The second trend Linda discusses is the move toward federated search. Increasingly, Customer Education programs implement a search tool that will search across multiple Customer Education properties – online academy content, help center articles, community-generated posts, blogs, and more. Gone are the days of each property having its own, isolated search. This improves discoverability of content wherever the customer is searching for it. This way, customers won’t need to know where to search for what they’re looking for, get frustrated, and give up (or angrily contact your customer support team).
She also discusses the advantages and challenges around adding federated search and help content directly into your software product. Often this requires getting buy-in from Product teams who see help content or training as a failure of the product to be intuitive.
The “in-product search” conversation ties into the idea of offering freemium models, or paid offerings, for training. Often when you’re bringing in revenue, that makes it easier for you to get the prioritization from cross-functional teams like Product and Marketing, or to get Product Management resources on your own team.
Linda talks about how she sees more sophisticated training teams offering paid education programs. Because they bring in revenue, they often get treated more as a product in and of themselves, instead of as a support tool for the software. While it’s still not common for many new Customer Education teams in SaaS to charge, it’s very common in the Education Services world, and Linda sees a hybrid model work in practice.
One thing she’s seeing is more interesting ways to attach training to premium support models and product subscriptions. For example, some companies create certification programs or premium education programs that aren’t completely customized to an individual account, but are available to a certain tier of customers to attend.
The last trend that Linda covers is the emergence of data-driven approaches. It’s becoming more common for Customer Education teams to collect, and use, more data to inform their approach. In the past, most training teams would collect cursory, activity-based data (like training survey scores, attendance rates, and revenue).
Now, Customer Education teams are using data to prioritize content – for example, what are the top customer search terms, and can those be used to create new help or education content? And when customers find specific pieces of content, do they find them helpful? Bounce rate data in a web analytics tool can give you that information.
But many of the metrics that we’ve historically looked at are – in her view – vanity metrics. For example, looking at bounce rates or completion rates without trying to understand the broader story around those numbers won’t be useful in proving the value of Customer Education to your business.
To get a seat at the bigger table, we have to stop looking at training data in a silo and start comparing it to business metrics such as product adoption, churn, renewal, expansion, support deflection, and so on.
This is also why LMS platforms increasingly integrate with core business systems like CRMs. If you can look at learning data in the same place as customer data, and analyze the two together, you have a better picture of what training is actually doing for your customers.
This episode is part three of our informal trilogy about instructional design in customer education. (See parts one and two.) What does it take to become a great instructional designer or content developer in Customer Education. How can you succeed in the role if you’re transitioning from another career? We’ll tackle these questions and more, so listen in!
For those making the leap into Customer Education as Instructional Designers, they typically come from three places:
Which is best? Are any of them best? The big question most people ask is whether they need a degree to be most successful in the field. What’s more important, field experience or a degree?
We’ll look at these three common paths and give some perspective on them.
Continue reading →In this episode we talk with Bill Cushard – Host of “Helping Sells Radio” and Director of Marketing at ServiceRocket – for our first ever CELab interview!
How do you help your customer buy from you? A lot of times we don’t help our customers … we just try to sell to them.
In this episode, Bill explains how helping your customers, particularly through education, really sells. We talk about Agile approaches to Marketing – and that includes using Agile Sprints to develop Educational content, building your 5-year roadmap for education, and much, much more!
In this episode, part 2 of our informal trilogy on Customer Education instructional design, we discuss a few failed hypotheses around content development. These are things we’ve been asked to do, and we’ve all certainly tried in our careers, but they just don’t lead to effective learning. Tune in to hear more!
New Customer Education leaders, especially those who are “accidental” customer educators who get thrown into the role, don’t have strong backgrounds in content development. That leads to content that can please stakeholders but will fail customers.
Our goal as content creators should be to:
How do we often get this wrong? Read on.
Continue reading →In this episode we explore how we, as Customer Educators tackle the source of the river of knowledge. How does one approach discovery and work with Subject Matter Experts to get the best material? Have a listen and we’ll explain our strategies.
There’s nothing worse than finding out that content is the blocker to building a Customer Education program. After all, instructional design relies on access to subject matter experts (SMEs).
If you’re in a small organization or working on a brand-new product, chances are that you have nothing – Zip, Zero, Diddly Squat – to work with. There’s no documentation, sparse notes, and very likely, an overworked Product Manager who’s way too busy to deal with you.
Using the traditional ADDIE content development process, the first thing you do before you design or develop content is an analysis phase. You collect existing knowledge and documentation, analyze performance gaps, and use all of it to inform your design. But that process won’t work for people working at startups or other organizations that move too fast for ADDIE.
In small organizations, knowledge usually isn’t documented thoroughly. It’s locked in the heads of busy people who are trying to do their day jobs. These are your product managers, your technical architects, your customer success managers. Getting them to document their knowledge or create training is like squeezing blood from a stone.
Adam here. In case you missed it, I have a new book out, called “Customer Education: Why Smart Companies Profit By Making Customers Smarter.” Pick up a copy before they run out!
This post corresponds with Episode 8 of “CELab: The Customer Education Lab.” Subscribe and download our latest episode on our site, Apple Music, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever quality podcasts are found.
Even though I recently published a book, that’s not what this post is about. Today I’d like to share three books that not only every Customer Education leader, but every leader, should read. Each one corresponds to a key mindset that enables us to create a sense of growth and experimentation on our team, and to maximize the potential of every single team member. After all, we succeed or fail together.
As a Customer Education leader, I’m constantly in the position of watching people stretch outside of their comfort zone. Whether it’s a participant in a class, or a member of my team taking on a new project, there will always be that frustrating moment where we throw up our hands, saying, “I just wasn’t built to do this!”
In fact, according to the research of Dr. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, we’re conditioned from a very early age to regard our skills as fixed and unchangeable. We’re either good at something or we suck at it. But is this reality? According to her research, it’s not — and once we stop believing that our skills our fixed, we can actually change.
In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck recommends that we think differently about our own abilities. Instead of assuming that we’re good or bad at something, and working hard to protect our own ego around those things, we should instead embrace the idea that we can grow in any area with practice. But for many of us, we don’t do the things that we’re bad at because we don’t think we can get better at them. We’re afraid of failure. If, instead, we treat those failures as opportunities to learn and improve, then we will stop protecting our self-image and start getting better at things!
This is obviously important on a Customer Education team. Even though I recognize that everyone has certain “superpowers” and will more easily excel in certain areas, it’s dangerous to assume that skills won’t change over time. By embracing the growth mindset and learning from failures, we can experiment and push into new areas of growth.
Customer learning professionals can also take the growth mindset into account as they design courses. We can explicitly encourage our customers to be vulnerable, put themselves out there, ask the “dumb” questions, and try and fail in a safe space. We can give them challenging activities that may be outside of their comfort zone because the learning will be that much greater. You might even try sharing Dweck’s research at the beginning of your course.
At this point, most of us know that it’s not empowering to micromanage employees or to build empires of “B- and C-players.” And yet many of us still do just this. But those aren’t the only ways we prevent our teams from reaching their top potential. We have habits that unconsciously diminish our team’s efforts as well. For example, many leaders believe that they must be the most intelligent person in the room. They must have all the answers. They must make the decisions.
In Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Liz Wiseman (who led Oracle University — a learning professional!) and Greg McKeown (author of another one of my favorite books, Essentialism) break down the approaches that multiply the power of a team, in essence making everyone smarter and more empowered. They contrast them with the behaviors that accidentally or intentionally diminish a team. For example:
The final book in my leadership trilogy is Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. This is actually the one I read first, and I think it may have had the most lasting impact on my career. (More time to marinate, I guess.)
The books authors (Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright) posit that within an organization, natural groups (or “tribes”) of 20-150 people compose the culture of the organization, and as a leader, you can help these tribes evolve. Tribes go through different stages, starting with a selfish and downright gloomy mindset (“life sucks,” “MY life sucks”) where they may give token compliance to the things you say, but they’re not really bought in.
It turns out that tribes with this mindset are often being held down by people in the next stage — “I’m great” — where individuals compete against one another.
So how do you escape this destructive pattern? You have to move from “I’m great” to “We’re great.” Align your team around a higher purpose and a common goal, instead of encouraging them to compete against one another (or against other teams in your organization). The book provides examples of how to do this, such as opening up decision-making from a hub-and-spoke model with you at the center to “triads” of individuals — groups of three with more distributed decision-making.
Here’s the part that blows my mind: the authors point out that a big way they know that tribes have made the shift is “a language and a pattern of behavior; not a permanent state like tall or short.”
So in other words, they’re describing a sort of growth mindset! I believe that it’s the same mental shift that lets you move from fixed to growth mindset, from diminisher to multiplier, and from I’m great to We’re great. If you read these books, in order, through this lens, I believe you’ll emerge with a fresh perspective on how to grow a high-performing team — not just in Customer Education, but in any field.
In this episode we explore the assertion, “The best way to start developing your Customer Education program is to leverage Virtual Instructor-Led training.” Why would you want to use Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT). What are the options for delivering it? What kinds of pitfalls and tips would you suggest? Oh … and most importantly Adam sings for us, making this another can’t miss episode!
As Customer Educators, we know that content development is no small feat. It takes a long time to product and develop content. Self-paced, online, and interactive content take the longest. In this episode, we reference the content development estimates from the ATD (Association for Talent Development) 2017 survey. This survey shows that even an hour of passive e-learning takes 42 hours to create, and that balloons as development becomes more complex.
When we’re developing for customers, passive won’t always cut it. When we create content, we often need it to have more interactivity to promote real learning goals.
That’s why it’s important to know where you’re going when you create self-service content. While e-learning will provide more scale, vILT allows you to prototype content more quickly.
Continue reading →What are the key customer education leadership skills you need? Join Adam and Dave as they dive into three great skillsets, each one of which ties to a book. These are required reading material for new and aspiring Customer Education leaders.
This post corresponds with Episode 8 of “CELab: The Customer Education Lab.” Subscribe and download our latest episode on our site, Apple Music, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever quality podcasts are found.
Even though I recently published a book, that’s not what this post is about. Today I’d like to share three books that not only every Customer Education leader, but every leader, should read. Each one corresponds to a key mindset that enables us to create a sense of growth and experimentation on our team, and to maximize the potential of every single team member. After all, we succeed or fail together.
Continue reading →
In this episode of CELab, Adam shares his experiences from Skilljar Connect, hosted in Seattle on November 14 and 15, 2018. Adam shares his experiences in talking on a panel hosted by Maria Manning Chapman from TSIA focused on Content effectiveness and how to make training stick! Join us for this recap and tons of myths and misconceptions about content!
This week on CELab, we recap another Customer Education conference: Skilljar Connect! Adam attended and spoke on a panel at the conference, and it was a great day spent with other Customer Educators.
Let’s face it: Aside from CEdMA (which we recapped on a previous episode) here aren’t many conferences devoted to customer education. While big conferences like DevLearn and ATD TechKnowledge are helpful for instructional designers and technologists, they aren’t often customer education oriented. I’d highly recommend them to anyone looking to learn more about instructional design, content development, and learning technology. But as a customer education professional, you often must make the leap away from the context of traditional L&D, asking yourself, “How does this apply to customer education?”
So similar to how Gainsight Pulse is focused on the discipline of Customer Success, Skilljar Connect was a forum for Skilljar customers to discuss the discipline of Customer Education and share our programs.
