Is Customer Education just Customer Training? Or is it something more?

Whether you’re scoping out your program for the first time, or consolidating separate functions into one Customer Education experience, you have to know which programs to include — and which ones to leave out.

But we think that whether you call it Customer Education, Enablement, or Education Services, you’ve got to think bigger than just training.

If you had said the term “Customer Education” even a few years ago, it would have been a synonym for training. In Episode 002 of CELab, we question the role of “training” in a Customer Education program.

After all, that’s the main way that tech companies thought to educate their customers: bring them into a room (or a webinar), teach the materials, facilitate some activities, and then the customer was educated.

The Internet has changed the way we live and work, but it’s also changed the way we learn. And it doesn’t just mean taking our long training sessions and posting recordings or breaking them up into webinars. The industry is seeing a shift in the way that people look for, and use, information.

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Welcome to the Pilot episode of CE Labs – the Customer Education Laboratory!

This podcast series is devoted to you – The Customer Education pioneers out there – to share what we, and others have learned from hard-won experiences in the trenches of fledgling SaaS companies and tech startups.  

  • Maybe you’re a member of a Customer Success team realizing that you need to invest in Customer Education — or that you have an interest in doing it yourself
  • Perhaps you’re the first Customer Education hire at a growing company
  • Maybe you’re part of the growing community of Customer Education Heroes.

In this episode we introduce ourselves and our mission and begin challenging the assertion:  “You don’t need a customer education team until your company is mature”.

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