How do you get from 6th grade science to a role leading Customer Education at Notion? It’s a great story that’s behind the evolution of customer education at Notion, where our guest – Zoe Ludwig – focused on bridging the gap between product adoption and user success. From emphasizing the importance of understanding the audience’s needs – to codifying knowledge to create a single source of truth for users check out this episode with so many topics including:
Transitioning from teaching to customer education leader at Notion.
Customer education strategies for a consumer-grade product.
Product education and user adoption strategies for a digital note-taking tool.
Using education content to drive marketing goals
Infusing education with storytelling and brand elements to make Notion content engaging
Creating high-quality content for Notion, including visuals, guidelines, and community partnership for new feature launches
Leveraging user-generated content in Notion’s education programs
Using education to drive product usage and measuring ROI through experimentation
Product education and experimentation with different content formats
Using AI for content development, including generating bullet points, expanding on ideas, and rewriting in a specific tone.
In this episode we’re joined by Special Guest – Shannon Howard – as we dive into the Intellum-sponsored study from Forrester: “Driving Business Success Through Customer Education”. This is a refresh of the 2019 report, which is crucial for those in our field to review and absorb. What’s changed? Are there new trends?
Highlights? Here are just a few we cover:
Around 86% of respondents said they had a positive ROI from customer education, with another 10% saying they at least broke even. This suggests that 96% are seeing a positive business impact from customer education.
Customer education helps drive business outcomes like increased customer retention, spending, and decreased support costs. High success orgs saw a 372% ROI over 3 years, with a 7 month payback period.
There has been a shift away from traditional workshops and certifications towards more asynchronous, mobile, and just-in-time learning approaches.
Vendors are being used more strategically as partners, especially by high success orgs, to help raise maturity levels.
Lack of tools, technical skills, and personnel were cited as top challenges. Budget constraints were also a factor in needing to do more with less resources.
AI is being explored more for use cases like accelerating content creation, personalizing learning, data analysis, and assessment creation. But widespread adoption is still on the horizon.
Key factors for success included data access, mobile accessibility, vendor partnerships, and having scalable platforms.
Grab your copy of the report and a beverage and listen in to this deep-dive that you won’t want to miss.
“If you just focus on educating your customers, you’re missing a HUGE opportunity!” says Mark Kilens, Co-Founder of HubSpot Academy and Drift, and now CEO and Co-founder of TACK ⛵️ & ClubPF. Check out Mark’s projects at tacknetwork.com and tackinsider.com.
In previous episodes, we’ve shared how leaders in the industry see education as the core of our programming. Here, Mark shares a human-first perspective on how education should be a fundamental pillar of your GTM Strategy. Why? The importance of integrating education into marketing strategies is crucial for businesses to build trust and loyalty with their customers.
Tune in to as we discuss:
Customer education and its broader definition beyond just training current customers.
Founding and expanding HubSpot Academy, a driver of category creation.
Tying customer education to business outcomes through partnerships and authentic storytelling.
Shifting go-to-market strategies to prioritize people over software, channels, and algorithms.
Creating helpful content for customers through storytelling and relationship-building.
Using education to fuel business growth, with a focus on customer experience.
Creating people-led growth through content and education.
Marketing and sales strategies, focusing on the “people first” approach.
In this episode we welcome Katie Felton – Director of Academies, Global Education Services at Anthology Inc. to continue our exploration into Pricing and Packaging for Customer Education.
This episode dives deep into the world of customer education programs for software companies, featuring an EdTech expert. Here are some key highlights:
Launching a Unified Academy: Learn how a company with 40+ products overcame language and product alignment challenges to create a single training platform.
Pricing & Packaging Strategies: Discover how to price software training subscriptions based on contract value and explore tiered pricing models with real-world examples.
Balancing Revenue & Customer Success: We discuss the importance of creating valuable training content that supports customer success, even when it impacts revenue generation in the short term.
Merging Product Training & Professional Learning: Explore the benefits and challenges of combining product training with broader professional development programs.
Sales & Marketing Alignment: Get insights on how to handle customer discount requests and ensure marketing and sales teams are aligned.
If you’re involved in the EdTech industry or building customer education programs for software products, this episode is packed with valuable insights!
How do we price our Customer Education programs? It’s a hugely challenging task, even for the experienced – and one that CELab listeners have asked for!
We welcome Mindy Barenblat to the show – an Austin-based an education & enablement strategist and consultant, formerly GM/VP of Education Service at Blackbaud and Eloqua. Tune as we discuss:
Subscription-based learning model with ala carte options
In this conversation we are joined by Emily Brogan, the Customer Education Manager at Dovetail. Emily’s experience (and ours!) expresses and dives into the importance of putting the customer first, and the role of Dovetail in providing customer insights. Emily shares her experience in building the Dovetail Academy and the challenges of scaling customer success and education – particularly focusing on collaboration and listening to customers as the company grows. The need for simplicity, customer-centricity, and continuous learning is key in this journey. Join us for another great conversation with these takeaways:
Takeaways
Put the customer first and prioritize their needs in customer education.
Build a customer education program that scales and allows customers to self-serve.
Collaborate with different teams in the organization to align on the customer journey.
Listen to customers and use their feedback to improve and refine the education program.
Listen in as we explore the ever-evolving intersection of community management and customer education with Brian Oblinger. Brian is a seasoned veteran in community management, and shares invaluable insights drawn from his extensive career, underscoring the power of learning from past endeavors. Our discussion ventures beyond the surface, examining how industry giants have leveraged platforms like North Pass to foster innovation in digital customer education, ultimately enhancing product engagement and retention.
We tackle the strategic and technical challenges of creating a frictionless user experience across learning management systems and community forums, sharing practical steps for incorporating single sign-on and prioritizing user experience in program roadmaps. The transformative potential of integrating community into educational strategies is not just a dream—it’s a reality we’re passionate about, and we want to share that passion with you.
Brian Oblinger is a revered community management expert with a wealth of experience dating back to the mid-90s. As the co-host of the In Before the Lock podcast, he shares his extensive knowledge to help others avoid past mistakes in community engagement. His expertise is rooted in building strategies that intertwine community and customer education, showcasing his proficiency in creating symbiotic relationships that enhance digital learning experiences.
About the Show
CELab is the Customer Education Lab for Innovative Customer Success, Enablement, and Marketing Teams. Our mission is to explore how to build Customer Education programs, experiment with new approaches, and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stop growth dead in its tracks.
Listen in as we discuss:
Guest intro Brian Oblinger
Brian’s favorite pasta
CE use in businesses
Fusion of community and customer education
Brian shares wisdom on digital training
Philosophy of customer-centric resource accessibility
Tackling technical challenges for a frictionless user experience
Unified experiences in customer platforms
Seamless navigation between learning and forums
Aligning community and learning within organizations
Importance of flexible, customer-focused organizational design
Weekly challenges and gamification in customer-led learning
Long-term benefits of a strategic community-building approach
Developing engaging community learning platforms
Integrating social learning and user involvement in content creation
And – please – if you’ve found value in this podcast, share with your friends, your peers, and your network to help us “Find the Others”!
Two of the key activities in the life of a Customer Education professional are crucial skills to have: Collaboration with Product Teams and getting their buy-in.
In this episode we welcome Jesse Evans, Director of Customer Education at Honeybook – and Box and Meta alum. This is an action packed episode where we’ll dive into all things Product and learn how to engage, collaborate, and develop your relationship with Product and Product Marketing to make a difference.
Collaborating with product teams for customer education
Product development and adoption challenges in SaaS organizations
Overcoming objections and misconceptions in product development
Customer education and product adoption
Using marketing campaigns to boost product adoption
Product education and in-app tours for enterprise software
In-app education and collaboration between customer education and product teams.
Product and education collaboration.
Product release process and collaboration between education and product teams.
Product education and its impact on customer success.
Demonstrating value to product teams through customer insights.
Ever wonder how the minds behind world-class customer education programs construct the experiences that not only stick but also spur action? That’s exactly what we’re talking about in this episode with instructional design virtuoso Julie Dirksen. Julie, David, and Adam navigate the transformative power of digital customer training – with Julie’s insights, gleaned from her years of experience, and books including “Design for How People Learn” and “Talk to the Elephant.” The episode peels back the layers on why industry giants like Walmart and Freshworks are betting big on modern, engaging learning platforms to foster customer retention and engagement.
Julie provides a treasure trove of strategies for fostering behavior change within customer education. We delve into the COM-B model and how it dissects behavior into capability, opportunity, and motivation, shaping the design of customer education programs. We also highlight the significance of collaboration between UX and customer education in system efficiency, sharing firsthand experiences from financial applications to healthcare environments.
Gear up for an episode that promises to enrich your understanding of instructional design and arm you with techniques to enhance learning experiences across the board.
About the Show
CELab is the Customer Education Lab for Innovative Customer Success, Enablement, and Marketing Teams. Our mission is to explore how to build Customer Education programs, experiment with new approaches, and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stop growth dead in its tracks.
Listen in as we discuss:
Intro and background – Julie Dirksen
Julie’s new book “Talk to the Elephant”
Balancing compliance and autonomy in education
Overcoming assumptions, understanding user barriers – long pants in the gym
Have you ever considered how an overlooked design choice could shut out a swath of eager learners? Imagine excluding twenty-five percent of adults from your training programs. That’s the staggering possibility we tackle in Episode 124, as we welcome our friend Sharon Castillo to the show! Sharon is a Customer Engagement and Education Leader currently working as Sr. Director of content Strategy and Enablement at Okta.
Making training accessible is more than a box-ticking exercise; it’s a strategic imperative that opens the door to a diverse audience, ready to engage with your product. Our conversation not only sheds light on the barriers to learning but also equips content creators with the know-how to craft learning experiences that welcome everyone to the table. Accessibility is a topic we’ve perhaps only touched upon on the CELab podcast, so Sharon shares why accessibility – particularly good accessibility, is also good customer education. We discuss the kinds of platforms and tools you’ll want to include in your planning, even as a very early-phase program.
So join us as we ‘access accessibility’ for Customer Education!
About the Show
CELab is the Customer Education Lab for Innovative Customer Success, Enablement, and Marketing Teams. Our mission is to explore how to build Customer Education programs, experiment with new approaches, and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stop growth dead in its tracks.
Listen in as we discuss:
Importance of accessibility in training programs
Balancing content delivery speed with inclusive design