In Late 2022, businesses in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market have felt the impact of an economic slowdown. Many of us – both leadership and teams – feel that in different ways. For leaders … fewer resources means doing more with less is crucial. For individuals, we may find ourselves scrambling to connect our value to the bottom line.
Customer Education can be an effective tool for SaaS businesses in such times. Customer Education programs affect scale via on-demand / one-to-many plays. We think that now is one of the best times to invest in your program strategy.
For the individual Customer Education professional, now is the time to sharpen your pencils and seek ways to provide return on investment, or even better, known impact on Key Performance Indicators and things that matter to the business. If you find yourself on the outside seeking work, we also talk shop about tactics you can use to find your way to a new and better role.
Video. It is often the go-to for many of our customers, and for good reason. Some stats from TechSmith, “83% of people prefer watching videos to accessing instructional or informational content via text or audio”.
Enter, Michele Wiedemer, who’s career has spanned partnerships with companies such as TechSmith and taken a winding journey to position her as an expert on Video for Customer Education. In this episode we spend time breaking down the caveats and nuances in building your video library. Both at scale, and using 3rd parties! Tune in to learn about:
👉 Michele’s video creation process
👉 Michele’s perspective on outsourcing (from both sides!)
👉 Some things to consider for a successful outsourcing engagement, some potential challenges, and more!
Customer Education is an increasingly important tool in a Software Exec’s toolkit. As programs grow and mature, we sometimes have a “seat at the table”. Wise B2B SaaS Execs will ask you questions such as, “What’s the ROI of your program?” Are you prepared to answer?
In this episode, we talk shop with Jasonda Desmond. ROI – Return on Investment – simply means that our programs have business impact. Just what does that actually mean in the context of Education in SaaS businesses? Well, Jasonda will help to translate the language of educators (Kirkpatrick Model) to the impact it has on business. We’ll talk about metrics such as “Time to First Value”, Product Adoption, (Support) Ticket Deflection and much more.
>> Episode Note: Please note that this episode was recorded on June 3rd, 2022 as a part of a live episode of Working Out Loud. <<
Many people ask exactly how Customer Education can drive Revenue, reduce Churn, decrease Support tickets, and much more. Is it magic? Is it secret technology?
Nope. It’s actually not. It’s Calculus.
Seriously.
In this episode we’re going to talk with Niyati Shah about “The Area Under the Curve”. The point? All the little activities that we do – across departments and teams – that, if added up – make a mountain out of a molehill.
One training won’t do. Have you heard the term “Everboarding”? Yeah – that’s in here too.
Join us as Niyati and I geek out on Customer Education tech and show how you can drive some massive numbers
As WorkRamp says on their website, “Learning is a Growth Engine” for your business. At CELab, we talk about scale and growth tirelessly and how crucial it is for your customer’s ultimate success.
In this episode we are joined by WorkRamp’s Stephanie Middaugh, the Director of Enablement to talk about the challenges that make learning – both internally and externally – difficult. Per Stephanie:
“If I’m training my support team that needs to support my customers, why am I not giving them the exact same training as my customers? Or vice versa? Why am I not giving my customers the exact same training as my support team? […] Now you really have this hub of all of this great knowledge and training that you can share with anybody internally or you could potentially share it with other people externally if you needed to, as well.”
Bridging the gap between teams, such as Sales Enablement and Customer Education, is vital to your success. Scale demands collaboration and efficiency, and WorkRamp’s All-in-One Learning Platform can help scale learning and sharing of knowledge across your organization. We spoke back in January 2021 in Episode 53 with CEO Ted Blosser about consolidation of learning strategies. Now we expand upon that discussion by reaching across the aisle to understand better how Enablement and Education can be the “peanut butter and jelly” of your org, and how WorkRamp can help you make that happen!
Continuing our journey through the “State of Customer Education” reports that have come out in 2022, we explore TSIA’s report – The State of Education Services: 2022!
This year’s report focus on Education as a “Team Sport”, focused on four key subjects supporting XaaS initiatives, from digitalizing the personalization of learning, reviewing the customer’s experience within the education org, driving value, and gathering and sharing data.
Download and read the report and join us as we break down and react to this great report from Maria Manning-Chapman.
As the discipline of Customer Education has grown, this report dives deep into more of the evidence that you need to make your case for Customer Education. In this episode we continue our tour de force through the 2022 State of Customer Education Industry reports, featuring Thought Industries and IDCs joint report.
Spending is up. Revenue is up. And above all, KPIs such as Brand Awareness, Decision Making, success of Onboarding, Adoption, and more are all trending up because of the impact that we as Customer Education practitioners are making.
Listen in as we dissect yet another amazing report and make it fun. You won’t want to miss it.
Each and every year our emerging industry of Customer Education sees vendors and other organizations create their “State of Customer Education” reports, and this year is no exception to our typical coverage. These reports are crucial in understanding the developing trends.
Major themes this year that we discuss?
Measuring Educational Outcomes
Training Teams and Infrastructure
Content and Training Formats
We’re always excited to see these reports and discuss each year. What are the commonalities and differences between these reports? Make sure you read and follow along as we dive into this great material!
In this episode, we speak with Phil Byrne, Manager of Product Education at Intercom.
Through the lens of choosing the right metrics, Phil takes us on a journey through one of our favorite topics: breaking into Customer Education. Phil wasn’t always a Customer Education professional: in fact, he joined Intercom with a background in music and video production. In his time at the company, he’s been through a journey of experimentation, using metrics and data to create better videos and tie his educational efforts to behavior change. Over time, he took bolder bets to experiment with the value of self-service and proactive support techniques.
These days, Phil manages a variety of educational programs that have driven Intercom users’ success over time. Tune in to hear more about his journey and what he learned along the way, as well as what you can learn if you’re breaking into Customer Education.
Customer Education programs grow and mature alongside products and platforms as a software business grows. And, at some point, Localization becomes a hot topic.
What is Localization in Customer Education?
In this episode we welcom Courtney Sembler, Director of Hubspot Academy, to have a frank and honest discussion with Adam about Localization and, related subjects – translation and globalization too!
Why? As our organizations grow we need to able to provide product in multiple languages for global learners and users. How do they have resources to use our products in different languages?
