Educate. Experiment. Find Your People
It’s the end of 2022 and we’re recapping the year with reflections on what we, and our peers in the Customer Education world, have learned. We start by hearing reflections from Customer Educators around the world about the biggest thing they learned in 2022, and then Dave and Adam share personal reflections about what we’ve learned this year as well.
Customer Education is, as Dave Derington says, “Both new and not new”. We review the book, “Customer Education” by Claudia Gaillard Meer and take time at the end of 2022 to reflect upon what has changed and how this practice – often thought of as adjunct to Customer Success – has resurfaced and is now ready to help organizations achieve scale.
We can trace the origin of the phrase at least back to 1984 – nearly 40 years ago! What’s new? (And … what’s not new?) Why did Customer Education not become a standard practice throughout our market? This is Part 1 of two deep-dive discussions where we consider the past, present, and future of Customer Education.
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
(This episode is sponsored by WorkRamp)
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.
“Now is the right time for Customer Education.” as Cushing Anderson and Lisa Rowan say in the their Thought Industries’ sponsored report.
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.
Click here for a link to the report
In the lead-up to Fall 2022 Conference Season, we will be releasing a three-part mini-series covering a number of reports. Here, we cover Skilljar’s 2022 Customer Education Benchmarks and Trends Report.
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?
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!
