Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] Hello out there in radio land, 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.
Dave Derington: [00:00:37] It’s September 4th, 2018, and welcome to episode zero zero two of CELab, customer education laboratory, where we’re exploring how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the miss and bad advice that stops growth. Dead in its tracks. I am Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:56] and I’m Adam Avramescu
Dave Derington: [00:00:58] and welcome to today’s episode.
let’s just start tearing into it, Adam. You ready to go?
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:02] Let’s do
Dave Derington: [00:01:02] it. All right. So getting back to what you just introduced, it. It used to be that in the on-prem world. And by that I met back in the day when you got a box with software and he had to go to a server and install it and teach people and whatever environment you were, how to use it.
It’s all in-house, that things were different. you’d used to get this, eh, Adam, did you have this, like this library, the shelf of all the software folders and like the three inch ring Bryant binder, and then somebody would come in or do you’d go away to train and it was long tedious, boring.
You know what I mean?
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:40] Yeah. the only chance you had to interact with a customer, a lot of the time was those first few weeks during implementation. Otherwise it was a retraining and it was you resculpt everything. So yeah, you had a pretty limited window.
Dave Derington: [00:01:53] It was total limited and. I feel like having been there at the beginning when I was really early on in my career.
And now we customer education leaders are simply being asked to do more. So let me turn over to you and. Yeah. let’s keep, let’s get this thing rolling.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:10] Yeah, sure. Thank, we’ve moved from on-prem to the cloud and that’s changed a few things. It means that we have more touch points than we ever have with our customers.
And it also means that the way that customers learn is very different from how it used to be, because they have more opportunities to do it in time. So I think these days, customer education programs, it’s more than just running trainings instead of having training and then documentation that lives somewhere else.
And maybe an idea of a community that lives somewhere else and maybe a certification program that’s very formal. instead of having those all siloed from each other, I think we’re seeing a trend towards rolling these programs up into the same cohesive customer education program.
Dave Derington: [00:02:52] That’s great. we’re also seeing different kinds of methods, different ways to combine customer education with other roles, other functions.
Like I was just talking to some of the other day about sales enablement. What pieces does your sales team actually need to get the product enough to sell it? and then you have internal learning and development teams, sometimes partner enablement. So Adam, why don’t we just take a look at the aspects of, into the different programs that can be included in where you might draw that line.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:25] Sounds good. So first let’s, let’s knock down the myth and structure our hypothesis. I think the myth here is that there are a lot of people that say customer education is just customer training. Have you heard that, Dave?
Dave Derington: [00:03:38] I hear that often.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:41] We think that’s false. So let’s go beyond that misconception.
I think the hypothesis we should test today is that an effective customer education function combines many programs that help customers learn in different ways.
Dave Derington: [00:03:55] So let’s go ahead and tackle the implications of this one at a time. So largely within this, we’re going to debate the different programs that roll up into a customer education functions, and that means training documentation and community.
Let’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:10] do it. All right. So let’s go back to this myth, right? Some people say the customer education is, and I’m making air quotes here. It’s just training. But when we do this, I think we’re actually creating an organizational problem and we’re placing the burden of that problem on our customers, on our learners.
And. That’s something where I don’t think we should be paying forward our organizational debt to our customers. If, if education lives in services and docs live on the product team and the help center lives on the support team and thought leadership resources live in marketing and community lives in a different part of marketing.
You see where I’m going? You end up with five or so different places for customers to look. And this is something I get asked about all the time. It’s one of the reasons why we created Optiv verse at Optimizely, because we saw that our customers didn’t really have one place to go, to get help or support or to learn.
And a customers that’s all the same thing. And then even sometimes education teams who do just do training, they split up and they bifurcate into. live training or online training or training subscriptions and so on. So I think there’s a lot of unnecessary divisions. And when you turn the lens around and look at it from a customer’s perspective, they’re wondering, where do we go from here?
How do I learn about this product? I
Dave Derington: [00:05:30] love this. I feel really passionate about this, Adam. And let me spin that a little bit further. Something that I’ve experienced is that from that customer perspective, and you alluded to this already. It can be a really tough experience. So you’re not there as a customer to navigate, like you talked about, organizational debt, right?
You’re not there to navigate that and to figure out, Oh, I need to go to this place to find this piece of information. And the documentation is over here. The training is on this LMS. Our customers want to get to information and solve a problem. Now it’s a use case approach in some cases. And so I think it’s amen.
so I think it’s really important. And I think we, I would say, we think it’s really important to consolidate as much of this as possible. So even if different teams with different pieces of content that are out there. You can still have a centralized customer education function, or even a committee that does content strategy across all these channels.
And ideally bring them together into one cohesive. Goal or one cohesive unit. So why don’t we share our stories here, Adam? Why don’t you go first? I’m really interested in learning more and you’ve told me about it, but tell the audience about it. what were some of your experiences with art?
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:46] Yeah, for sure.
Happy to talk about that. And maybe, just to put a fine point on something that you just said, customer education does not have to live organizationally under one team. And in the early days of the opt diverse, we actually had multiple teams. Working on different properties, but we coordinated really closely so that the experience still felt cohesive.
So keep that in mind, as I dive a little bit, into diverse. Totally. So the reason we created op diverse to begin with is that we knew that customers were looking for information and trying to solve problems in different ways. And so the Opta verse, when it first started was three different ways to learn about lead.
If you just needed help in the moment or just needed a reference. That was what our knowledge base was for. If you wanted to ask a question or to talk to other people about what was going on, whether it was in the product or whether it was, how do I become a better optimization or experimentation professional that was in our community.
And then finally, if you did want that, Hey, I just want to learn how to go from zero to 60 with Optimizely that was in our Academy. We had all three of those merged together into the single op diverse portal. Even though there were three different systems underneath it, even though we shared responsibilities with our customer marketing team in terms of running it still felt like one experience to the user.
And when we built , we did it to, to reflect the 70, 2010 principle in learning, which is that when you look at how people learn different things, About 70% of the learning they do is basically on the job learning it’s in time, they’re not sitting in a training class to do it. They’re just trying to get things done about 20% and these ratios aren’t exact, it’s, they’re relative to each other about 20% is social learning.
So learning from other people, talking to other people about how they do their jobs, and then only 10% is actually formal classroom. learning path, style learning. So we really built the op diverse to reflect those three different methodologies.
Dave Derington: [00:08:48] I like to hear that and especially with the quantified number, even if it’s not completely.
this is it, but statistically 70, 2010, that really helps because I’m finding more and more. Somebody will just walk over to me and say, Hey, Dave, how do I do this? Or you want to find something in a social context with a friend online or whatever, or you want to go to community and see if anybody’s submitted this question before.
So that’s awesome. let me give you some, my experiences.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:12] Yeah. I’d love to hear about some of the experiences you’ve had too.
Dave Derington: [00:09:15] One thing that I had was particularly frustrating. So as I came into one of the former companies I worked for, I saw education, I, and I did this thing that this exercise that we’re going to do today, and I started to reach out and see who has done what.
documentation is one area, product had other things. And I found this particularly frustrating as a learning professional to try to get all of our customer education experience into one locus. so our documentation was tremendous product owned it. So the role I fell into literally was to help empower struggling customers with technical content.
This wasn’t just an end user that was using a pretty easy product. This was people that were configuring setting up. They really needed to know the details. And the problem that they experienced was documentation is not. Training proper. And in other cases, we had project managers or other technical folks that were helping to onboard people.
And all of the knowledge that should have been somewhere else was locked in people’s heads. So they didn’t, they had a community, but the community wasn’t being used, they didn’t have a knowledge base and above all there wasn’t like a unified track. What I mean by that is, Hey, I am completely lost. Yes, I can read your documentation.
Yes, I can go to your community, but it’s angling in on that 10% where people really were struggling to get onboarded quickly. So that was one of the bulks of my job is to get stuff out of people’s heads, get it on paper point to all these other resources and bring it together. And I still frustrated at the end of that.
And this is something we could talk about on, that mythical perfect customer education team. I had lobbied for years in this organization to bring things together. And unlike your experience with Santa Monica was net positive, working with people across the board while it wasn’t negative.
Negative is still was frustrating that. Other people had different kinds of focuses and we couldn’t really bring everything together. Easily could have been better. This is one of the reasons we’re talking about getting this all out early, starting the conversations early with your broad team so that you can drive to a really great education function.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:25] Yeah, for sure. that sounds incredibly frustrating, Dave, and you say it’s not easy. I agree. It’s not easy. It wasn’t easy at Optimizely. It’s not easy at Checkr. it’s not easy anywhere that I’ve ever worked. And I’ve talked to other customer education leaders who are in a similar situation where they’re coming in to solve one problem.
But what they quickly start to realize is that training isn’t the way to solve all customer problems, right? Because training helps you build a certain set of skills in a certain context, but sometimes the problem that the customer is trying to solve is. for instance, Hey, I’m experiencing this error in the product and I just need to know how to solve it.
you probably don’t want to send them to a troubleshooting training for that. You probably just want to give them effective documentation that helps them solve the problem. But to do that, you have to know where they’re looking and what content is available to them. So I actually think one thing that helps if you’re just getting started is to borrow a technique from the world of content strategy.
And so content strategists, when they first come in, they’re responsible for looking across all of the marketing content that exists. sometimes all the help center, all the different webpages that are associated with the brand and really figuring out what content is there, who owns it. And what’s not there that needs to be there.
So that’s called a content audit. And I think that when we come on board as customer education professionals, we can actually do the same thing. We can look across all the different content that lives in documentation, in the help center in trainings, if they do exist and start cataloging that together.
So if you have different content that educates customers in different ways, then you probably aren’t aware of all the different ways the customers are even trying to get to the info. So that helps you create a more customer centric strategy.
Dave Derington: [00:13:09] Awesome. Yeah, I’ve been on this, journey as well.
And it’s, one of the things I relish from my career as I was a business analyst, so this was a big part of the job anyway. It’s what do we have? where is it at? Who owns it? How do we make it better? so why don’t we start off a discussion and tear some of the most obvious and maybe less obvious things down, maybe even debate a little bit.
Yeah, I think we know the most obvious, but let me let you lead into that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:34] let me ask you this. before we get started, you mentioned that it’s good to do a content audit based on your practices as a business analyst. What information are you even looking for when you start to do a content
Dave Derington: [00:13:47] audit?
What I’m looking for is to build a map. Typically, when you come into an Oregon and you’ve done this recently with your move, I’ve done this recently with my move. We both done this in the past. You say, here I am, my job is a hundred percent thinking about the customer education process. and I thought it was fun because the last role I’ve taken at Azuqua, everybody’s Oh my God, thank God you’re here because everybody has this font of information, but they don’t have time.
Or ability to actually put it together. So the obvious things, and I’ll just pick a few of them at random. Here is, Hey, do I have any written training slide decks in the worst case? Do I have that knowledge base you were talking about? Maybe that’s even something that the support team is just as simple to haphazardly, but it’s in a Google doc.
did you have a community site, is at a portal or something like that? So I’ll lay down a whole bunch of different things. And then I’ll start talking to people and walking through that. So what other things are you thinking of Adam? Like maybe we’ll go down the list that we’ve generated together and talk
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:52] through that.
Yeah. I think that as you’re starting to look at it, one thing that I like to do is I like to identify the owner of the content. Who owns the content today? we can have an idea about maybe who should own it in the future, but that can be contentious when you’re just walking into an organization.
Oh, absolutely. and then I also like to look at, when was it last updated? How fresh is it? Because sometimes you’re walking into an organization and, your CSMs are still sharing a PDF that was created like five years ago. And nobody knows if it’s actually up-to-date or not, even if it has a version number.
Yeah. And then I
Dave Derington: [00:15:24] like my favorite
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:26] what’s that.
Dave Derington: [00:15:27] I said that one is my favorite actually. Oh yeah. We have this document and the date doesn’t actually reflect when it was done, it was probably about three years old.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:36] Yeah. It smells right to me. And then the other thing I like to look at to your point here is how valuable is it?
So in a help center, you’ll usually see upvotes downvotes in a training you’ll usually see satisfaction scores. So if you can get a sense, at least of. Is this thing working today, then that’s going to give you a good idea of where to go from there. So yeah, let’s go down the list and talk about, what to actually include in your content strategy and potentially to be included in a customer education team.
Dave Derington: [00:16:07] Cool. w let me kick it off a little bit and I’ll take the obvious one. Alright. Obvious is you, of course, want to have a training modules, e-learning modules, things like that. the big blocks, how I tend to view them first is look, I’m going to go and make either, a live class and I’ll make all my notes and I’ll have.
God helped me a slide deck to bullet some of the main things that we’re looking at, or I’ll go on to e-learning which. We’ve talked about previously. It takes time to get there. So that the best thing you want to do is look for that training content. Somebody may have it. If you’re coming into an organization that’s already been doing training.
The people that I talk to are, of course my CSMs I’ve seen a lot of them have really good content because they’re with it every day, project managers or implementation team members, they may have their own. Things and assets that they go and talk to people about. And of course anybody else that’s, semi-technical, that’s working with customers day to day.
Even that pitch deck that’s awesome material to have. And then I will try to absorb as much of that kind of content together to see what I’ve got. So I don’t have to start from scratch. And some days you may have to do that too.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:21] I agree. That’s a great place to start. Another one that I see often is, not just do the CSMs, have trainings to onboard customers, but a lot of the time there might be some pretty sales materials that either an account exec or a solutions engineer uses, to really orient customers pre-sales and a lot of the time that can become either documentation or training too.
Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:17:42] absolutely. And usually it’s somewhat technical in those cases.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:45] Yeah. Okay. So let’s, let’s do a harder one. A lot of the time when I start talking to especially customer success leaders, but sometimes marketing leaders think about this too. They ask, are we going to do a certification? So should certification be part of customer education?
Dave Derington: [00:18:04] That’s a good question. Do you want me to answer?
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:06] Yeah. Why don’t you take a stab at it and then I’ll chime in too.
Dave Derington: [00:18:09] Okay. I think we could debate this one.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:11] Yeah, let’s do it
Dave Derington: [00:18:12] for me. I think certification is a complex topic. Only because, and those of you who may be listening that I know that I have, I’ve actually reached out to get your opinion on too.
There are some regulations, there’s some rules around what you can entitle certification. There are legal documents that say it has to do these things, and it has to be in this format. And basically if you bring it, boil it all down true. And Adam I’m using air quotes now, true certification really is something that if.
I say, Adam, I’ve got my product training right here. And at the end of the day, you’re going to take this test. that test probably has to be proctored so that you can’t cheat. It has to be very well crafted. So that test questions can’t be too hard. Can’t be too easy. Goldie locks type questions, and it needs to push you a little bit.
so on the hard edge of certification, it’s. It’s sometimes hard to get to, and it could cost you a lot and it could actually not just cost you a lot to build, but it could be a loss leader depending on how you do it. So is it right for you if you’re really early on? Maybe not, but. Maybe you have another idea on how to spin the concept of certification Adam, in a more light way.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:27] Gosh, before we even go into the idea of high stakes versus low stakes certification, there could be a whole episode on that. I think what certification, when you’re thinking about putting it in a customer education team, the first question to ask is what do we mean by certification? Because if a customer success leader comes to you and says, Hey, we need a certification.
And then the marketing leader comes to you and says, Hey, we need a certification. They could be talking about two completely different things. And so then I think the second question to ask is what do we want certification to do? Do we want certification to be a class that people can go to where there’s a brief test at the end, and that ensures that they know how to use the product?
that’s very different from taking a proctored exam that meets all these legal specifications. there’s just different levels of certification out there. Sometimes people meet in the class. Sometimes people mean the test. Sometimes people mean the actual certificate. So I think it’s important just to get aligned first on.
What do we mean by certification? And then how rigorous do we want it to be, to achieve what goal.
Dave Derington: [00:20:30] Great. so would you say Adam then a really good example yeah. Of an early certification. What might be partner certification, where you have somebody that’s helping install, who may not be your folks, but you want them to be up to speed and possible and it may not be a formal thing.
It may be an internal. Okay. Yes. You’ve looked at the materials. You’ve tested it out. I saw that you can actually present our product to a customer. Is that the kind of thing that you’re angling in on?
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:53] I like starting with partners because there’s an element there where if you have a smaller controlled group of partners who are delivering on your behalf, you really want to make sure that they can do what you can do.
So you can actually measure whether they can pitch your product, you can measure whether they can support your product in these use cases. And usually because it’s a smaller and more controlled population, it does make it easier for you to know that they’re actually doing what you ask them to do.
Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:21:21] That’s great. So you’ve quantified the journey.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:24] Yeah, absolutely. And then, and start doing lightweight certifications with customers. I’ve seen all sorts of certifications, right? There’s like a HubSpot’s inbound marketing certification where you don’t even have to be. Their customer to get it. It’s just a way for them to, introduce people to the world of inbound marketing,
Dave Derington: [00:21:41] right?
Yeah. That’s exceptional. You can go all the way up to a Tableau type certification or PMP. When you think about the project management, certification, which is really intense and brings people to their knees.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:52] Yeah. And a PMP is, I think that’s technically an accreditation, which is just a whole different level in some ways.
Absolutely. Yeah. I guess in summary, the question to ask here is what do you actually want your certification program to do? and then from that you can ask, what form does it actually need to take?
Dave Derington: [00:22:09] Totally. I think that’s really a good way to
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:11] approach. cool. we talked a moment ago about documentation and knowledge bases or help centers.
And do they belong in a customer education program now? I think the answer is yes, in both of the most recent customer education programs that I’ve built. I’ve actually started with documentation before I’ve done anything else. because in my opinion, documentation is one of the most efficient ways to get knowledge and expertise from your subject matter experts, head, and help customers access it.
What do you think,
Dave Derington: [00:22:40] Dave? Yeah, I think so too. And there are some cases, depending on what your, how you’re approaching things is documentation training. No, not particularly. it’s I think it’s a precursor. I think it’s a F a requirement for training because that’s commonly where I pull stuff out, knowledge base is a little less structured, right?
It’s documentation that is in a, more of a freeform, but indexed fashion. I’d like to say. and I’m actually agreeing with you. I think that both of these things technically belong within the customer education persona, that role, because they’re the foundation of really good educational material that.
That, it’s all written down and it’s like the knowledge base in particular, if you’re doing it right, it’s constantly updated and constantly surfaced probably by your support reps, maybe even your CSM team. What do you think?
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:35] Yeah, I agree with documentation, being able to get more people from the organization involved really helps because it is a more accessible way for them to.
Help identify what are the most common issues that are coming up? how does this feature actually work and do it in a way that’s more scalable than asking them to do trainings over and over. So I like that. And I also think that when you’re thinking about documentation and help centers, cross-functionally, you’re avoiding this hammer and nail problem.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the phrase when all you have is a hammer. Every problem starts to look like a nail. I think when you just have training. Then every problem starts to look like a training problem. So when you have documentation, you have a way to start thinking about how can we help customers in a way that isn’t just, Oh, let’s put a training on that.
Let’s put a training on that. There are other ways to help your customer solve problems besides putting them in a classroom or sending them to an email. Totally,
Dave Derington: [00:24:31] totally great. So let’s go ahead and talk about community.
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:33] Yeah. So another piece that people like to ask about is community. I know a lot of people who are, for example, director of customer education and community or customer training and community.
So does community belong in a customer education program?
Dave Derington: [00:24:49] That’s a good question. And one of the things that I’ll attribute to Donna Weber and probably Bill Cushard , made the comment. If you build it, they won’t come. Hey, you could build documentation or a community in this case.
And if I just put a website up and say here, guys, post your questions. what happens, when you’re a new company and you’re just doing that for the first time, maybe nothing, but I would tend to agree with you that. Community is, let’s put it this way. I would tend to assert that community should be well aligned if not part of that customer education landscape.
Why? Because we just talked about documentation and knowledge base and the thing that I’ve seen at every company I’ve worked for, and even in my own projects that are on the side, you put up a forum or a community, people are gonna start asking questions. And the great thing about a community is that’s there in preparation.
That’s there in perpetuity. I ask a question, somebody answers it. Hopefully it’s somebody, who’s a subject matter expert. And then that’s basically pinned. And I can go back to that might decrease in relevance over time, but that’s a source of material that’s constantly surfacing by people who are trying to learn.
So what do you think?
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:07] Yeah, I think it definitely makes sense to account for community. again, like with certification, there’s a question to ask here, which is. What does community mean? Some people think community is the online forum. Some people think community is user groups and events. to that token first define what community means to your organization and depending on where it lives or what it is, it might be a shared responsibility.
A lot of the times I see marketing do a lot of the field marketing pieces, the user groups, the live events, things like that. and then they may run. part of the online community, but they may not. That might be within the actual customer education team too. We actually tried it both ways that Optimizely, but I think to your point, the, if you build it, they won’t come is essential because.
Customers will come asking questions. And if there’s no one there to answer them, then that community is going to become a tumbleweed community really quickly. So I would make sure that regardless you have subject matter experts who are in there, whether they’re from your company or whether they’re partners or, customers that are part of your MVP program, just really make sure that there are people in there to facilitate discussions and to answer questions.
Dave Derington: [00:27:16] Totally. So basically to summarize, you need to invest in that. You can’t just throw it out there and expect it to do something.
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:24] Yeah. it’s true of all of these. if you build it, you have to maintain it. But, with communities, I think that’s amplified just because there’s always something going on in a
Dave Derington: [00:27:32] community.
Totally. let’s flip to one more point. I know we have is, and I’ll ask you this as a question. Yeah. So there’s this topic called content marketing. And again, this may be an alignment issue or alignment effort. So tell me more about what you think content marketing has to do in the customer education ecosystem.
Where does it fit in or does it
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:57] at some point someone’s going to ask you, Hey, we’ve made all these eBooks and white papers and blogs and things like that. Those are all customer education, too, right? And my answer to that is they can be depending on how you want to use them. So usually I like to have a tag team relationship with the content marketing team.
If they’re producing eBooks or white papers or blog posts that are primarily aimed at generating awareness or thought leadership, I love to be able to take some of the concepts from those and repurpose those into training or documentation that can be used. Post-sales. And vice versa. A lot of the times we’re hearing an issue from our customer base, especially if we’re working on more conceptual trainings or documentations.
I love to share that with them as well, so they can turn it into more aspirational pre-sales content.
Dave Derington: [00:28:45] Ooh, I like that. Let me share an idea or let me share a topic that we’ve done recently at Azu CWA, where we actually aligned pretty tightly while I’m in marketing. So that actually makes it so much easier.
And when we say, Hey, we wanted to. I’ll give you an example. We were working on a new, aspect of our product, and we did a very short, very concise use case, right? Hey, you can do this with Azuqua. And it was very light, very, to the point, very short. And that was more outbound for marketing too, to bring people’s attention to the product.
And then. I had something prepared that would go further after that. So it told people exactly all the steps you need to do to implement what they were talking about. And man, that was awfully fun because then you would see people literally say, wow, that’s interesting. Now, if they said, it’s not interesting, they can move on and they’re not bothered by it, but that’s cool because then you’re working in collaboration with the true marketing effort and making very deep content while your marketing team is talking at it.
Kind of at a higher level to see whether you’re interested or not. So that’s a really good way to navigate into teach.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:53] Yeah. Content, marketers, love repurposing content I’ve found. it really helps fill in those gaps in the customer journey.
Dave Derington: [00:30:01] Totally. And it go the other way too, because I’ve seen content that I’ve created where the rest of the marketing team goes, Hey, what if I pick this with us?
This did a little thing and then re repurpose that. And I’m like, let’s go for it because that brings more eyes to the training material that we have to
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:15] awesome. So I think we’ve had some really good debate about what goes in a customer education team. It sounds like all of these potentially can be in a customer education team, but you really have to be intentional about what each of them is going to do.
Dave Derington: [00:30:30] I think that’s a really good point. So basically Adam, you’re saying no, what you’re trying to accomplish by beginning with the end in mind. What’s my goal. What’s my outcome. and. We’ll probably get back to this in other podcasts, but also be thinking a little bit about how am I going to measure that.
That’s not the goal right now and now we’re just trying to get the landscape tout.
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:48] Yeah. We’ll we’ll come back to measurement for sure. So let’s, with that said let’s switch over to our mailbag.
Dave Derington: [00:30:54] All right. let’s we got here today.
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:55] Let’s reach into the mailbag and see what we got welcome.
You’ve got mail.
Dave Derington: [00:31:03] So here’s a question from Kim in San Francisco who asks. I train on a software product. That’s always changing. How do you keep up with all of your software updates in your trainings and videos?
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:17] Oh my gosh, this is one of the most common questions I hear.
Dave Derington: [00:31:21] That’s a great one. Stressful
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:23] it’s very stressful.
So we could do a whole episode on this one, content maintenance and updates, but this, this does align well with what we’ve been talking about already having a content strategy. I think just super, simply on a high level. Your software product is always changing, but that doesn’t mean that your videos and your content always need to 100% reflect what your software looks like.
Your learners are smart. They’ll know if a button is in a slightly different place. So it’s on you to figure out when is the product different enough from the assets I have that I need to make that change. So if you have a regular audit period built in, we are looking at your existing content.
Or, that, you’re doing a major feature release that is going to change the way your product looks and works in a meaningful way. That’s the time to update.
Dave Derington: [00:32:11] I think that’s a very concise answer, Adam. And I would confirm that, or I would validate that as well. the real tendency for those of us who have that perfectionist gene is, Oh my gosh, you’ve changed something fundamentally.
I wanna go back and fix it. if you’re early on in your organization and you’re just starting out. My advice to you is to turn that gene off or at least say, no, perfect. Is the enemy of done or perfect. Is the enemy of good. I love that. I F I don’t know who to attribute that to, but I love that one.
And I say it all the time and it catches the key point is for me, at least, and Adam, I don’t know how you feel about this. I am an early. I’m early in that cycle of developing content. When I’m in that mode where it doesn’t exist, I vie for getting it out there and putting a beta sticker on it and saying, please click here for any inconsistency as questions or whatever, and get that loop going.
Because I feel like it’s a partnership with our customers. And I’m a customer of many other vendors. I want to know that people are listening to me and that. I can say, Oh, you’ve got this here or this doesn’t seem to be quite right in that team’s going to be listening. That’s super hard, but your product is going to be changing so fast.
You’re going to get completely stressed out. If you try to maintain a cadence, that’s completely in sync. It’s not sustainable.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:30] I love your idea of having constant feedback too, because that helps you figure out what your customers actually notice and what they don’t, because it may be that you are two or three ribs out of date.
But, the button only moved, as slightly to a slightly different place or it changed color or something like that. Customers probably don’t care about that as much as, if you changed major pieces of
Dave Derington: [00:33:50] functionality, probably not. And I would say just the last note on this, one of the other ways to get somewhat around this is, and I’m not lobbying for this all the time, but if you’re early on in, you’re only doing instructor led type training.
One of the things that I say is like, The product’s evolving. I’m giving trainings every week, every month, I’m updating on the fly because I have to prep and I’ve always found that was a really good way to keep in sync and then basically take some of the videos or recordings of those and put them online and socket them in.
So to speak into some of the material, not perfect, but it’s another way to really get accelerating pretty quick.
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:25] Yeah. Be transparent with your customers about where you are. And as time goes on, you’ll probably also start to work on some more evergreen types of material, either conceptual training. diagrams things that don’t change so often, so that’ll help you over.
Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:34:39] Thank goodness for that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:40] All right. So we’ve had a great discussion today. And just to summarize this week’s, experiment, let’s wrap up with a clear call to action. Let’s do it. All right. Cool. So get out a piece of paper or a spreadsheet and let’s start figuring out what the landscape of your customer education program is going to look like.
I would say first, if you’re the education leader at your organization, take stock of where the existing programs live and start talking to the other leaders in your organization about how you can better collaborate. So on the other hand, if you haven’t done a content audit yet, and you’re still figuring this out for the first time, get out a spreadsheet and start making an audit of the content that educates customers put down the stuff, you have stuff you think you have stuff that maybe you found that you don’t know, you have.
But do it for do it from the customer’s perspective, across those different channels. And then use that as a way to start the conversation with other team members to figure out where the gaps are and how you can better work together.
Dave Derington: [00:35:39] I love this. This is a fun one, Adam, this is it’s something that I’d also say in that just organically is it’s going to be a little painful at times and people may be, challenging you, but most people will recognize your role and how it helps them pretty quick, because then they can offload and give you information.
And they’re not completely burdened by having to do this all the time. super cool. I might go back and do this again cause I love doing it. All right. let’s close this out. If you want to learn more, we have a website and it is at. Customer.education you could type in the HTTPS part or HTTP.
We’ll take at the same point, it’s customer.education there. You’re going to find all of our podcasts, our show notes, and other material like templates. That will be an easy download to help you with these exercises. And please, if you have found value in this podcast, we ask you compel, you share it with others, friends, peers, and your network.
We’re trying to find the others. That means find everybody in our ecosystem and help. Help as a team collectively to get up to speed with this material and make great customer educators with that, we are closing outs. again, you can find us on Twitter on LinkedIn. We’ll put our handles on the website and to our audience.
Thanks for joining us to go out, educate experiments and find
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:01] your feet. Thanks for listening.