Nikki Engel: [00:00:00] I do one more.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:02] Yeah. Okay. What was I saying that the customer Academy should be open to even non-customers to view. Yes,
the lab, the customer education lab, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and bad advice. Like the cockroaches. They are. My name is Adam Avramescu. Your host with the most you can boast the most roast. And today our episode is actually a recording, a webinar that I did with a company called Northpass.
And if you haven’t heard of them, you can go to Northpass.com and check them out. They are a company focused on customer education. They’re a customer focused learning management system. And part of the reason why I thought that this would be a helpful episode to share. Is because we were really focused in that webinar on what it takes to build your first customer Academy.
And if you look at the analytics for this podcast, it’s still true to this day that one of the most popular episodes is the one on building your customer education program from scratch. And I know that those are questions that a lot of people have when they’re still starting out. So I think you’ll enjoy the content that we shared.
In this webinar, because it’s really focused on how to build content, how to structure an Academy, how to look at different metrics that will inform how you iterate over time. So definitely really relevant to the topics that we discuss on this podcast. One note before we dive in Dave and I will be at DevLearn, which is the e-learning Guild’s conference coming up in October.
So if you’re there on October 23rd through October 25th, come and say hi to us. And especially if you know someone who’s going tell them to attend our session, it’s going to be on the Thursday, which I believe is the 25th. we’ll be talking about customer education metrics and visualizing ROI. And it’ll be like a live episode of this show.
So if you are listening to this episode, as it’s posted, make sure to join us or spread the word about joining us at DevLearn. So without further ado, we’ll dive into the episode. Thanks everyone.
Nikki Engel: [00:02:15] Do you want to say, thank you for those, joining us right now, hopefully some of you on your lunch break, some of you it’s morning, some of you it’s evening, so we really appreciate you taking the time and spending with us. my name is Nikki angle. I will be your moderator. I am the head of product marketing here at Northpass.
And I have with me today, Adam Avramescu. who right? who is our customer education expert? And I will let him introduce himself and give you a little bit of background on his expertise and his experience. But, the purpose of this webinar is really to educate you on tips and best practices when it comes to developing.
A customer education strategy and building a customer Academy for yourselves and for your organization. So really excited to dive in with Adam, and answer all questions you guys might have, but Adam, would you like to give a little introduction for yourself?
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:12] Yeah, of course. Happy to be on and, good to meet all of you today and looking forward to your questions.
As far as my background goes, I’ve been in customer education, instructional design, and content development for basically my. Entire career. And most recently over the past few years, I’ve been out here in San Francisco, helping to build innovative customer education programs for some of the fastest growing SaaS startups.
So a optimized early and a Checkr who, if you have heard just raised another, Big funding round. these are some of the companies that I’ve helped build customer education programs for, and I’ll be speaking from some of my experience, building those, but I’m also very active in the customer education community and, want to be as active as possible, but sharing out my experiences.
So to that end, I co-host a podcast called CELabs, CELab, the customer education laboratory. and I co-host that with a great guy in Seattle named Dave Derington. He leads customer education at a company called outreach. and then most recently I’ve also written a book called customer education, which we’ll share the link for it.
You
Nikki Engel: [00:04:23] have a copyright here. Awesome. Thank you for that, introduction. So let’s just jump right in and get started. we. Have a mix of viewers and listeners today, some of which are from companies who are just starting out, some are more established companies. I want to help see if you could help set the stage for us by defining really sorry, what customer education really is and what it means to you.
in terms of what is it. Customer education’s supposed to do, what does the customer Academy, what should it look like? what does a customer expect out of a customer Academy and whatever else you might want to add from there?
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:06] Yeah, for sure. So I think what we think about what a customer Academy is and how it fits into the idea of customer education, a lot of the time for those of us who are tasked with building a program for the first time, The people who are asking us to do it sometimes even including our customers are really just thinking about a series of activities.
They think, Oh, I might want to go through a live training, or I might want to go through some online modules, or I might want a knowledge base. And these are all reasonable activities that you can use. But I would really want to start this conversation by thinking about what customer education. Really does for a business.
And we’ll talk about some of the metrics that you can use. I think a couple of questions in the future, but for now, really start by thinking about customer education, not as a series of activities that you’re performing. It’s not just the training that you’re doing. It’s not just the articles that you’re writing, but it is really a function within your business that accelerates the way that customers come to meaningful value of your product along their life cycle.
because to do that, they need to learn things and learning things doesn’t mean just being exposed to the information. It means that they actually have to be able to take that information, process it, and then perform those activities, ideally with your product. And I’m speaking here for those of you who have software products, if you’re educating your customers about something else, then whatever the action you want them to perform, should be that’s
Nikki Engel: [00:06:35] great.
Do you want to go into a little bit about, what you’ve seen in terms of customer churn and how. Having a customer Academy really impacts
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:44] that. Yeah. So this is actually from a study that a affirm called Preact did a few years ago and they were originally doing customer success exclusively. I think they’ve pivoted since then.
but they came to some really interesting findings in their surveys of, customer success programs across the board when they were looking at the reason that customers churned from different SaaS products. and for those of you who are not in the SaaS world, churn here basically means a customer who has significantly downgraded or who has stopped using the product entirely.
Again, I think the findings here were really interesting. You could look at some of the main reasons why, you would think a customer would leave like a product underperforming. yeah, that was almost 20% of the reasons why people left. You could think about ineffective relationship building, which.
Hey, if you don’t have time to build meaningful relationships with your customers, they probably aren’t going to stick with you even poor customer service they’re around 14%. But the thing that really stood out to me from this survey is that the single biggest predictor of customer churn was actually poor onboarding.
So for almost 20, 83% of those customers who ended up turning, again, across the board, across the industry, The reason basically was that they failed to have a meaningful experience, getting educated as to the value of the product, how they should be using it and how they could leave.
Nikki Engel: [00:08:11] Very interesting.
yeah, it’s interesting to hear that, from the very first, when they first sign up for your product, the very first thing that they really get exposed to is onboarding and you don’t think. that’s going to be the biggest factor of someone turning maybe even just a year later, but it does make such a big impact on their whole experience.
If you just, the first I know people always say like, when you’re interviewing someone, you always know within the first 30 seconds, if you’re going to hire them or not, and you’re going to have a good experience with this person or not. So the same thing there, from even a product standpoint,
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:45] Yeah.
and it’s not necessarily that once a customer is on board, we want to continue reselling them the product. I think that is that might not be the best experience for our customer when they’re trying to learn and get value from it. But I think something that we do underestimate when we think about customer education is we have a lot of really great information locked in our heads about what our product can do and what our product should be doing and what customers should do to get value from it.
and again, we’ll talk about this when we get into structure of an Academy coming up in a little bit, but I think one thing that really gets in our way, a lot of the time, especially when we’re talking to subject matter experts in our business is we’ll have all of this expertise locked in our head.
And we think that just by putting together a series of content that is really, a feature driven. We ended up missing the broader context here because we have the curse of knowledge about how to use our products. And when we just talk about our features, we ended up missing a critical opportunity to actually help our customers understand how they can get value from our products.
Yeah.
Nikki Engel: [00:09:51] I love that. Especially from a product marketing world, I tend to always agree. It’s all about driving the value and the why, rather than just feature.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:00] Yeah. So it’s a little bit different than for, a lot of us come from internal learning and development backgrounds or sales enablement, or places like that.
And this it’s a little bit different in that sense, in that that you, the customer can leave you at any time. Yeah. So I always like to start with churn.
Nikki Engel: [00:10:15] That’s great. so you’ve been in the customer education field for awhile now. You’ve. Had done a ton of research for your book, I’m sure. On your podcasts based on what you’ve seen and heard and experienced yourself firsthand.
how are modern SaaS companies really using customer education today and how are they using a different ways or do you see it differently across the board? Are you seeing that most companies that you’re touching and talking to are using it all the same way?
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:48] No, I don’t think everyone’s using it in the same way, but I think as time has gone on, the use cases for it are starting to coalesce.
So if we take a bit of a history lesson back in the day before, SaaS companies were really that prevalent, there was certainly a concept of customer training and of. training services that customers would get when they implemented a product. So let’s say that you are implementing a on-prem software while you would send your team to training, or the vendor might come onsite and you’d go through a week of training, or you might go out to a really bulky certification program and really.
That was your opportunity to get enabled on how to use the software. And ideally, if it were something that were a little more high risk, where by using the software improperly, you were going to end up breaking something and actually think this is also true for hardware, right? Like with the hardware, if you don’t get trained on how to use it properly, you could end up electrocuting yourself.
So it’s really important to have that initial training and there’s definitely a liability component to it as well. but. Back in the day before there was really a good way for all of this to be distributed online at scale, that was the way the training services worked. Now, modern SaaS companies are thinking about this a little bit differently because they recognize that again, going back to the point about churn that we were focusing on earlier.
The customer is in a cycle of reeducation all the time, because the customer is continuously renewing. So as you’re thinking about, what your customer education program should do, and you want to get pretty specific about this to start with, think about what point in the life cycle. It gives you the most opportunity to educate customers for some it’s really about getting further up in the marketing cycle and helping build awareness around what your product is.
For some, it might be a closer to what you would call the, the bottom of the funnel right before the customer has purchased and really helping them ideate different use cases, and prepare themselves for an implementation. But where I see a lot of people focusing really is on customer onboarding to start with and really make sure that you’re protecting that investment in your software or whatever your product is by really training people, not just on what the features are, but how to get value from those features.
and maybe how to think about the industry in which your software is being
Nikki Engel: [00:13:10] that’s great. I think you had some examples.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:13] Yeah. So these are some examples that I’ve built in the past. on the left, we’ve got some examples from Optimizly. and on the right, we have an example of, something that we were doing a Checkr and I can call out a few of the design decisions here.
One is. You notice a trend now where a lot of customer education programs are trying to go more highly branded. So it’s not just about having this, learning management system or training. All of that is completely gated off and customers don’t get access to it, and they’re never exposed to any of your learning content.
That’s just not the way that things are going anymore. There’s a real emphasis on discoverability. up here in the top left, we have opt-in verse, which was the program that we built at. Optimizely. And what you might notice about it is that it’s not just an Academy. The Academy is connected to other resources that you would use to learn like a knowledge base and a customer community.
And there’s a big emphasis through all of these on search. if you notice up there at the top, there is a unified federated search where, you type in a search term and it’ll give you results from anywhere within our resources, not just the Academy, not just the knowledge base, not just the community.
So you really want to put that emphasis on, Hey, how are customers going to find these resources? Even if they’re not specifically delivered to them by someone at your organization, because customers are getting savvier and savvier at searching for what they want. They don’t always want to contact you every time they have a question, or even every time they want to start learning about your product.
If we move to the bottom left, this was something that we started evolving in our Academy over time at optimized lead, where we started thinking about paths. and how can we make those paths correspond to different roles on the customer side? So I think another thing that we’re really starting to see is role-based education and path based education and helping people understand what learning is going to be most relevant for them given not just the product they’re using, but the skills that they really want to build.
And another great example of this that I actually don’t have up here is a Salesforce Trailhead. If you go to Salesforce, Trailhead, which is the learning site and certification program, and, they have a customer community component of it for, for all things, Salesforce, when you first hit that page, you actually see, really career based information on the value of getting, not just Salesforce certified, but.
What does a career as a Salesforce administrator look like, what are the salaries that are paid? And then what’s the learning that you need to go through in order to get to that point. Now, for a lot of companies, you don’t have entire careers built around your product the same way that Salesforce does.
So you can’t really start there. And I wouldn’t recommend starting there. But I would recommend starting to think about who are the people using your product? what is their day to day like, and how has using your product going to help them become more successful at what they do? Because you can start to orient the learning that you create around that, not just going through the features that you think are important, but how are they going to drive value for your customer?
So on the right, the example that I have here from Checkr is I’m actually one of the learning paths that we built, which. Walks you through the flow that you might go through as someone who’s evaluating a background check Checkr as a background checks as a service. So it’s something that you might not be aware of, all the different things that you need to keep in mind from a compliance perspective, from a candidate experience perspective.
And we thought that one thing that we could do there was not just educate you on what our features are, but how to walk through that life cycle of evaluating a candidate and making a fair decision, that actually ultimately affords them more opportunity in the market.
Nikki Engel: [00:16:54] That’s great. I think it’s really helpful to talk through some of these examples and even bring up, some, companies that are currently using.
a customer Academy is very successfully and to just get some ideas from that
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:08] know, I’d recommend. if you’re looking for inspiration, do this analysis on any company that you like go, go type in that company’s name plus Academy or university or certification. If you. Try one of those combinations you’ll usually end up going to the right place.
and do an analysis of what is their user flow. how are they positioning the value of the Academy that they have set up? what is the entry point? what’s the positioning? how is the content organized and how effectively does that resonate with who you imagine the user of that?
Nikki Engel: [00:17:37] that’s great. just moving along something we have been noticing here, in the learning management space is a misalignment between business strategy and customer education. We find that oftentimes those who are tasked with setting up customer education programs and initiatives are just so focused on the learning outcome that they forget, or don’t know how to string it back to a, the bigger tasks that are at hand.
In your experience, how do you ensure that your customer academies aligned to actual business outcomes? for example, like what have you seen, how do you think about business outcomes as it relates back to customer training? How do you really tie that altogether?
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:20] Yeah, I think one thing to start with here is you’ll very quickly be led down the path of looking at.
Not necessarily your business outcomes or your value metrics, but very operational metrics. So certainly there are things that you can look at within the performance of your Academy to decide how well individual pieces of content are performing or resonating and will. We’ll go into some of those a little bit later, but honestly I wouldn’t start there because a lot of those metrics will be the same from Academy to Academy.
You want to know how many people are enrolling, how many people are completing, what they think about the content so on and so forth. that’s pretty similar. Honestly, anyone running a customer education program is going to want to know those, but what’s going to be different from company to company or from business case to business case is what is your Academy actually doing for the business?
And to do that, you really have to be in tune with what the business itself is saying is important. So at the time that we created the first version of the optimized lead Academy, for instance, we were really hearing a couple of very clear needs. And even with those, we needed to be very clear about which one to prioritize first, but the two things that we heard or that one.
Customers who in the past had just gotten it and just understood exactly what they should be doing with Optimizely’s product because Optimizly is an experimentation product. So it got really well adopted at first by innovative digital marketers who knew that they wanted to experiment with their sites and knew they wanted to run AB tests.
but more people started coming onto the product and needed a little bit more. Direction. So the thing that we were really hearing loud and clear from our customers was we want a way to go from zero to 60 with Optimizely, and we want to. Know what the right order is. We want to know what we don’t know.
Meanwhile, we are having a parallel problem in the business where, we were handling a lot of support tickets, very manually. So we were starting to build up our knowledge base resources. And we’ll take a look at some of those in a moment as well, but we knew that we needed to make an impact on support deflection.
So we knew when we first started building the first version of the Academy, that the way that we were going to look at business outcomes and to know whether we were heading in the right direction was. Number one, is this something that customers are reporting is helping them scale onboarding, and to do that, we could ask the customers.
And we could also, as a proxy, ask the customer success managers who are responsible for onboarding those customers. how effectively are you able to use this as a resource instead of doing all of these as manual time-consuming trainings? Because a lot of you are probably in this situation as well, where when your individuals at your company are all responsible for doing these very manual time-consuming trainings, not only is that taking a lot of their time, but it doesn’t scale.
So the moment you have a point of contact turnover on your customer side or new people join the project teams. Guess what you’re doing that training all over again. So how can you drive efficiency there? And then we also cascaded that over on the support side and said, how efficiently are we resolving support tickets?
So let’s actually look at the customer deflection rate. Let’s look at the number of customers. We have divided by the number of support tickets that are coming in. And let’s try to optimize that over time so that as we bring in more customers, the number of support tickets that are being submitted by them is not cascading linearly with that.
Now, this might look different for you, right? You might say, Hey, the need really is to generate more marketing demand and more qualified leads. And if that’s what your Academy is doing, then that’s great too. Just be clear about what it is that you’re tracking too, because the content that you ended up creating ultimately should support whatever that narrative is.
And you should be able to look at that as a signal. So for example, here, look at a common, flow that customers go through, right? Like for a lot of customers who have a or companies who have a customer journey, you map it out this way, where over to the left of the screen would be the marketing funnel.
So actually getting, a customer to sign and going from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. But then once a customer is on board, you’ve got to get them onboarded. you have to drive meaningful adoption over time. You have to get them to renew and to expand. And then ultimately you need that customer to have positive lifetime value because especially for SaaS businesses, if a customer doesn’t stay with you long enough, they’re not going to be profitable, right.
there’s a, some costs involved with customer acquisition. and in my book, actually, I go into a little bit of how you look at, the CAC versus LTV ratio, but we won’t get it in, get into that right now. So when you’re looking at that, there are some risks along the way. So if we go to the next, yeah, like if you’re not doing onboarding correctly, you’re actually not going to ever get to that point of meaningful adoption.
And you’re going to have to spend a lot of manual time rebuilding trust with the customer and showing them what use cases are and how they can, start to build workflows around that. Maybe they adopt, but if you’re not helping educate them about other ways to adopt or other ways to grow over time, they’re not going to renew with you.
They’re not going to expand over time. And even if they do renew, but you, aren’t still focused on educating them throughout the life cycle, you are going to experience slow and painful turn. When customers decide that. They don’t really see a good reason to keep using your product. Whether the answer to that is to go with a competitor or to Homebrew their own solution, or for a lot of companies that are creating their own categories and might not be familiar to customers.
The customer might just decide, Hey, this isn’t business critical to me, this is not something that I care about doing. So I think when we just map the customer journey, the in, the way that we have written in white here, where. That’s a very business centric way of looking at it, right?
These are the business tasks that we have to perform. We have to onboard them. We have to get them to adopt. We have to retain them. We have to expand them and then we have to get to LTV. So we will be profitable. that’s not how the customer looks at it. And so thinking about how your education program is really going to drive from a customer centric perspective.
Becomes really important there.
Nikki Engel: [00:24:28] Yeah. I love how this is it’s all waterfall effect that you really don’t have to look at them separately. If your CEO comes to you and says we have a retention problem. it’s not just, let’s go look at retention, but let’s actually go before and look how onboarding happens and adoption.
And are we. Doing those well, and then we’re just stuck at this retention point, or should we start from the beginning and actually solve the issues there before we just harp on retention?
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:56] Yeah, Nikki, I think you’re absolutely right. And one disconnect that I see a lot of the time, especially for people who are newer to customer education is it’s a real struggle to speak the language of the business and to really listen to what’s most important to other business leaders and tie the value and the strategy of the customer education program.
To that. So I think it’s always helpful to keep that lens of the thing that my business leaders are talking about as being most important. How does customer education drive or not drive that? Because it may be that you’re doing the most effective thing from an instructional design standpoint and frankly, a lot of us aren’t anyway.
but we might not be supporting the broader business goals. So I think that’s a, it’s a really important lens to keep on. Yeah,
Nikki Engel: [00:25:38] that’s great. so you touched about, customer Academy and having knowledge base, at Optimizly and how actually one led people to go into the other. The question comes up all the time of what’s the difference between a customer Academy and a knowledge base can’t they do the same thing.
How would you define both of these, resources and why would an organization need one, versus another.
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:04] I would start by saying anything can do anything. Do you, but do you want your platform to do everything so answering, more seriously though? I actually do think that there’s a pretty distinct difference between what a customer Academy will be optimized for and what a knowledge base will be optimized for or a help center.
I think both terms are pretty calm. And actually, if you go to the next slide, you’ll see some examples when we were first building the program at Optimizely, the thing that you see on the left is actually the very first version of the Academy. this was what we built before. the version that I showed you a few slides ago, and we actually built this on an instance of Zendesk.
So you actually have kind of an apples to apples comparison here of. What an Academy might do if it’s built on top of a knowledge based platform. And the answer is, first of all, we have to do a pretty fair amount of design skinning to even get the platform we were using to mirror the type of experience that you might want for a customer Academy.
one thing that we did was we really tried to organize the content, such that you could readily identify. Where you could slot in what level you are at. and where to start learning and everything in there, we hacked as articles. So we had text-based lessons. We had videos that we embedded.
and then we had things that we called activities, but that weren’t actually interactive. They were step-by-step things that. You could go into the optimized lead product and do, but it was almost like reading an instruction manual for your activities. and they’re comes pretty quickly where this is great for prototyping a solution and figuring it out.
Where is your content in the right order? Does it resonate with customers? What are they about? What are the downvote, but what you start to realize pretty quickly. And in doing something like this, is that. There’s a lot of functionality that’s missing once you move beyond prototyping. And when you want to start to scale to say other user types or other personas, the more you want to start getting creative with how your content is organized and displayed, the more you actually want a product that supports that.
So the way I think about this is a knowledge base is really optimized for being searchable. and a lot of the times. That search is going to come from, not just from searching within the knowledge base. Like we have, an example of here, but really searching from Google or searching. Within your product, if your product has a search capability.
So here you really want to look at how do I organize things into a way where I can make them as discoverable as possible based on what my customers are searching for. So you look at the search terms that they’re putting in. If you have any analytics for that, you look at which articles are being viewed most often and any decent web analytics products will help you get to the bottom of that.
Like we. we had some analytics that we were getting from our knowledge based platform, but yeah, we also used a lot of Google analytics on the backend and just to figure out what our users were actually doing in here. but that doesn’t tell you a lot of things that you want to know from a customer Academy, right?
For a customer Academy, you actually want to start to understand, Hey, who are my users? What accounts are they from? What percentage of that accounts have taken or not taken certain courses? how far does an individual user get through a path before they drop off? How do they perform on quizzes or activities?
And those are questions that really, at that point, it makes sense to have a different platform that’s optimized for creating and displaying and customizing those journeys and serving the right type of content to support that, and then giving you the measurements on the back end. So you can actually tell a more intelligent story about how far users are getting what they’re doing and whether they’re succeeding or failing at doing that.
Nikki Engel: [00:29:56] So I that’s all from an optimization standpoint and the value you get out of it from a content standpoint, what would you for someone new to, customer academies, how would you say to divide up content in. Differently.
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:14] Yeah. So there’ll be a lot of overlap. I would say don’t be afraid of putting similar material in both places, but think about how it’s being conveyed.
if you really empathize with your users here. first of all, you might come to different conclusions in the ones I’m about to tell you because you’re using might be very different than the ones I have in my head right now. but a user. That’s using a knowledge base is typically there because they have a specific question and want a specific answer.
So with knowledge bases, it’s really helpful to divide up your content by topic to make it very easily scannable with the table of contents. and to serve content that is either kind of feature documentation because they might be asking, Hey, how does this thing work? or that’s support focused, right?
Cause they might be saying, I’m having a problem with this. How do I solve it? So they’re being very concise, having very stepwise process oriented content. Like here’s the list here are the steps to resolve it. that tends to be really effective in a knowledge base in an Academy it’s a little bit different, right?
Because in an Academy you’re making the assumption that. Someone entering it doesn’t know what they don’t know. So first of all, think about what the entry point is going to be. How do you make sure that you have a clear map of the right place for someone to begin using your Academy? for example, in the optimized, the example here, we had a, not just a beginner, novice, intermediate, skilled, advanced.
Framework where you could assess where you were supposed to be coming in. But we actually had in that introduction section that you see in the top left, there was a little bit of a diagnostic there where you could say, Hey, what do I know? What do I don’t know? And then you could use that to calibrate where to enter the content at the point, that made the most sense for you in terms of the actual content being served.
I’m definitely seeing a trend towards. some learning professionals in the audience are gonna hate me for saying this, but microlearning, there’s definitely a trend towards making your learning very digestible and bite-sized, and I only say people are gonna hate me for saying that because it’s a bit of a buzzword, but I think the point is clear, especially for people using software products or people using, SaaS.
You only have a limited amount of time with your customer and their attention is going to flag pretty quickly. So I would say as much as you can focus on making your content bite-sized so let’s talk about. three minute videos, not one hour videos, for instance, keeping interactivity in there so that people can challenge their skills, and can connect concepts and really apply concepts as much as possible.
So that might be, putting in quizzes that might be putting in a sandbox environment of your product so they can play around and. experienced some of the concepts firsthand. It could be a, for more conceptual materials having diagrams or little, interactivities that they can play with. because I do think in an Academy, another thing that you can focus on is not just how do I use this product, or how do I troubleshoot, but what are some of the conceptual things related to my industry?
That would really help someone come to meaningful use. So are there certain use cases or workflows or even, can I educate you a little bit about industry concepts and best practices? For example, an optimized really? We didn’t teach you how to use the product. we did teach you how to use the product.
We didn’t just teach you how to use the product. we also taught you about best practices for experimentation at Checkr. We didn’t just teach you how to use the product we taught you about best practices for fairly evaluating candidates. And there, you probably need different activities to support it that are more conceptual.
Nikki Engel: [00:33:36] Yeah. I love that. Just trying to help them be more successful in their day to day. instead of just throwing the product at them and saying, this is how you do step one, two and three.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:49] Yeah. we would always say, I think this is a core value for me. actually, and it continues to be a core value for me is it’s not about product knowledge.
It’s about industry education.
Nikki Engel: [00:34:01] Yep. And it goes a long way. the numerous academies I’ve logged into for various B2B products that we’re using here. it’s helpful to, it’s nice to see it in somebody else’s eyes and get like a use case out of it raw. And they’re actually thinking the way I’m thinking instead of just.
Here’s a feature. This is how you use it, but why do I want to use that? And what does that really going to do for my job at the moment?
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:31] yeah, cause think of your own experience using a new product. How often do you go and open the instruction manual and read it from top to tail before you actually just start trying to use the thing?
maybe it’s a, if it’s a very dangerous product, you will do that, but for most, you’re not going to do that. And we’re the same way with software. Usually, and I’m making a generalization here, but most people like to go in and try a few things, before they really start looking at any help or education.
So really think about by the time someone does come to your Academy, what can you help them discover or show them that will really help inspire them to use your product in ways that are relevant to them? don’t just make it the equivalent of the instruction manual. It’s
Nikki Engel: [00:35:14] like in between having the instruction manual and having the reviews, because really you’ll come to you’ll look at all three, right?
You’re going to go look at the instruction, manual knowledge base, and how to guys and things like that. And you might look up reviews and see how people are using it, but it’s not going to go into the level of detail as much as a customer Academy would and give you that mindset as if someone was leaving a review and how they’re using it and why they were successful in that sense.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:43] Yeah, because going back to this example here between, what’s an Academy versus what’s a knowledge base and a knowledge base, you can get out all those, caution statements and all the edge cases and pieces like that. and with the knowledge base, you can very easily usually link from article to article and surface recommended articles and things like that.
but in an Academy you typically want to be telling more of a story. and showing, not telling as much as possible, which doesn’t mean you need, a full production studio or anything like that in this first version of the optimize, the Academy. In fact, it was mostly texts with just a little bit of video, but a lot of the texts that was in there was storytelling about three sample customers who represented our customer base and personas at the time who were building an optimization program and how they went about doing that.
And you followed those characters through different scenarios.
Nikki Engel: [00:36:33] Okay, so let’s move on to the second, portion of this, which is how do we now create a customer Academy? I think we have a lot of good, advice from your experience of just defining it and, the type of content to include in there.
But. Just want to know more best practices of actually creating an engaging and thoughtful customer Academy. here at Northpass, we actually recommend these four steps when it comes to, the very first onboarding, Experience with us. So first we would suggest setting up goals, which we talked about a little bit.
you know what success really means to you and always have some kind of objective to look back on. Then we would recommend outlining the framework. So you give yourself some structure, and keep yourself within those loans. And then obviously start building your Academy and creating the content. And then finally, of course, measuring that success based on all of the different things you talked about, whether it’s quiz scores or course completions, or anything between, and then the best part is that you can just continuously iterate and improve based on those.
success metrics, because luckily you do have reporting at your fingertips there. So since you are much more seasoned in customer education than I am, can you tell us a little bit about how you would apply the, this type of framework to your customer academies? And if you have anything to add in between?
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:58] Yeah, of course. I use a very similar framework when I’m thinking about, content development cycles. And specifically thinking about goal setting. It really goes back to what we discussed earlier. It’s really easy when you’re looking at the measurement aspect of this to look at all the things that you could measure, whether it’s something that’s reported through your LMS or whether it’s, something that you’re looking for in your business.
To get analysis paralysis, because there are a lot of things, frankly, that you can measure. So I really recommend taking this minimum viable product or MVP approach, and testing and learning and iterating as you go. But to do that, you need to have a strong perspective on what is the main goal that I want to be testing towards.
So again, I would say, Pick and stick, at least in the first version of your Academy to the main business goal that you want to drive. So if that’s, creating efficiency for customer onboarding, and reducing the amount of time that your internal people spend doing it. Great. That’s a great one to start with.
You can validate that. and you can look at some supporting metrics to help you flesh out that story. So for example, if you look at, net promoter score or customer satisfaction, SISEP, related to your onboarding, that’s going to give you a really good indicator about what you may or may not have sacrificed in, scaling this content.
You might look at time to first value for your customers. If that’s something that your business tracks. But again, be clear about if that’s what you’re doing and you’re building content that is designed to help a company efficiently, onboard, or a customer, I should say, efficiently onboard, look at the goals and the metrics that support that.
don’t look at everything else that you could look at to start with. All
Nikki Engel: [00:39:41] right. The second step is outlining the framework for your customer Academy.
Adam Avramescu: [00:39:46] Yeah. So again, here, I think that based on what you’re trying to do, I hear one really common question that I think is the wrong question to be asking.
And that’s, what’s the best way to deliver my content. And you might be thinking that even as you have heard the discussion today, so what’s best, is it best to do text is the best to do video. Should I be pulling out articulate rise and building self-serve modules that way? again, I don’t think that’s the best way to think about it because a you can apply solid instructional design principles, no matter what your format actually is.
whether it’s storytelling through text or, you have the ability to do a lower, our high quality videos, or you have someone on your team who knows how to do a rapid development. E-learning there are lots of ways to get to that end goal. but there isn’t. One specific way that is best from a learning perspective.
Instead, I would think about a, what is the quickest way to validate what you want to put out there? And for a lot of people, that’s going to be text and short, lower quality videos that you can start to iterate on over time and build something more sophisticated around. But the other way I would think about it is what is the most effective way to teach what you’re teaching.
Video might be really helpful if you are showing, something conceptual like a conceptual framework where you want to build in pieces of a diagram or of a model video also might be helpful if you’re showing a really quick overview of something in your product and you want to show screenshots, But do think about what is the right thing to be showing the customer at the right time.
and I would say focus on validating the flow of that content before you get too hung up on what format should I do it in? Because one of the things that I think, people make mistakes around is they really try to overload people with too much content at the beginning. And so what might be your one Oh one or your basic module might end up actually having way too much content in there that you’re going to end up overwhelming people with the details instead of really helping them orient themselves and get to value.
So for example, a lot of people in their one-on-one courses, They decide that they need to do a full tour of every element of their user interface, because every feature is important, right? And it’s really important to get the user onboard. And if they don’t learn this stuff, then they’re not going to use the product.
And that’s actually not true. Again, think of the way that people actually learn and discover products instead of throwing all the information about, the user interface at them. Why not focus on a few key ways for them to start getting value from your product? And that’s actually going to help you down the line.
Cause as you start to outline, you might say, Hey, I have all this content for my basic and maybe for my intermediate courses, but I don’t really have any ideas for advanced. I would challenge you to say maybe some of what’s in your beginner or intermediate courses should actually be in your advanced.
it just wasn’t the right time to teach people. So that’s why it’s really important to validate the flow of the content as you go. That’s
Nikki Engel: [00:42:57] great. and so for creating content and building your customer Academy that way, I think there’s, you touched about this a little bit in the outline step, but anything to add, for best practices, how best to create
Adam Avramescu: [00:43:14] everyone has a different workflow that they like to use.
some instructional designers prefer to use what’s called the Addie model, which is a very linear. A process where you first analyze the problem. You design a solution, you develop that solution, you implement it, and then you evaluate it. I think for a lot of programs who are in the earlier days, it makes sense to be much more iterative and really take a test, learn iterate type of approach.
there are instructional design methodologies to support that. If you want to go that route, there’s one called. SAM which is the successive approximation model. you can look up Addie versus SAM there’s, people who have written entire books about that. Michael Allen wrote a really a book called a really good book called leading ADDIE for Sam.
but again, yeah, I think for a lot of people who are in the early stage, like regardless of what framework you use. Really try to focus on, getting quick learnings and putting things in front of your customers, to actually get real feedback before you start going into these more, high-fidelity development cycles.
Nikki Engel: [00:44:15] That’s great. And then last but not least measure, how do we measure the success of your customer Academy and
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:20] always be improving. Yeah. And here again, let’s talk about measurement in two different ways. One is you do want to have a perspective, even if you’re not going to have this data at first and most people don’t, you want to have a perspective on.
How successful your Academy is in driving broader business goals. So for example, I’ve always been really insistent on trying to drive towards being able to correlate. customers who have, or haven’t used the Academy or customers who’ve used the Academy a certain amount versus those who haven’t used it a certain amount and then how that correlates to success in other places.
So let’s look at, product adoption for customers who have, or haven’t been trained. Let’s look at renewal rates for customers who have, or haven’t been trained and let’s go down that funnel that we looked at, much earlier and actually tried to draw some inferences and correlations about what.
Trained customers do better than on untrained customers. And you’re going to have someone in your business who’s really smart and really data-driven and they’re going to say, that’s core, that’s a correlation. That’s not causation. And you’re going to say, so what, I think that’s, some people will get really fixated on whether you’re drawing a correlation or causation, like they’re going to ask, how do you know that the Academy really caused them to renew.
it probably didn’t right. That’s not actually the argument that you’re making. but what you are saying is that for us to be able to run a healthy business and for us to be able to scalably, onboard and get customers to adopt and to see value and to renew and to expand and to do all the things that we want to do, the Academy is w a meaningful way for us to drive that and to support that customer demand,
Nikki Engel: [00:45:59] And attributes to it. You can’t pin as part of the attribution.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:03] Exactly then attribution is messy, right? Sorry to interrupt. Attribution is messy. There are a lot of things that end up going into a customer renewal versus non-renewal. And you’re not ever going to be able to pick out unless you have a huge sample size to work with, like Google and Facebook sample sizes to work with for most companies who are not at that stage, they’re not going to be able to pick out.
One thing and do a linear regression and figure out, Oh yes, it was this specific activity. So that’s not the story you should be trying to tell. so that’s going back to measurement against your program goals, but then I think it’s also important to look at measurement within your Academy itself so you can iterate, refine.
And on the next slide, I have a simple model for that you can use. some people prefer to use, something like Kirkpatrick’s four level of, evaluation where they look at, reaction, like how people responded to your content. and then, so what if they responded to it? Did they learn something?
that’s level two? so what if they learned it? Did they actually go apply their skills? That’s level three? so what if they apply to, did it create business results? That’s level four. that’s all well and good, but a lot of that’s really hard to measure. when you’re not at that stage yet, I think if you can find a proxy for the value of a piece of content.
And the discoverability of a piece of content, then you can start to make really quick, really lean operational decisions about what to do with your content. So for value, you can use ratings upvotes downvotes, or you can use completions of content. if something was valuable, they probably completed it.
And then you can also use discoverability, right? So discoverability might be page views in a knowledge base or on a very public customer Academy, or it might be enrollments or something. That’s more course-based. And you could matrix this. So if something is really high value, really high discoverability, people are finding it and they like it.
that’s probably the thing that you want to focus on repurposing. So if you did your early version of the Academy with low fidelity videos, you made them quickly in Camtasia or something like that, or even just recorded yourself, talking about something. these are the things you probably want to come back to and do.
Higher production value versions. if it was texts, those are probably the things you might want to turn into videos, so you can continue to repurpose them and promote them. those are the things you might want to surface as in product onboarding or in product education, because you can make the case that this is stuff that customers are looking for.
They’re finding it. And when they find it value, find valuable. So why not do more of that? it’s more interesting when there’s a disconnect. So if there’s something that is really highly discoverable, But really low value. that’s the stuff that you want to put first on your fixed list.
and at Optimizely and a Checkr, for instance, we had a group of, customer support representatives who were responsible for helping edit and fix some of those things, especially if they were technically inaccurate or didn’t reflect product functionality. And that was the reason why. So you always have to ask, okay, if something is not valuable, why, what are customers saying about it?
If something’s really highly valuable, like when customers do find it, they like it, but it’s really hard to find. there, you actually just have a discoverability problem. So can you add search terms to the content? So it’s more easily find-able can you surface it more in the navigation? Can you put it in a learning path so that more people find it?
can you move it above the fold, so to speak, so move it higher on the page so that it’s easier for people to find. and then if you have things that are not valuable and also not discoverable, don’t be afraid to scrap it. there’s a David Packard quote that says companies don’t die of starvation.
They die of indigestion. And I think that’s true of customer education programs too. Too much content is just as much of a problem as not enough content. That’s true.
Nikki Engel: [00:49:30] I love this grid. I have a feeling, a lot of people will be screenshotting this one. So
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:35] it’s in the book too.
Nikki Engel: [00:49:36] Yeah. this is all great. I want to open the floor to questions.
any one of the questions, please include them in the chat and we can grab a few and talk through, are there any. Do you have, yeah, I’ll kick it off with one question while people can formulate their questions in the chat. How do you know when a company is ready for a customer Academy? Would you say there’s a minimum number of customers?
Like some, an organization just starting out, they have 10 customers. Would that be warranted for a customer Academy
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:10] yet? So I think about this in a couple of ways. One is that I think it’s important to start thinking about customer education before you need to build it reactively. customers who are thinking about it a little bit earlier are able to be more proactive about it and are able to use it as a way to scale as time goes on.
but if you think about that in terms of a company life cycle, there’s a natural progression, right? early startups. We’ll usually just have, engineers and maybe one person who’s the business person. and then they start to develop more functions as time goes on. And then the company gets to, somewhere in the hundred to 250 person range.
And typically that’s when you start to see companies drawing a distinction between having general support people. And now they’re having customer success. People because customer success has been blowing up as a trend. That’s also the point to start thinking about customer education and how you can at least start thinking about, okay, I’ve built this great team of people in support and success who are working with customers.
How do I start to scale it? I think that’s the point to really look at it as a cue.
Nikki Engel: [00:51:18] That’s great. here’s a question from the chat. What is your advice, for building a business plan or a business case for knowledge management department and client Academy or customer Academy?
Adam Avramescu: [00:51:32] I think part of it is again, having a vision that relates to a clear business problem.
And I do think that separating the vision from the initial stages is always important here. So I like to think a few years out in terms of when we have this thing built, what’s it going to be doing for the business? So if your immediate need is to. drive scalable and consistent product adoption. I’ll talk about what are some of the ways that we can do that with some short term knowledge management or customer education efforts?
what are some of the initiatives that we can do this year? If we had one head count repurposed to work on that. But then I also like to play out, not only how would that evolve, a couple years down the line, but also how would we be able to address some other needs that the business might not even be thinking about yet?
so for instance, here are the ways that if we continue to build this program over time, we could support customer maturity or customer expansion using the same framework. Yeah.
Nikki Engel: [00:52:34] That’s yeah, that’s good. One of the questions that was sent through email, what role or function in a company typically manages the customer Academy initiatives?
Is it always one department? Is it always customer success or is it
Adam Avramescu: [00:52:51] vary? I am seeing a trend towards customer education living within customer success. for businesses that have services functions, and typically that those are a little bit larger sometimes customer education lives there.
although I do see a fair number of customers who are choosing to support it from their product teams, especially those who rely very heavily on in product education or on marketing teams for those who are doing a lot of industry education. but I think I see the most, these days within customer success.
Nikki Engel: [00:53:23] Great. so I think those are all the questions right now. ah, do one more.
Adam Avramescu: [00:53:30] Yeah. Okay. What was I saying that the customer Academy should be open to even non-customers to view. Yes. if you don’t have criteria information in there. And I think sometimes customer or companies get a little bit squeaky about revealing their secret sauce, but I guarantee you, there are probably things about your product that you want to highlight and want to share with people who are not even your customers.
and customer academies, there can actually serve partially as marketing tools, even if the content itself isn’t necessarily marketing the product. being able to show that you have an effective customer, Academy and that you have an approach to getting customers onboard actually can instill a lot of confidence.
Yeah. I
Nikki Engel: [00:54:10] say for that also just showing that you guys are the experts and you know what you’re talking about and builds that trust. So even if someone’s working with your competitor, but they’re using your. Yeah, Academy to succeed with the competitor, likely they’re going to come to you in the end of their contract or whatever it is and say, you know what?
You guys actually know what you’re talking about. And so if you know what you’re talking about, your product is probably built in a way that is going to be helpful for me. So I think I agree. I think that can go a long way. All right. if there are no other questions, thank you, Adam. This was really amazing.
I certainly learned a lot about the importance of customer education and academies. I hope everyone who is listening and watching did as well. I want to make sure that, everyone here does know that Northpass is a solution. Or a customer education needs and a platform where you can create your customer Academy as well.
companies like Shopify and Twilio and square, FreshWorks just to name a few has been using Northpass to not only educate their customers on how to use the products like Adam spoke about. But also how to succeed in their day to day using their own products and really providing more value to them.
So if you are interested to learn more, please visit us@northpass.com where you can book a demo straight from the homepage. and as a bonus, for those of you who stuck around for the last few minutes, If you do book a demo, and you mentioned this webinar, we would love to send you a free copy of Adam’s book, which is called customer education.
which is a lot of the information we’ve talked about here, but obviously tons more, so lot to cover in there. I look forward to connecting with all of you guys soon and see how we can all apply Adam’s, experiences and words of wisdom to everything that we’re doing from a customer Academy standpoint.
So Adam, thank you again. I would love to, for you to tell everyone here also how they could hear more, from you.
Adam Avramescu: [00:56:16] Yeah, thank you. And thank you to everyone who attended. If you’d like to learn more. like Nikki mentioned, I have a book out customer education, why smart companies profit by making customers smarter.
And we go all the way from the business case to content development. so find out on Amazon, if you are interested. and then I encourage you to subscribe, to CELab the customer education lab on your pod, catcher of choice or wherever you find podcasts. We have a site@customer.education, but that’s me and Dave, Derington from outreach.
and we do everything from, interviews of other customer education professionals to a good, healthy debate and discussion. So if you want a more practical, real world advice, tune into us. We, we released biweekly. Thanks everyone.
Nikki Engel: [00:56:59] Thank you again. Believe it or not. We’ve finished with a minute to spare, so have a great day, everyone.
Thank you, Adam.
Adam Avramescu: [00:57:07] Thank you.
Nikki Engel: [00:57:08] Bye.
Adam Avramescu: [00:57:12] Thanks everyone. I hope that was a helpful webinar for you to listen in on. it certainly was a fun one to do Thanks again to Northpass for hosting me. If you want to check them out, go to Northpass.com. And if you want to check us out, go to customer.education, where you can find show notes and other material on Twitter.
I am at . Dave is @davederington and again, both of us will be at DevLearn coming up in late October. Our session is on the 25th. Special, thanks to Alan Koda for our theme music. And if this helped you out, you can help us out by subscribing in your pod catcher of choice. That’s a podcast app, by the way, that’s what podcatcher means or leaving us a review on the Apple podcast store.
So those two things really help expose our podcast to other people and to our audience. Thanks for joining us. Go out and educate experiment and find your people. Thanks for listening.