Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, Adam, here from the CELab podcast, I’m proud to announce that I just released a new book. It’s called customer education. Why smart companies profit by making customers smarter? You can actually find it now on amazon.com in ebook or in print format. you could also do blt.ly slash customer education made you a easy little Bitly link.
So I’d really appreciate it. If you pick a copy up and let me know what you think. Thanks everyone.
Welcome to lab customer education lab, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and take those myths and bad advice that are so harmful for growth and spray them with rain. Rain. Because we’re exterminating them. I’m Adam Avramescu
Dave Derington: [00:00:57] I’m Dave Derington.
And today we’re going to continue on this journey, talking about some of the latest reports, industry standard reports for customer education. Today, we’re going to be looking at. The 2020 state of customer education training, I’m sorry, the 20, 20 state of customer training report from Thought Industries.
So this should be pretty exciting. So we’ve talked to these guys before haven’t we?
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:23] We have, so we had very Kelly who is the founder CEO of Thought Industries on the show on a previous episode. And in that episode, he was talking about how they started in the world of learning businesses. And moved into customer education over time.
So it’s really great to see them doing an analysis of the customer education
Dave Derington: [00:01:44] landscape. Yeah, that’s really cool. And when I was listening to that, anatomy did a great job interviewing very, very conducted. I conducted, this survey. And some of the things that he had talked about was in that, but you can talk to the survey with Claire Schooley.
Claire is the former lead learning analyst at Forrester research. Forrester, they have, this is over 150 respondents and software companies and other industries really important. We look at them all the time. Now, unlike the TSIA report we covered before these programs were typically smaller.
57% of the respondents had 500 or fewer employees. Also on average, they had around 2000 customers. Now that’s Gluck closer to many of the companies that we meet with who are in this journey of what do I do? Where do I go? How do I get started? They’re just beginning to grow out their education programs.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:36] Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ll see a different cut of priorities here, and it’ll be interesting to do a little bit of compare and contrast. So let’s dive into the findings here on national vanilla pudding yet.
Dave Derington: [00:02:49] Oh, it’s putting pack day.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:52] I, I don’t have a pudding back. I don’t have a pudding.
I don’t have actually anything pudding related, but now I am hungry. Okay. So let’s dive into the findings. The biggest disconnect here, and this is highlighted front and center of the report is that 96% of the respondents said that customer training was important to their company. And Dave, you and I talked about this, right?
Oh, people I’ll say the customer education is important, but that’s different from actually doing the things that you need to do to really improve the business case for customer education. So 96% of customer training was important to the company. However, only 14% of those respondents believed that their cup, a cup that their customers are adequately trained.
Dave Derington: [00:03:38] 14%.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:41] Is that a record? Scratch?
Dave Derington: [00:03:42] Yeah, for 14%. That’s just that what’s up with that. That’s absurd. That’s really low. And those are coming from the practitioners, right? That’s not. Outside of these organizations.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:53] Yeah. I feel like we need to insert that, what’s up with you.
so we’re going to insert a sound bite here, but I think we’ve just done them. Yeah. Given that the survey went on to a group of training professionals, I’m not surprised to see that they see a gap between the importance of training and the competence of their customers. Let’s first acknowledge that you might expect.
A training professional to say customer training is important, but our customers have opportunity to be trained more because yeah, in training, we’re the ones who see those gaps and we realize how much more our customers could be learning. But Dave, what are they doing about that?
Dave Derington: [00:04:32] that’s a good story.
And you and I are in that audience, some, and I’ll say of us, some of them are investing in systems, from this report, we’ve got some numbers to support that. So let’s go through them. 57% of respondents have an LMS. Cool. And that’s for customer training, specifically, not an internal type system.
That’s compared to 85% for employee training. And
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:56] I would assume some of those might have the same system that does both. Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:05:00] no, I’m sure you’ve been at places like I have who have three or four different LMS using, serving different needs.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:05] Yeah. It’s like a learning technology Paya.
Dave Derington: [00:05:10] Yeah. I had some scallops in there, but it’s interesting to see. I’m really hungry too. It’s ice cream cake time or so right. Or something like that. Pudding. Get off the pudding kick. Sorry, let’s talk about how interesting it is to see the idea of having a customer LMS isn’t completely ingrained. people talk to me about this pretty frequently.
I remember talking to somebody not too long ago, where they said, we have a hard time convincing our, head of revenue that we need. An LMS is going to cost as much. That takes me back to when we recorded episode three. You remember that Adam, we did the LMS discussion and
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:50] I can’t remember what I did this morning.
I can’t as do episodes pre-history but yeah, I do. I do remember that’s actually one of our most listened to episodes
Dave Derington: [00:05:58] and that we questioned it. I think we were really serious about it. Do you really need an LMS or not? Yeah,
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:05] that was our hypothesis. Was you don’t need a customer LMS. I think we just proved that.
For those who do have a customer elements, the report shows that where they’re really focused is on the student experience. So they’re focused on usability for the customer. they’re also really trying to use those LMSs to provide streamlined onboarding for customers. So when you think of all the content that could live in the customer elements, streamlined, sequential onboarding, that’s the number one use case.
And then these customers were also thinking a lot about how to expand their content library. So for almost half the respondents, in fact, the top goal was to expand their content library beyond just to feature functionality, training.
Dave Derington: [00:06:48] And that is the goal they should have. one more theme in there was, certifications.
So not a lot of companies have them, not all companies have them, the ones that responded, in the survey seem to be using them for what I would be using them for is brand awareness. and that totally makes sense, smaller companies when I was in smaller companies. I was just trying to get my head around the product and to do that in a way that I could share with the customer to be easy and consumable.
at that point you don’t need high stakes, sir. You just don’t because you’re just trying to get the story out. and they’re not making hiring contract decision based on certification, but that said 60% of respondents didn’t have certifications at all.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:32] Okay. So 40% did have certifications and
Dave Derington: [00:07:34] most of those
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:35] were using it for mostly brand awareness.
Dave Derington: [00:07:39] So that’s, yeah, that’s more like a, I would think like the HubSpot model, where we all went out and we took that, that course they had on what was it?
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:48] inbound marketing.
Dave Derington: [00:07:49] Yes. I took that as well, and I thought it was really fun because you weren’t grabbed that little badge. It wasn’t that it wasn’t that overwhelming.
It wasn’t that deep. It’s just a brand awareness search.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:58] for another recent one, I think what Intercom just released, like some of their badges, you might be able to classify as that they have an SDR badge and I think they have a support badge. So they’re role-based but I think they’re really about pushing forward.
The idea of how do I use a product, like in our comm, not just to understand the feature functionality, but how does this help me do my job better? And even not necessarily talking about the HubSpots and Intercom’s of the world like this makes sense for smaller companies. And given that the report showed that many customer education programs were really focused on onboarding and jumping product adoption, I’m honestly not surprised to see that certification in general was less common here, especially as a revenue driver, because when you’re building your program for the first time, unless someone is really, we talked about this in certification episode.
Yeah. unless someone is really breathing down your neck and someone is really passionate about, Oh, the first thing we need to build for customer education is a certification program. Typically that’s not actually the first move that it makes sense to me, free apartment.
Dave Derington: [00:09:00] That’s curl. It’s not really a revenue driver there.
I’m in the thick of certification right now, and I can tell we had to do a lot of work to get to this point where we can start thinking about it. It just takes the time to, you have to get to your job task analysis and everything, and really think about how we got to have the core material first.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:16] Yeah. and that’s even for a high stakes certification, there are companies doing low state certifications out there, which might just be. A series of content with a badge attached. And maybe you see a little bit more of that, but that’s not even the first thing a lot of people are going to be thinking about when they’re really just blocking and tackling on how do I create an onboarding course for my customers, or how do I produce quick feature videos to drive adoption?
Like that all comes before what you might even consider like a light search.
Dave Derington: [00:09:42] Yeah. going back to this in some ways, this is telling, I think telling the same kind of report or it’s telling the same kind of story as a TSIA report, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:51] While when we looked at last episode,
Dave Derington: [00:09:53] indeed. so while education pockets are still saying, they’re still saying that driving product adoption is the number one benefit.
They’re not necessarily even measuring that only 36% from. From the report says, they use adoption rate to measure the impact of training. and more than that, they said they were struggling to measure impact. I did want to call out one thing here and that if that describes you and you’re listening to this podcast, don’t feel bad.
but one of the things that I think at least that you should be doing very early on to get to being able to measure is thinking about how we are going to measure. What is, what are the learning outcomes? How do they map to business objectives? How are you collecting information? Do you have an LMS that stores that can there’s a litany of things that you can do.
It’s really hard. So you have to start thinking about that as one of your number one things to
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:42] be able to measure. Absolutely. And, given again, that there’s such interest in looking at the linkage between customer education and product adoption, one of the things that Barry talks about when he was on the show was having a proximity metric.
So being able to measure when someone takes. your education course. And then when someone does the thing that you want them to do in the product, are you measuring how close those two actions are? And to do that often, you can’t just do that with the default metrics that come out of your LMS. You need something reporting into your data warehouse, really tie together those metrics so that you can start to do a more sophisticated analysis.
It resonates with, the report says the number one challenge for customer training is by far the number one benefits, product adoption and usage. So to me that, like in other words, that’s actually the same education paradox that Maria Manning Chapman brought up into TSIA report just in different words.
Dave Derington: [00:11:37] Yeah. It’s crazy.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:38] Yeah. Okay. The Thought Industries report also addresses the COVID 19 pandemic as many of the newer reports coming out too. when we covered TSIA last episode, we mentioned that there was, a pre state of the industry report that came out the endemic, and then there was a post, customer education at the time of COVID.
But, basically this report about industry is one. Had asked their respondents to rank their current Taiwanese and most training leaders responded that their top priorities were around retaining customers. And so that suggests to me that is a team sport, Customer education, typically isn’t coming in and like doing contract negotiations or anything like that.
But they are still involved in this team sport or retaining customers who are probably more likely to turn in uncertain times.
Dave Derington: [00:12:34] Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:36] What do you make of that, Dave?
Dave Derington: [00:12:38] I think this is real important and I know that we, and other companies that I talk to are, at time of COVID we had all these things going on and all of a sudden everybody’s Oh my gosh, like the narrative, the story, how we’re using the product has changed.
And it’s slightly nuanced, but that’s really important. so now we’re trying to figure out how to get that out. Now. We’re not, we’re going to share this entire report of course, but, you can check it out, going to Thought Industries.com. There are some other themes in there too. The increasing importance of engaging B2B customers.
which makes
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:10] sense again, given that they’ve gone from learning business to customers.
Dave Derington: [00:13:15] Yeah. there’s this trend towards increased importance of training and educating customers, and. And yet a challenge in getting those same customers to take the training. So it’s know, same kind of story,
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:30] Sam, interesting story.
And especially now with COVID with, one of the, one of the reports highlights was about how they’re starting to prioritize, moving in person trainings e-learning or VILT like, we’re just going to keep seeing more of this.
Dave Derington: [00:13:42] Yeah, that’s really is really cool. a fair number are trying to drive engagement with training or certification or expanding their content.
they’re trying different things now. So that’s interesting to see. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:52] I would say overall, if we were to summarize some of the themes here, customer education programs are struggling to get more customers aware of what they offer and to engage with their training programs.
So you’re right. Uptake is a big theme here. I think we’re also seeing definitely the trends towards really using customer education, both for retention and to sustain in this online format. So the fact that they’re moving in person training to online and that they’re focused on expanding their content libraries tells me that we’re trying to see a shift here from training being appointed time and activity.
When you go onsite and you train someone. To having more of an ongoing model where training is a thing that you do over time, not just during your onboarding, but, through certifications or through a more advanced just-in-time courseware through in product, education. Because ultimately if the goal is really to drive product adoption, that means that it shouldn’t just be like the first thing that you do when you implement the software and then never get trained again, training should be a.
Well,
Dave Derington: [00:15:02] yeah, it’s an ongoing and always present activity unless you’re learning and you’re not growing and you’re not finding new features. So I think that’s one of the very natural things that as you start getting into this education space and this customer education space with small businesses, you’re just trying to get content out there and.
You’re doing it with good practices and you’re trying you’re you want to measure that, but at first you’re not able to, then over time, you start to realize that you can tune this thing. You can, you’re not just dumping and running. And I see a lot of conversations in internally of companies where we’re having this dialogue is like, what do we want people to do?
I heard the best quote the other day is that we’re doing all this stuff. What is it? What does it work? Getting out of it? So that awareness is super important. And that’s where I say, that’s where you as an education person can and should be interjecting yourself. That’s an intervention. If you want to watch that and let me pursue this, read this real briefly, and then I’ll stop.
but I really think the role of education is a differentiated. Is differentiated from normal awareness play a place because I say, I see people say, Oh, let’s just put an article on support and let’s just put an article on the website, let’s do this and do this. And a lot of cases, all of this stuff’s being done.
In different silos without awareness of that’s all being done, because it already knows it needs to be done. And that’s where it called an education, because we are in there to wrap a story around it, to wrap a journey around it. So we don’t just go train. I say, I went and trained, but here’s what you need to do next to continue that journey.
And, Oh, I have some in the product. I have some training. you could take this online class. You could take, it’s, you got a micro training thing. It’s a fabric.
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:44] It’s a what? It’s like a fine tweel or a, I don’t know what type of fabric it has. No, I’m the way I would describe it. I think I say this in my book is that if you think of customer education as an activity, a person getting trained person consuming this.
Piece of content, then you’re missing the big picture of customer education as a program that drives an hour.
Dave Derington: [00:17:08] Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:09] And so I think maybe that would put a little bit of a. A fine point on it. But again, we don’t want to, we don’t want to cannibalize everything that this report says, we want you to check it out and you can check it out by going to Thought Industries.com and they have that report as well as some of their other marketing resources there.
Dave Derington: [00:17:27] All right. let’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:27] yeah. That’s it. That’s our mini episodes. We wrap it up.
Dave Derington: [00:17:31] Yeah, let’s wrap it up. If you want to learn more, we have podcasts website at https:// customer. Okay. Education or just type customer.education. You’ll find it on that site. You’ll find all kinds of materials, show notes, blog entries.
And of course these podcasts. On Twitter. I am @davederington
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:51] for best you special thanks to Alan Koda.
Dave Derington: [00:17:55] And if this helps you out, you can always help us out by subscribing in Apple podcasts or any of the pod cutters of your choice. Leave us a positive review, particularly in Apple podcasts. That helps us out a lot.
So
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:07] I think the reviews that we’re seeing so far. please help us with that.
Dave Derington: [00:18:10] Absolutely. now to our audience. Thanks for joining us. Go out there, educate experiment, and find your people.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:19] Thanks for listening.