Dave Derington 00:02
Yeah, I guess I don’t intuitive product design comes up a lot. Because I mean this. How many times have you been in the situation where like God, okay, users trying to do this and they keep failing? Why? Okay, well, then he started doing a click path like this and click Clear click here and then people check out because they’re like, Well, okay, well, I just want to do this thing. And why can’t the product be easier? So you come up with like, masks or you know, templates to help people pull people through. And once they get a couple of them are like, okay, now I get how the product is working. It’s just a little weird. No, and then then it starts to come together for them. So the customer education is up getting them over the hump, then they understand the sophistication of the product, like it was a platform that I’ve been working with more recently, is, it’s really dense, and it’s really hard, and it’s hard to navigate around. But it’s also ridiculously powerful. And it does make sense. But customers are like, well, I don’t understand this. Where do I go to do this? Work it so you have to have those five minute, three minute to minute courses to say, you need to go here do this thing. Oh, okay, now? Well,
Adam Avramescu 01:13
that’s Yeah, exactly. Because like, we know all the use cases for our product or a lot of them, we can see the future because we know our product so well. But customers, especially those who are novices don’t and so we’re showing them the art of the possible with our product, which also helps to motivate them then to be able to use it in the ways that that will bring them value. And so like he’s teaching you how to do a gap analysis basically that’s that’s what this so once you figured out what the the actual root causes, like, why, why isn’t the product being bought or used? Then you also define the state of like, what it should be. I think that’s like the art of the possible. And now you as the instructional designer or as the customer education person. Now you’re playing the detective now you’re doing the the investigative journalism that you always talk about Dave,
Dave Derington 02:05
are now the Benoit Blanc.
Adam Avramescu 02:07
You want it to call this episode? What can we what can customer education learn from Benoit Blanc? You know, we can’t because it has to be called customer education that
Dave Derington 02:16
didn’t sell Oh, but you know, to that point, I think there’s a couple of threads here I wanted to respond to not necessarily the knives, you know, knives out stuff, which was just an amazing, amazing, amazing movie, for a lot of reasons. Partly because it captures one of the things the most important things I think, and underrated aspects of customer education, in its strategic value of instruct in investigative journalism and Intertek detective work, to be honest, like, I feel that we are okay, I want to go back up in our thinking. We’re talking about the what should be in the what is? Yeah, that’s
Adam Avramescu 02:55
the gap analysis.
Dave Derington 02:57
You know, I came at Gap analysis from a different perspective, my personally, but I came at it from a way that was very methodological, I was taught by this consulting firm, to, to basically use this rapid prototyping methodology that allowed you to look at an application and say, Well, what’s wrong with it? Or what do we need to change? And how do we evolve it? How do we improve it? How do we teach people what to do with it? This as is to be plan? We don’t do this enough, Adam, I don’t think a lot of the times and I gotta say this again, out loud, this is happening less so. But there is this compulsion of people in our space to just get something out there. And we even say this, MVP, get good stuff out, get to market fast as well.
Adam Avramescu 03:43
It’s like it’s the, it’s content first. Right? Like, here’s what we need to teach customers about, and we’re just gonna, like, put this in order. Well, okay. But like,
Dave Derington 03:52
is, but that kind of, is like, Well, okay, yeah, we got to get this content out there. But what should it be? And how do we evolve that and how do we make it better? So the concept of the gap analysis is so fundamentally crucial to our our tribe, that if if you struggle with this and just get doing gap analysis, not just sitting down for one meeting and asking questions, it’s that’s why I went back to Benoit Blanc. When I was when I was watching that movie. It just hit me. Like, holy crap, a doughnut hole. I’m not gonna go further with that despoil.
Adam Avramescu 04:28
Well, you say there’s a form of education for your customers. That’s very peculiar, if I do say myself. That decent Benoit Blanc, or was that Foghorn Leghorn? I’m not sure.
Dave Derington 04:43
Oh, that was a was a riff in the movie in and of itself. Was it not? Some Foghorn Leghorn talking but that point that that kind of incisive intelligence that spirit of an investigation Understanding where the gaps are. That’s what the point I wanted to make is that going back to what this chapter types covers is, you know, we’re analyzing, we’re always looking for the gaps, we’re always filling in the blanks. And our job is to help connect the how to, to the customer with
Adam Avramescu 05:19
with with the watch should be watching, like he’s right. He’s like, what’s happening today, what should be in between that is the gap and you have to find the root cause of that gap. So the root cause can be like knowledge, skills, product, design, incentive, whatever. But like, the most important thing, and I love that he’s doing this in this chapter, is he’s not just talking about content, he’s actually the what should be has to be a business goal. So he’s talking about like, the what should be has to be something like customers can assemble the I forget what example he uses. The Shed the storage shed, unless Oh, yeah. And if you haven’t reached that goal, then there’s still a gap between the what is in the what should be and you have to go figure out what that is, is because they don’t know how to assemble the shed? Is it because they’re not motivated to assemble the shed? Is it because, right, right, so on and so forth. And that’s how you do the gap analysis. And but it has to be the gap between achieving an actual result. Oh,
Dave Derington 06:22
yes. Last thing I want to say on this promise is that I feel like this is the last piece of our craft, that now don’t mean loss, because it’s not losses, that’s the one that does, it hasn’t given getting enough has gotten enough attention. On an executive level, the strategic function of customer education is involved in looking at these gaps and solving them in closing. And that’s what makes
Adam Avramescu 06:48
good instructional designers and good customer educator, education leaders know that you have to do this, you have to position your efforts in terms of solving real problems for the business.
Dave Derington 06:58
And that’s where the the counterpoint of this is that when I when I see organizations that prioritize delivery of content over delivery of meaningful content. And what that means is just get it out, I don’t care. Just get it out, just get it out. You know, you should know how to you as an instructional designer, you should just know everything? No, this is this is in the investigative journalism. This detective?
Adam Avramescu 07:24
Yeah. And so like to that end of getting real results, then the question is like, what will like what results? Do you actually like what probably you’re actually solving? Yeah. And that’s, I think, like, we can spend just a brief moment on chapter four, because we’ve already kind of talked about it, because that’s where he’s talking about the actual driving forces for customer education. Because his point is, you can expend a lot of time and effort to change anything that you think might need to be changed. You can develop expensive educational programs, but they’re not going to get ROI unless you’re solving a meaningful problem. So there are three different categories of problem he calls out or opportunities. One is marketing. One is legal, and one is operation operational. I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time on these, but marketing is like either stimulating demand. And that he Oh, no, sorry, increased CSAT is the first one that can offer that. Yeah. Right. So you’re like reducing complaints. You’re increasing customer loyalty, positive word of mouth. Then he talks about stimulating demand. That’s interesting. Because that’s either about like the examples he gives here are, are like how to do the thing that your company does. So like this would be like a see a ski school at a ski. Lodge. What’s it what’s a ski place called? slopes? Yeah. Resorts resort. Yeah, having a ski school, that’s an education business that they have. That encourages you to use the product more because they’re teaching you how to do their product. Or this is like Schwab teaching you how to invest. The next one that they have, I’ll just, I’ll just go through these three. And then we can just get to Romans on it. Second one is how it works. So the example here is like Microsoft training customers on features and procedures like on the conference floor, so they know like how the product actually works. And then the third one is how to buy like actually making you a more intelligent buyer. So the example that he uses here is Gibson because our company actually offering a buying guide for electric guitars, so you can choose the right one for yourself. Those all stimulate demand just in different ways because like they address different root causes. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you called out that he talks about he sort of has like the Crossing the Chasm. model here with like the early adopters and the early majority and the late majority and the lady
Dave Derington 10:04
I loved. Because that just connected us right back to all the things we’ve been seeing more recently. It just it’s like the source of the river.
Adam Avramescu 10:15
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, Crossing the Chasm had been published before this book, it was around already. So like that model was at least somewhere in the zeitgeist. But the idea here, I think, is that through customer education, you are helping to get enough early adopters already using your product and using it correctly, that then the majority, like early and late majority, will be more comfortable being able to use it, and they need a little bit more help to be able to use it correctly, because they’re not just going to take as many risks. And then finally, the last No, actually, there’s two more marketing ones, there’s one about differentiating product from the competition. So this is like what we would call competitive differentiation today and uses the the example here of like, two competing flower companies. Flowers in baking flour, not as in like flowers. That smell good. A rose by any other name, but he he talks about like, okay, so like a flower company decides to differentiate themselves by putting like, innovative recipes in their in their packaging, right? And then their competitors. Like, wait, we can do better, we can publish a cookbook. And they’re they’re like one upping each other.
Dave Derington 11:36
Yeah, but that really sells in. I’ve been, I’ve talked with executives that say, Hey, this is why we’re doing customer education, because we want to differentiate ourselves. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu 11:48
Well, and like it could even be like table stakes. Right? He says, it’s a criterion for many customers that you teach them how to use the product. Well,
Dave Derington 11:55
yeah, we talked about that at length on the other with the other book, but okay, but I just got a devil’s advocate question for you, Adam. You are, let’s frame it up, in again, b2b SaaS, where both of us kind of got our genesis was smaller companies that are in growth cycles, right? And, like, what the heck what? Why don’t some of these organizations, there’s so many organizations out there? Why aren’t some of them even thinking about customer education? Like, what? Why aren’t you going to try to train your customer? Well, like, what is it? This is the question that I’m trying to figure out? And I’m still not able to answer it is like, why haven’t we prioritized this educational motif? And done better? Why is it continued to be a problem? In a lot of cases?
Adam Avramescu 12:49
I would say, first of all, if you take his definition here, I think a lot of those organizations would say that they’re fulfilling it because they have documentation.
Dave Derington 12:58
Oh, okay.
Adam Avramescu 13:01
Right, that’s, that’s teaching a customer how to use the product and how to use it well, because you can read the documentation, I can read it, and a lot of lot and a lot of like, a lot of early stage customers will just read the documentation. So it’s efficient. And when we join organizations, we’re typically joining them at the point where they are no longer serving all the early adopters who will just read the documentation, and just be able to pick the product up and use it. So that’s why we need generally to work with these organizations to expand the breadth of their customer education offerings, both to drive proper meaningful adoption, as well as over time to differentiate them in the market. Because there’s going to be a certain point where, okay, you’re an early stage company, maybe you don’t have like that many competitors. Or maybe you’re a disrupter and serving a different class of a customer. Well, yeah, maybe maybe, then you don’t actually need to differentiate based on your customer education, your product itself is the differentiator, right? But you’re gonna get to a point where your market becomes more crowded, and educating your customer, your customer on how to properly use your product will become more of a differentiator if you do it right, because a lot of other companies aren’t going to do it. Right.
Dave Derington 14:08
Okay, so, okay, so you answer my question. Essentially, it’s, there is an inflection point or a moment in time for most businesses, where there’s a call to action, whether you acknowledge it or not,
Adam Avramescu 14:21
when he’s talking about like a flower recipe, like it’s not the same as b2b SaaS,
Dave Derington 14:25
not the same but b2b SaaS is way more I’m trying to connect with the back in those days yeah, fine. I mean, people can get a recipe book but it helps sell more when you have that handhold and guidance that understanding the the framework of tools and educational components that can help somebody actually do the How to that’s all I was really getting them.
Adam Avramescu 14:46
Yep. And then he like the last marketing one, he talks about his correcting consumer misconceptions, but we don’t need to talk about that one because it’s not really that relevant to our audience. The example here is like Equifax has a data breach. You know, everything repeats. And they’re rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which sort of bridges into we did marketing, he talks about legal, which could be about like limiting product life liability, that could be like safety cards, complying with government regulation, or complying with industry regulation, where it’s like self imposed, because they don’t want the government to come regulate them. And then finally, he talks about operational forces. So this could be teaching customers how to do business with you. Like for instance, I think this is especially like vaguely pre internet, but he’s talking about how to find who to contact or how to use the company systems paperwork, Doc’s especially if you’re a reseller, you need to know like, how to work with the company. Yeah. So this is like partner training, we still kind of do this, right.
Dave Derington 15:49
Yeah, it’s really helpful to you know, Hey, make sure you you know, don’t call support go to this thing, or we have community here are trying to navigate trying to at least put a page up there to help customers understand. Don’t call support, look at this first, or
Adam Avramescu 16:04
Yeah, or like, onboarding? Yeah. But even like simple things like here, he gives an example of like, teaching customer at the bank that you need to bring a picture ID to open a bank account is customer education, teaching customers how to do business with you. Because if you show up without an ID, you cannot do business with the bank. Yeah, exactly. And then he brings up you know, the Old Testament reducing or avoiding costs, and then finally, promoting vision and values. I thought this was an interesting one. I thought the example he gives us like, yeah, do you remember the example here?
Dave Derington 16:35
Yeah, it was you go to the store to buy a steel chainsaw. And the salesperson will not let you leave the store unless until you’ve gone through how to replace a chain, how to start it safely. How you know, like the whole thing, an orientation or onboarding on the hardware itself? Wow,
Adam Avramescu 16:53
that’s cool. Because they because they value safety that much that they should have, they should have made a video with a police officer training you how to use the chainsaw. This book has like an interesting undercurrent of like featuring very violent products. I think later he got like there’s a rifle company later in the in the Oh, two?
Dave Derington 17:14
Well, not just that. What was it? Nicotine? Tobacco Products,
Adam Avramescu 17:19
nicotine, he talks about tobacco product? Yeah, there’s like a lot of, I guess, but I guess he has to do it. Because product training around safety and reducing liability is actually a form of customer education. So he like intentionally has to call out violent or dangerous products.
Dave Derington 17:36
Yeah, you know, I haven’t gotten into violent or dangerous products so much, but I have come in contact with a lot more businesses that have regulatory impact. And yeah, that’s super important. Because if a customer doesn’t know how to, you know, how to perceive that, you know, maybe you’re doing credit reporting, maybe you’re doing so I don’t know, maybe you’re working?
Adam Avramescu 17:58
No, I mean, health care, I can give you I can give you a very, very tangible example of this. When I was a checker, leading customer education, I got to the General Counsel, I was on the legal team, because our primary driving force for customer education was actually helping our clients understand how to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as well as like the EEOC guidance and all these other factors that govern how you adjudicate a background check. If you get that wrong, you’re gonna get sued.
Dave Derington 18:33
Yeah. And that’s, I mean, that affects the entire tambor and tone of your, your training curriculum. And now your customer education program was a lot about regulatory stuff, rather than just how to use it, which is that skills, which is the knowledge, which is around encompassing the space, the problem space, where the product is going to solve the solutions for? It’s fascinating. It’s really relevant.
Adam Avramescu 18:58
It is it is. And so like you have those are the driving forces, right? Those are the reasons you would do customer education. And then he basically recommends that you balance those with where you see potentially restraining forces. This is a marketing thing, right. But it’s called force field analysis. I think. I remember learning all of this in like March classes that I took around the same time as he wrote this book, and I don’t think marketing uses all these concepts anymore, but like, it’s really taking me back to the class that I took. But so the restraining forces here are like, if there’s no ROI, potentially for putting a training program together, or an education program around the need that you’re responding to. So here like he recommends mitigating that by having kind of like a base case and a conservative case, in case you need to like scale back what you’re proposing. Yeah. Could be the company’s inexperience with customer education. They don’t see the value. This sounds familiar. Uh huh. And this like misperception of, quote, customers know our product already. What more can we teach them? By He points out that this is often miss judged because and I don’t think the Heath brothers made the stick was written yet that’s that comes later. But this is where I think he would have brought up the idea of the curse of knowledge as as experts on our we know way more than customers now. Yeah, you know the overestimate how easy it is to learn? We do.
Dave Derington 20:26
Because when you’re there and you use it every day, it makes sense to you, not other people. Yep. Yep. With this or standing forces section, though, I wanted to comment on a couple of things. First, is the no ROI. And I will say that I’ve left roles before because I was blocked from being able to even calculate it. And, and that’s bad, because like, you can only go so far with the program until you can get line of sight to how different you know, how can I see my customer journey through my education material? Can I correlate that to an outcome? Can I show that what I’m doing actually has value? If I can’t show that, then I’m worried because well, it’s okay, I can’t do my job because I can’t. It’s like I’m blind.
Adam Avramescu 21:10
Yeah, or the way that I would frame it is if like these restraining forces that he talks about still exists today, right? These these exist as clearly as they ever have, if you can’t calculate clear ROI, or if you’re not proposing training programs, that at least point towards ROI. Or if your company doesn’t really know what customer education is about, or if your company overestimates how easy the product is to use, then you’re you’re inherently going to have a harder time making customer education happen, or proposing specific customer education product projects. So what that means is, you then need to go look at the driving forces and find more relevant driving forces to attach customer education to so there’s more motivation to make the investment in those programs so that you’re not spending as much time trying to push back against those three restraining forces that we talked about. This is more relevant than ever.
Dave Derington 22:10
There’s more relevant over the last point I’d want to make on this before we move on is that that inexperience for the customer education part, that one should be less of a problem today, but it’s still a problem. And one, yeah, what I want to say is, there’s two parts to this that I want to respond with. Number one, if you’re a leader, or an executive, and you’re listening to this podcast, what I encourage you to do is go out there and read and familiarize yourself with a space to if you going back to other podcasts we’ve done, please spend the time to read some of the textbooks that are out there right now, Adam, your book, Daniel and Barry’s book, maybe even these two books that we’ve just reviewed, other books in our market, know your craft. And and that will help a lot because if you know the players and the activities that you can do to help out. And you’re proactive about that, you’ll get less in a situation where people are just telling you to do stuff from a leadership perspective. That doesn’t make any sense. Yep,
Adam Avramescu 23:08
absolutely. And those books that my book is called customer education, Daniel, and Barry’s book is called the customer education playbook. You can find them there were way more available than the books we’re reviewing right now because they’re more recent, and cheap. And sometimes, this Yeah, this one actually this this home buying one was was relatively cheap, but may not be once we have a surge of demand after people listen to this episode. So I think that is as good a pausing point is any. So Dave, I would propose that we take a break here, we end part one, and then pick it up in part two.
Dave Derington 23:47
So let’s outro this again, folks, thanks for joining us. Get ready for part two, which will come shortly if you want to learn more. We have a podcast website at customer dot education. And there you can find all of our stuff, all the great podcasts going out. And we’re almost at 100 right now. So this is it. There’s a lot. You can find us both on LinkedIn here. We’re here all the time.
Adam Avramescu 24:12
Yeah. Where we live. We live in LinkedIn. So come join us there. Thanks, Alan Coda for the music and audience. We’ll see you in part two. Cheers. Okay, pause, pause. Pause
Dave Derington 24:29
right. Yeah, actually, let it be a big pause here because that’s a visual cue and then we’ll do a clap. Okay.
Dave Derington 24:43
All right, let’s go.
Adam Avramescu 24:44
Okay. And three, two. Welcome back to C lab, the customer education lab where we are in the process of reviewing the 1990s Seven book strategies for effective customer education by sharing your home buying.
Dave Derington 25:06
We’re showing it on the screen, we’re showing it
Adam Avramescu 25:08
if you are, if you’re watching the video of this, we’re showing it on the screen written for the American Marketing Association. So if you have not heard part one of this episode, I would recommend that you go back and listen to part one. Because otherwise, this is not going to make a ton of sense.
Dave Derington 25:27
Very good. And we’re gonna pick up today I think we wrapped up from talking about chapter four, we were talking about driving force, yeah,
Adam Avramescu 25:35
marketing, I want. I think this is a great place for us to pick up because we pick up with a German folk legend. Oh, yeah.
Dave Derington 25:46
So this nerves are all
Adam Avramescu 25:49
this is the legend of the Nurnberg funnel. This is something I wish I knew about when I wrote my book. Because I think I use this analogy. I mean, I definitely use it in presentations and things like that. But I think I also use it in the book without knowing that there’s an actual German folk legend that’s about this. And actually now working for a company that has its roots in Germany and having a lot of German coworkers. They probably could have all told me about this. So you know, really missed opportunity. But the Nurnberg funnel is a legendary funnel that lets you pour knowledge into someone’s head.
Dave Derington 26:36
Guy, that would be great.
Adam Avramescu 26:37
Yeah. And apparently, there’s a there’s actually another book about this called the Nurnberg funnel by a guy named John Carroll. wherein he compares technical education to that funnel, basically saying, like, we wish that funnel existed for technical education, but it doesn’t. I haven’t picked up that book. But that’s another potential pseudo customer education book that’s out there in the world that maybe we’ll get our hands on at some point.
Dave Derington 27:04
Yeah. Well, yeah, now,
Adam Avramescu 27:06
he’s talking about the process of customer education.
Dave Derington 27:09
And I think, what’s, what was interesting, I felt like I learned a lot about this. And some of this is ethical, and some of it is maybe not so much anymore. But we understand that educational opportunities, the opportunity to do customer education exists throughout the whole process of choosing a platform or a product for us. You’ve got what we start off with a goal from issues like what am I actually my boss will tell me, what are you trying to do? What was the problem you’re trying to solve? Oh, I want to purchase looking management platform so that I can distribute all of our content at scale and stop doing training live. Okay, cool. Yeah. And remember,
Adam Avramescu 27:47
this is this, the goal here is typically a marketing goal. So good, right, because this is a marketing book, and customer education is being defined as a marketing discipline. So in that goal formation, he’s basically talking about four stages of of a buying journey. There’s identifying needs, and then there is setting priority, narrowing preferences, and planning intentions, which basically takes you to,
Dave Derington 28:18
to that goal formation.
Adam Avramescu 28:20
Right? That’s all. Yeah, I think those are the goals that you’re attaching to. So he’s, he’s like, he gives an example here of like Charles Schwab having a mutual fund selection guide. So this is like, basically one booklet, one, one piece of collateral that walks you through all those stages, you identifying needs by having like a Do I need an investment plan questionnaire. And then in terms of setting priority, he says, they’ve mentioned the average return for each fund. So that helps create urgency because you want to invest now. So you can get that rate of return, also sets priority by describing it as like a simple four steps. So the product is positioned is easier to use. So again, you have more priority to be able to use it, you’ve reduced potential objections. Yeah, the narrowing preferences is like there’s a table of different investment options, and a worksheet where you can work through how you’re going to allocate your assets. And finally, with planning intentions, it informs them of the minimum purchase requirements. So that won’t become like a last minute blocker to closing the deal. So you’ve educated the customer at every step down this funnel, even just in one piece of collateral to be able to choose a better Fund, which is within Schwab goal because Schwab is trying to help customers who otherwise wouldn’t be investors because they don’t work with like, you know, like full brokers, they want like a low a low cost, low overhead broker, like Schwab and otherwise they just wouldn’t be investing. So Schwab is helping open up the market and educate them so they could become buyers of that product, which is cool.
Dave Derington 29:57
That’s super cool. And then and then we Go on. So let me go on to the other step. So I like there’s this whole choosing process of forming goals, then acquiring the product, then consuming that. And then the last term that I haven’t heard very often is disposition, or what happens at the end. Like if normally, if you use a, what were we talking about in the book, the concept of like going to buy, you know, get lunch, and or you have a TV dinner, you know, a frozen dinner you put in the microwave, it’s easy, it’s two minutes, you get it out, you eat it, and then disposition is throwing it away. But these days, if you live in Seattle, like me, throwing things away can get very complicated, because you’ve got three or four bins with different kinds of things that you have to put in each one of the bins. And
Adam Avramescu 30:46
we call this out, right, like recycling, I think is actually one of the options that he gives for disposition. Yeah, yeah, I thought that yes, you’re right, that can get complicated depending on depending on where you are, and how easy or hard it is to dispose things. In Amsterdam, we have actually very strange underground trash cans that are also hard to throw things out in. But like, so the thing is, like, we have to think he’s not talking about like software here, right? He’s talking about, like, actual, actual products. So acquisition here. I mean, you could be talking about software as well. But like the point about having disposition as part of the lifecycle implies that we’re talking primarily about, like actual goods.
Dave Derington 31:25
Yeah, but I would say one thing to that I just to be just for completeness sake, I think there is a disposition step in software that we don’t often think about, which is what happens when, when, like, I’ve, I’ve learned all this stuff, and I’m using a platform, but there’s this case of I’m leaving the platform. And I think some of the best and most I don’t know, I know that word. Companies with a tremendous amount of integrity have actually built an off boarding. Yeah, thing.
Adam Avramescu 31:58
No, I agree with what you’re saying. In fact, I’m
Dave Derington 32:01
not really important, but it’s there. No, no,
Adam Avramescu 32:03
I mean, look at personeel, we actually have a version of this as well, because we have a target customer size. And sometimes we work with very fast growing companies, where we know that they’re just growing so quick that in a certain number of years, they’re going to be way too big. For personeel, right, because we focus on small and medium businesses, we know how to serve small and medium businesses and mid market really, really well. But like, if you’re then you know, if you’re going to become like a 10,000 person, company, and we see you on the path of that, we need to start working with you early to figure out how you will graduate to workday or a company like that that’s more equipped to serve a 10,000 person company. At scale. Yeah. At scale with with like, yeah, with all the the different, you know, back ends more complicated features that you need to support a company of that size. So anyway, like, I see what you’re saying. And that is actually a part of the customer lifecycle.
Dave Derington 33:08
We don’t right, because we don’t often call it out. And I think it’s important to do so at least, yeah, but I think like you do something there.
Adam Avramescu 33:15
But the point the point is like, we don’t, we don’t we don’t educate the customer on disposition in the same way that we would need to if it’s like, here’s how to recycle this.
Dave Derington 33:27
Yeah. Yeah, sure.
Adam Avramescu 33:30
That’s, that’s, that’s what I’m calling out is the difference. So okay, so you got acquisition, which is like how to access buy and get the product home, or install it, I guess. Then there’s actually an installation is the next step. That’s consumption. So it’s product training. It’s like preparation, which is the assembly or installation. Use could be functional, like, like a VCR manual teaching you how to like set the clock.
Dave Derington 33:56
And like the artistic one, the artist. That is, you know, that’s something that I’ve had so much fun with. Being in these fascinating b2b SaaS companies, where you work with customers, occasionally, they’ve come with this amazing way to use your platform. And those use cases you love to show off because they’re elegant, they’re creative, but they also show off how your platform can be used in really cool ways.
Adam Avramescu 34:23
Yeah, for sure. And I think like, at Slack, we would always call this the art of the possible. And it was a big part of how we worked with customers. It was a big part of what our sales team and our marketing team worked with enterprise customers to do to show them the art of the possible with Slack all the creative ways that you could use it. Because slack was a blank canvas in a lot of ways, right like within the UI. The example they give here is like Home Depot doing DIY workshops, do it yourself. So you can use the products they sell to do something more creative or artistic. But consumption could also be maintenance. Since storage, like how to how to how to care for and store a product properly, and then there was disposition, like we talked about, and he’s talking from an instructional design standpoint, you’re writing your performance objectives according to those goals. And basically recommends that as you do that you consider the what he calls the ABCD. Is the audience behavior conditions and degree?
Dave Derington 35:26
Question for you? Is this not part of what we would call kind of a job task analysis?
Adam Avramescu 35:33
It is, it’s somewhere between a job task analysis and writing learning objectives. Uh, huh. Look at maps, it maps there. And in fact, if if we remember the other the 1984 book, where she’s describing a loose instructional design process, you’ve largely got the same process here as well, where you’re kind of writing, you’re figuring out what the objective is, and then you’re writing an assessment first, based on that analysis of the performance goal. And then you’re writing the curriculum afterwards to fit that. So that’s what’s going on there. And I think that’s kind of a lead into, like, you, and I would read that and think, okay, yeah, this is like, insert.
Dave Derington 36:18
Like, yeah, this is our job is
Adam Avramescu 36:21
instructional design chapter. But it’s a lead into what I think is a fundamentally more interesting chapter, which is the one where he talks about product systems. And you called this out before. As one of the more interesting parts of the book,
Dave Derington 36:36
you know, let me take a lead here is that in chapter six, we’re talking about product, the like you’re saying the product systems. What this evoke, when I was reading through the book, I was starting to think about a problem or challenge that I’ve had all throughout the last decade, where, okay, I’m sitting here in a professional services team, or whatever. And then I get, I need to go talk to a product and figure out, you know, stuff from them from documentation. And I’ve always, like, had this kind of like, Alright, we’ve got product here, and you’ve got support here, and I’m here. But the frame of a product system is it’s in this is something that I’ve said, I think, unintentionally, but this maps to the concept of a product system, I’ve always said, your education is part of the product. Your enablement is part of the product. If you’re in an organization, where that’s lagging, so far, you know, it’s a month, two months, three months out, before you have updates to the product to the educational material that your product is delivering, you got a big problem, because this is it, they all have to be here, you have to have support education product, working in unison, as kind of like a wheel to be able to deliver the product, deliver the training for that product, deliver the support for that product as well. So that it’s an integrative web of activities that happen. And I like the way that that the author, you know, Peter is just putting this together and saying this is a system, not just a one thing.
Adam Avramescu 38:14
Yeah, yeah. And here, I think he’s getting to the heart of something that has always been challenging for customer education professionals like parently, even in 1997. But certainly, certainly today as well, where there’s always that question of why do we need customer education? Couldn’t we just invest in making the product more intuitive. So he’s tackling this head on. And he he starts in a contentious way. Like, here’s the quote, he says, the very presence of customer education accompanying a product, whether a manual videotape, or instruction on the label indicates that there was a fault with the product for if products were perfect, there would be no need for customer education, for customer support. So he’s being cheeky here, right? Because obviously products do need customer support. And therefore, by the transitive property, I don’t know which which logical mathematical principle that we’re using here. Yeah, yeah, I don’t know which one but like, therefore, also, they they all need customer education, because like, products will never be completely autodidactic. There are very few products out there that are so simple and intuitive, that they need no instructions on how to use them. The example of one he gives is a doorknob. a doorknob should not come with instructions on how to use it maybe on how to install it, but not how to use it. But most products do actually need education and support because the new technologies and again, I’m quoting here might be too complex and overload the cognitive abilities of customers, or the facts of the product change continually. Like they’re constantly getting updates or something like that. Just one We’re dealing with now it sounds like SAS sounds like. Yes. So he describes this as being all of a product system where you’ve got product design, customer education, and customer support, working all all the same way. And so he starts by talking about the product design part of it. And, again, the goal being like get the product design to be good enough that you minimize the need for customer education and customer support is customer education. And support shouldn’t be basically like a palliative for a bad product. So here’s where he gives the example. Again, he goes back to the Design of Everyday, everyday things. And he’s talking about the Norman doors, which I’m realizing now we talked about in the last episode, not this one, but that’s like a door where it looks like from the handle that you should have to push it, but in fact, you have to pull it. So to compensate for that they had to like pull on the door to get people to use it properly. So that’s an example of like needless instructions, when you could have actually just designed the thing intuitively. But the point is like, the more the more you add in terms of the psychological design. And here, he brings up that principle of like, you can use a human can like kind of actively process seven plus or minus two things at the at any given time. But the more you go beyond that, the more you won’t absorb. But what you can do to make products more usable. So by the way, like the example he’s giving for this is I think he’s talking about like a remote control, where if a remote control has, like 20 buttons, that’s way beyond seven plus or minus two. So you’re never going to know what all those buttons do unless they’re labeled and organized. So what you can do is you can chunk the UI, or you can categorize it. So for example, all the buttons that do similar thing, it’s going to be in a similar area, the remote and can be a similar color, in addition to being labeled. And that’s going to make the remote more usable. Or you can have feedback loops where you do something and then the product responds to you in such a way where you understand what the what the feature does. And we have that, right, we have that in software all the time. You click the button in the software, and then something happens.
Dave Derington 42:18
Yeah, I mean, like, I’m sitting here looking at my Steam deck. And the reason I’m bringing it up is because I was sitting there last night, playing civilization on it, I can’t believe it actually will play that and plays it quite well. But the I was struggling with the interface. And I was thinking very much about this book that I’m reading like, well, how can you teach me how to use the interface, the coolest thing about this piece of hardware is that when the games load, there’s a screen that pops up on it, showing which buttons which parts of the of the device itself will control the game that you’re going to play. And I’m like, Oh my God, and because sometimes if you dive into any kind of video game, there’s always this moment of, I’m just going to, you know, F around and find out what works for a little while because games. Games are a very good example of
Adam Avramescu 43:11
product compressing D Why isn’t he jumping? Yeah.
Dave Derington 43:15
Yeah, like come on. And then it will prompt you and stuff. So that was a
Adam Avramescu 43:18
really games. Yeah, games are built on feedback loops like that. That’s a crucial part of game design. But when
Dave Derington 43:23
they’re not, so that was an example of steam deck and Valve Corporation putting customer education into the application in a moment of need.
Adam Avramescu 43:32
Right? Because the product itself doesn’t have the product design to warrant that you don’t need to educate the customer on it. It’s yeah,
Dave Derington 43:39
I mean, that’s fascinating enough, it’s current. And then it’s really cool to see these kinds of examples. I’m always looking at them now in the context of customer education, anything I use?
Adam Avramescu 43:50
Yeah, for sure. And so so that’s so that’s product, he also think he talks about physiological design, but that’s not really relevant to tech. It is relevant, obviously to like physical. It’s
Dave Derington 44:03
not though because the more I think about it, I mean, well, it’s hardware conversation with people about that hardware increasingly looks like software. And one of the conversations I had this year with a person from a medical devices company, you know, and b2b to see type medical device, but it was working for a company, really complicated situation. But there was so much interface discussion and customer education need that they’re really struggling.
Adam Avramescu 44:33
No, you’re right, like wearables and things like that, that it physiological design definitely applies if you’re in like hardware or wearables or something like that. Yeah. I was thinking about software. It doesn’t really like sorry that that’s all psychological design. I was trying to remember what example he gives her for physiological design, but I don’t I didn’t write it down so I don’t have it on me. So okay, so again, we’re talking about like product design, customer education and customer support working together at a product system. So that was that was product. Then for customer education, he’s saying like what we teach mostly depends on the product design. But he pokes he pokes at it a little bit, he’s like, Well, but necessarily does it need to be that way, it could go the other way. Like, it’s kind of an interesting thought experiment, like, you could start by educating the customer on how the thing works, and then design it around how you intend to educate the customer. So here’s an example of like, it’s like some sort of display that you set up. And before they actually ever designed the display. They wrote the instructions for how they wanted the customer to put it together. And then they actually designed it to the specs that they wrote about how to put it together to make sure that it was simple to put together. So I thought that was interesting.
Dave Derington 45:45
Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, not realistic.
Adam Avramescu 45:50
No, it actually happened. Like won’t get once. Yeah. Actually happened once. We don’t. Yeah, well, it actually it actually happened trademark. And then there’s customer support. So here, he’s talking about the hot new trend of online supports. Again, we have to read we have to read the quote, you want to read the quote, Dave?
Dave Derington 46:17
computer and software company has been doing this for years through bulletin board services. VBS is
Adam Avramescu 46:23
Oh, wow. Yeah. So give me that. Oh, yeah. Do you remember BBs is
Dave Derington 46:28
Oh, god. Yeah. I mean, I had a, at one point, I had an early PC and I had a modem and I would connect and all this stuff. And it was just horrible. Horrible. Yeah, it’s all these are like
Adam Avramescu 46:41
pre pre worldwideweb. Like early internet, forums, basically, for our Gen Z audience. That’s that’s what we’re talking about.
Dave Derington 46:54
Today, grandpa gave us the internet and it was taxed.
Adam Avramescu 46:58
Well, that’s where I went to mansplain. How Star Trek worked. Anyway, so these are early online communities that they’re talking about here, in addition to more traditional support channels, like going through the phone. And then he gives an example of putting it all together. So the example he uses here is is Macintosh. So now we’re actually getting back into tackle, we’re talking about hardware and software. And so the design he calls out obviously, like Mac product design is really simple. They differentiated themselves in a market by having a GUI graphical user interface. The packaging, and the unboxing teaches you step by step, how to unpack and assemble and put your Mac together, plus some pretty sleek docs and a manual. And then for the support side, they actually he calls out a trend where previously they were only doing support through resellers. But now, they were revolutionising their support model by actually giving end users a one 800 support number that they could call. And this is I think, you know, still a few years before Apple geniuses and Apple stores and things like that.
Dave Derington 48:17
Yeah. That’s pretty. That’s pretty cool. Especially in that era. I remember using computer technology in that that area era, and it was it’s often infuriating. Because now when you take for granted with Google experts, you know, you ask a question, somebody’s like, oh, I googled that for you. But there’s such a proliferation
Adam Avramescu 48:40
of of materials, like sending people to let me Google that for you site.
Dave Derington 48:43
Oh, I do all the time. But it didn’t exist, then there wasn’t that opportunity. And it was a theory thing when you hit a wall and you go, Oh, I don’t know how to do this. Now you’re talking maybe days or you have to pick up the phone. And Mike, you were on on hold? To get questions. Yes, I was that person on the other line in the early 2000s. Not very long after this book where I was the support line for a very sophisticated platform. And it was very difficult job. One of the hardest ones I’ve had.
Adam Avramescu 49:17
Yeah, yeah. And so you can imagine that at the time, as well. The idea of being able to open up support to a community of specialists on a BBS is actually, I mean, it actually like we’re making, we’re making fun of it, because it’s like early technology, and now we have better ways of doing communities but like, communities, like community software these days is not fundamentally different from what BBs is we’re doing at the time in terms of being able to connect people with expertise to other people to solve each other’s problems. So it actually wasn’t a huge innovation.