Adam Avramescu  00:00

Welcome to see lab customer education lab where we debunk customer education myths, misconceptions and bad advice that stops growth dead in its tracks. I’m Adam ever masscue and I am here with special guest, Tiffany Taylor, Director of Customer Success and education at handshake, welcome, Tiffany.

Tiffany Taylor  00:26

You made me sound like a celebrity. I felt like I was coming out of a curtain on a stage. And I love it. And I’m so grateful to be here, Adam.

Adam Avramescu  00:35

I’m so grateful to have you. And if, if I was introducing you like a celebrity, it’s because you are a celebrity in my mind. Actually, I have to tell the story. Because you and I met after having heard of each other multiple times we were at a conference. Do you remember this?

Tiffany Taylor  00:52

And a lot of people kept on telling you and I that we should meet each other. But we had never met each other. You’re like, do you know Adam, do you know Tiffany, you must have met how have you noticed each other? And it just it this was the circle? We were ships that never met in the night?

Adam Avramescu  01:06

Yeah, it was very strange. But then we finally did. I think it was at one of the receptions during the evening. And we finally found each other over at a table and we started talking and then it was a very much one of these. Why have we never done this before moments. So I’m so happy that that was the opportunity for us to become friends and start talking. And now the culmination of our friendship is talking about success and education together on this podcast.

Tiffany Taylor  01:34

I agree. It’s also one of those things where you find out that the world is small, but somehow not small enough, right? Like our circles knew each other. But somehow our Venn diagram was yet to overlap.

Adam Avramescu  01:47

Yeah, for sure. So that’s, that’s the fun of this world. And it’s also why it’s it’s so nice that, you know, we through through both, you know, podcasts like this, as well as conferences, and all the areas where customer success and customer education professionals are starting to come together that we’re, we’re starting to narrow that Venn diagram into a circle. Absolutely. Now, before we get started, we have to do our tradition on the show. Do you know what day it is today? Tiffany?

Tiffany Taylor  02:17

It’s it’s Friday, January 6, what what what else does that mean?

Adam Avramescu  02:24

It is and that has a certain connotation in the United States, but I’m gonna I’m gonna make it more positive. Today is National Technology Day.

Tiffany Taylor  02:33

Oh, oh, no, that is special. I wish I had known that.

Adam Avramescu  02:38

Yeah, it’s also national shortbread day. But I thought National Technology Day might be better because we work in the tech industry. And so it’s a pretty momentous day for all of us who support people who are trying to use software better.

Tiffany Taylor  02:51

I’m actually a little sad that it didn’t feel I feel like we should know about it, or am I the only one in the dark? Do we need to I feel like we need to make it a big a bigger affair next year. I’m gonna I’m already marinating. If it’s if it’s Technology Day, there’s some things I love to party and celebrate so that

Adam Avramescu  03:06

you can make like a shirt that looks like a shortbread cookies with computers on them like a little CRT monitor. Okay, okay. Deputy, let’s stay on the same page by doing what Dave likes to call the frame up. Today, we’re talking about the overlap between customer success and education. And I’m so glad that you’re on the show, because you are leading both of these functions at handshake. And I really want to talk about how they relate and how we talk about buy in and ROI for those both internally and externally. So to do that, it might be helpful before we we jump into the conversations, talk a little bit more about what your what your function is at the company and specifically, who are your customers. So what what does customer success mean to you?

Tiffany Taylor  04:03

Absolutely. Well, thank you for asking. First of all, for folks who don’t know handshake is essentially a platform that helps employers connect with students who are interested in early talent. So for example, Wells Fargo wants to increase their pipeline of fresh graduates in all aspects of their financial realm. They could essentially go to the handshake platform to do that, through who our customers are more than 1400 institutions in the United States and now, the UK and so it really just provides a space where we’re trying to democratize access for students. My specific team serves our what we call our edu partners. These are career services professionals, who were for the most part on campus in the Career Services offices for folks who had maybe a traditional four year excuse areas or community college and have a main main office that focuses on getting students internships and jobs. And so in my function as the Director of Customer Success, we have not not unusual to any SAS industry where we have our three segments, we call ours growth, scaled, and strategic. And those three managers report to me. And then each of those managers have three to eight CSMs. We call them relationship managers, but again, for for a SAS space. So the entirety of that team is about 2122. Folks, who all rolled up into me from our success side, on the other side of my hat is our customer education team. Very happy as Adam knows, and has spoken with so many of the guests here, that was never really truly a team. It started with me, when I was I myself was a CSM and fell in love with all things customer education. Long story short, I grew the team, to now having my first full time headcount. And actually three team members who split their time in their full time role to provide assistance to the customer education, facet as a part of their dri. So I really like to think of it as an army of four folks making all things customer education happen, for handshake. And we know that in customer education, world four is plenty, especially for a newly formed function. I think, for me, in terms of how that relates, is that I have the best of both worlds. Selfishly, I know, I think there’s a dream where maybe those could be separated, I could not imagine doing either of my jobs. Well, if I was not the director of both those functions, I get direct access to the audience as they learn the tool. And the people who I need to market push and promote the tool and learning offerings. Also report to me. So there’s this very, I hate to say it, it almost makes my job easier, right? Because here I am talking about pipeline and and help and sentiment with my success, RMS? Well, a part of the tools in their toolbox are the customer education offerings. And so it really gives me the direct pipeline to feedback, I get feedback instantly from both the folks who are delivering it from the audience, because this is not a separate or siloed space, because I manage both functions, it means there’s minimal lapse in between when I can act on and incorporate the feedback as well. That was a whole lot. I’m sorry, yeah,

Adam Avramescu  07:35

no, that’s but it’s good. It gives us a layout. And I want to dig into some of those things, as far as how they relate to each other, because I think this will help us map out then how education plays a role in this kind of ROI story across customer success. So you you named your segments earlier within customer success, and that was growth scale and strategic was that right? Yep. Is that is what is that based on? Is that customer size? Or is that like the level of touch you provide in the model for them? Well, tell me more about the segments.

Tiffany Taylor  08:05

Absolutely. So our scaled is is our traditional that is or very large one to many, these tend to be our smaller schools that really need scale touch. smaller schools, smaller, smaller number of students that they’re serving as well a one person or two person office or growth somewhere in the middle where the ratio of CSM to customer gets us about one to 80. And then we have our strategic which tends to be our you know, I think in some some industries, we’ll call that longtail, right? longtail mid and tier one or tier two. And so our strategic tends to be our mot our high touch, these are our longest, our oldest accounts are super users, they tend to hit have a much higher touch in terms of their service and even just their usability of our tool.

Adam Avramescu  09:03

Got it? Okay, that that makes sense. And we’ll come back to that in a moment. But first I want to ask then in terms of your educational offerings, tell me about what what programs are within your your education space like how are you educating your customers

Tiffany Taylor  09:17

the biggest leverage again, not not unique to us is implementing the implementing process that goes through our customer education, you You and I both know we utilize our academy that is housed in skill jar and you cannot as an education partner purchase handshake without going through our handshake Academy. And so that is how we we launched at at scale. So first is going through our our implementation course it ends up being about four to eight weeks and that is our biggest most use highly leveraged. course offering with with customer education. The second piece is our virtual instructor led training where we’re able to do it took a long time through growing our customer success team that we were able to do scaled programs, you and I know when you’re a smaller just starting customer success, all you’re kind of doing is triage. There is no time for forward, proactive work, you’re really,

Adam Avramescu  10:22

you’re in that ad hoc reactive. Absolutely.

Tiffany Taylor  10:25

No one could have told me three years ago that this is where we would be. Now each of my segments are doing tailored programs. I think at scale team, they call theirs and power hours, or strike team calls, their strap chats. And those are actually now being housed through our academy. So we’re getting, obviously folks having to log into our academy. So that’s, that’s immediate potential for them to then go into the other courses. But we’re getting that feedback and data and analytics, right in our system. And that is housed by my team and by

Adam Avramescu  10:59

briefing within your team is a tailored program, right? Yes, yes. That’s that’s a joke about your last name. But yeah, no, no, but like going back seriously to that for a moment. Like if you think about then, that being so the implementation process is driven by a combination of self service, and then VLT, and then depending on the segment you’re in, you might be getting then additional direct guidance from one of your relationship managers. Is that right? Right,

Tiffany Taylor  11:30

right. And then the other things are, as you can imagine, we have, I mean, we still don’t even have a course linked to every feature in our program. But what we do have our high value, as as my advice, and I think your advice to anyone, your high value, target items. So we know our appointments tool, very highly used. That’s actually one of our first batch tools, our virtual career fair tool, that course is very linked on. And so that’s kind of how we’ve broken down in our first iteration, by feature mass usage and badge ability for a course courses.

Adam Avramescu  12:08

And are those are those badges mandatory to complete the implementation? You mentioned a moment ago that you make customers go through this during implementation, no, there, it’s still optional. It’s still

Tiffany Taylor  12:18

optional. Those are separate, you have to go through implementation to launch the handshake tool. These batch courses are more, more, I wouldn’t say more vanity, it’s more you want a depth of understanding of that feature. And that’s when you would go to that course.

Adam Avramescu  12:34

Got it. Okay. So you sort of have like, let me let me try to map this out. You’ve got implementation, which is about driving activation, like that’s the milestone, you need to be able to activate handshake. And if you don’t go through those courses, if you don’t successfully pass pass them, then you presumably, are not done implementing handshake. Like what happens at that point, if they don’t finish the course,

Tiffany Taylor  12:56

your launch is delayed, you we will actually not turn off. I mean, I wish I’m not simplifying the engineering of it, but you will actually not launch your product here, you wouldn’t be able to use it to your to your because you

Adam Avramescu  13:08

have to learn about the project to be able to use. Okay, so that’s, that’s, so you’ve reached activation. And then at that point, depending on your customers level of interest or motivation, which, which is also why you’re providing badges, then you would have courses that are more focused on driving adoption after that initial point of activation, exactly. To your your deepening knowledge around high value topics, you might be coming back to some things that might have been addressed during implementation, but aren’t going to be fully set up at that point, because the customer doesn’t have enough cognitive, right to

Tiffany Taylor  13:44

thing. And then the rest is, do you want to drive the thing? So I think we can add on and here’s how you then maximize its usage.

Adam Avramescu  13:53

Okay, and so now let’s, let’s tie those two concepts together, because we’re going to talk about the success education overlap, how does the way that these courses or educational offerings are used change, depending on the segment who is using them?

Tiffany Taylor  14:09

Or do they really, I right now, in the way we have approached it, they don’t they don’t change right now, based on segment, what does change and what is tailored by segment are those virtual instructor led training that I was mentioning, because those are really, it’s not a hey, everyone come to this, we actually only invite those segments to those sessions. And those sessions are crafted in partnership. My customer education team meets with the strap managers, the growth managers, the scaled managers to talk about great this time of year, this month, what do your what do your book of business need? And so those are where we tailor for the segment and not necessarily in the course offerings yet that doesn’t mean that we won’t get to that. I don’t know if we’ll have time to talk today we do a voice of the Customer scorecard, I’m now actually going into what some of the feedback from our customers are about what they need, which is great that they want more depth, we see our super users wanting more. But again, with a team of one, we had to be strategic in what we’re doing. And this is our first foray in providing tailored training per segment.

Adam Avramescu  15:19

Yeah, that that makes sense. And so I think that would then take us into you, you’ve described some goals, that customer education drives for the business, right? customer education is ensuring more consistent activation of your product. There’s a tie to deepening adoption, presumably, there are some other things that customer education has pointed out as well. But what I’m curious curious about here is when you are thinking about the relationship between customer education and your broader customer success, function, what what’s the ROI story for you? Like? How do you think about the investments that you make in customer education relative to the rest of your, your business?

Tiffany Taylor  16:02

Yeah, I think the ROI stories and much different than others, right, there’s a lot of showing and proofing. We know that right showing the correlation for multi year renewals, I think is a top one when you would send these questions to me again, because I manage or, or CSMs. renewals are a big part of my job and their job, at least that’s how their role is at handshake. And so very, very good way for us to have shown especially when I acquired our one full time headcount, we just started doing multi year renewals as a part of packages that we offer at handshake, us being able to show that the folks who engaged in the academy were also the folks signing multi year renewals was one of the I mean, I don’t want to call it low hanging fruit, we had a lot of analytics to run, but because of the high priority that our leadership had placed on the author of How much multi year renewals our team was able to acquire, that was such a good connection for the, for our customer education team to make. And so showing that showing the correlation there has been critical similarly, and you know, it’s about leading and lagging lagging indicators. Similarly, showing the connection with those who churn and their lack of involvement, customer education related action, was an incredible indicated actually helped lighten the fire for my success team to be better at tracking. Oh, wow, they haven’t been in the academy. Oh, they’re about two weeks behind in their implementation with based on where they should be in the course. This is something I think I’d been touting three years ago. But again, when we’re smaller, when we don’t have when we’re juggling a lot of balls, it wasn’t as easy to become so laser focused. And it was just a quantitative story, right? We weren’t actually showing the metrics to align with that and show look, we just have four turn, let’s look at what their activity and in with our customer education and Academy has been. And it’s either been little to none or delayed, and showing that correlation was a huge indicator for us. And we were able to tell putting out that oh, sorry. Yeah, no, go ahead. We were able to show that like within a three week window, if there was a lapse from them competing or starting their implementation course, that that would be an impetus for potential churn. And just even being able to narrow down timeline like that, you know, is very powerful for how you drive CSM action and being able to tell that story, especially to leadership.

Adam Avramescu  18:38

Yeah, so you’re you’re able to measure along several fronts, which I think is interesting and instructive, probably for a lot of people listening. One is, you have managed to do some correlation of education activity with downstream impact. And in fact, some of the most important downstream impact that you would want to see as a customer success team, right? If you’re looking at renewals in churn, well, that’s, that’s the heart of customer success right there. So that’s amazing. And presumably, that helps get buy in for customer education as a key pillar of customer success.

Tiffany Taylor  19:19

Right. The second I would say is that we consider the seasonality of our learners and ensure that that story is told within the context of the seasons for company. I’m gonna say that again, because I think this is one of those things that I think apply to any of your listeners, regardless of industry. Something that I’ve learned, having multiple careers in many industries. Every industry has their own season, right? Like when your year starts, who’s q4 is when you can imagine, as I had mentioned earlier, our customers, our education partners, so our seasons tend to run on an academic calendar of when it’s the busy season. And so BT is recall that back to school is our busiest season, our customers are putting on fairs, our students are their students are just coming back. So it’s the start of their year. So data has shown us, that is actually the slowest time of the year for customer education. Because our customers are, so they’ve got other stuff going on. Exactly. So they can’t, they don’t have the time. So what was great is that you can imagine, at a company where customer education is new, and hear all the other teams are being busy. When customer education looks slow, it could be read as Oh, this team isn’t doing anything, they aren’t doing enough. So it was really important for us to tell the story within that context of saying, hey, actually, the reason why customer education metrics might be down now is because our customers aren’t engaged. This is not their training season. So here’s the question is actually building, that’s when we’re building our content. So it’s really great that when the rest of our teams are busy, because summer education is kind of in a hole, we’re building all of our content, so that we can release it. During December, when our customers are there in their office students aren’t really coming into their office, and they’re like, great, and I’m a little bit more free, I can digest some content. So even that it might seem so small. But that helps the light turned on for leadership to understand when they can expect the metric driven stories when they can expect those nice numbers from customer education. But we had to tell it within the context of the seasons for our company.

Adam Avramescu  21:29

Yeah, and I guess what I’m curious about then is, you know, we were talking a moment ago about what’s essentially lagging indicators, value metrics, right? Whether customer education has an effect downstream on renewal or churn? Are those seasonal as well? Or is what you’re talking about here more looking at the leading indicator metrics, the ones that are more focused around learner activity within your platform, what you talked about, as well as like the timeliness of making sure that they’re logged on with the right part during implementation, like which, which are they both seasonal,

Tiffany Taylor  22:05

they’re both seasonal, we have seen, but I will say that this is to a lesser extent, we have seen when it is the high training season. So let’s talk about let’s say December, it is still been good for for a CSM to check on which customers are not engaging during that season. Because let’s be clear, if they weren’t doing it when they’re busy, and they aren’t doing it during the time when they should be, then the prediction is that well then when is it going to happen? So our CSM team has still also utilize that to drive action for any of your folks who are listening who are who are around like success pipeline CTAs. This is one of those CTS for our team, where who are the folks who are not engaging around this, again, this very sweet window, I think we’ve marked I think my team locked it down as like just before Thanksgiving and just before just before the Western American Christmas holiday, that if they’re partners, especially folks who are at risk, however folks categorize their health, red, yellow, green, these are the folks where you might now have a CTA for your CSM is to actually drive Hey, it’s your December come check out this content, right? Like instead of just waiting for them to come where the RNs are at the CSM czar actually forcing action around those to drive folks there because we have seen a risk of again, if they’re not using that window, they’re not using their busy window, then when is it going to happen?

Adam Avramescu  23:30

Yeah, so what I really like here is that you’re you’re not just looking at your education, activity metrics. descriptively, you’re not just saying, oh, traffic went up, traffic went down, you’re actually working across your CSMs, to say, hey, let’s actually make sure that we’re using the data that we have about how our customers are using our education to drive very specific calls to action, because we know that running those playbooks will correlate to downstream success. And by the way, we can look at that downstream success, to say that education has a forward looking impact on the metrics ultimately, that we care about as a business. So getting customers trained at the right time when they’re ready for it is going to be predictive of their overall health and lifetime value as a customer. That’s cool. Yeah, I love that. And to me, that is the perfect relationship between education and success.

24:26

i

Adam Avramescu  24:29

Good, good. So yeah, I think I think this is instructive to a lot of people who are listening to this maybe we have a lot of people who listen, who are customer success leaders who haven’t necessarily made a strong investment in customer education yet. So it sounds like you’ve taken the first step by hiring a full time customer education head and then second of all, having some some other folks now starting to get involved with customer education. Is there a next step in Add investment story and if so, what arguments do you think you would have to make to your leadership around the ROI to be able to continue to to grow in progress?

Tiffany Taylor  25:12

I don’t know. He agreed to like my answer. I don’t think the next step yet is investment in growth. I think right now I’m in a place of, I got the headcount. I have the time from the team. This is great. Right now. We’re spending a lot of time and showing our metrics we started in internal customer education newsletter, which has gone over really, really well. I always tell folks don’t, don’t let your wins happen in secret, right? Like, if you were not a fan of the brag folder, you need to be now. And so that’s really what that internal newsletter is just you have to remember, it’s not just about showing ROI, Adam, and you, and I know this for my company, it’s still new, we’re still educating folks on what customer education is. And so that is a lot of where the language even just how we speak in customer education is so new. And so how can we, my favorite moment is when I hear a member of the C suite use the same language, I have been using it. That’s when you’re like, Yes, this is it, you know, so those might seem small things. Yes. And so it means that when I’m not in the room, it’s being spoken about. And this is when you know that well now when I need the next headcount that may come right. And so we’re spending a lot of time there. I think what the next step is for us is, I think the number one thing I was thinking to myself, Okay, Adam was going to want to know what is the thing I want the all his listeners to, to take away. And this is very net new for me coming up, off after our Connect conference chatting with you is the number one thing I found the most impactful with leadership at handshake is to volunteer customer education as the solution for a problem. I think for many C suite and leadership there used to teams directors, myself, asking for things, right, we need headcount, we need money for this, I need a software, I need whatever. And so I saw this light bulb go off when, from from my customer success side, we had a couple of escalations, it was an interesting end of the year. And here I was in a room, other leaders, and we’re trying to solve for this issue that we have. And I had said, Well, what if customer education does x and elevation, like the eyebrows on for road and the leadership because we were looking so narrowly at how it could be solved, and to introduce customer education as a potential solution, as opposed to money, headcount, lack of time from someone else to accomplish X. It was such a relief. And now I’m just trying to infiltrate any I go to the marketing team meetings, like Oh, customer education will be happy, happy to How’s that, or, Oh, we can create that, Oh, happy to put that on the Academy. And that I think, is when you start to see, it’s, we no longer look like a money drain, or this new thing that Tiffany wished for and is trying to make happen. Stop trying to make fetch happen graduate, and you know, it’s like, truly a part Oh, my

Adam Avramescu  28:12

gosh, this is like the second episode in a row where we’ve made a stop trying to make fetch happen.

Tiffany Taylor  28:19

Come out. Now I’m gonna go watch that. So I think making customer education a part of the solution for the problems that your company team or industry is facing. I think that is this this way that maybe someone hadn’t told you before, that instead of trying to show ROI, you just look as as if you were a value add, you become an asset to to the team, and it doesn’t mean that your solution has to be chosen, it shows that you are willing to be a part of the solution. And that to me has been a game changer.

Adam Avramescu  28:50

That so by the way, I do not not like that answer. I like that answer. In fact, I’m gonna say I love that answer. And it, I’m gonna go as far as to say that I want I want everyone listening to this podcast, who’s really thinking about the ROI of their customer education program to rewind for how many minutes that Tiffany just gave that answer and listen to it again, because I couldn’t agree more. We spend a lot of time making, I think, fundamentally, two mistakes. One is not focusing on the value that we deliver to the business. So maybe we just spend a lot of time measuring our own vanity metrics within the education world are activity metrics, and we’re not thinking about what the downstream effects of those things are. And that was kind of the first part of our conversation. The second thing that I think we often do within customer education is we kind of look for these abstract ROI metrics to try to prove our existence or to justify our existence. Like proven we do exist, just justification. That’s the hard part. But we’re often doing that in the wrong way. Because what we’re trying to use to show ROI in the abstract is not actually connecting ourselves to solving real business problems. And I love that you brought that up. Because if we, as customer education can tangibly solve real business problems through the programs that we’re doing, and continue to do that, that’s actually the reason why you would want to expand, I completely agree with you that you do not want to be just arbitrarily going to your leadership and asking for a bunch of stuff, especially if that bunch of stuff isn’t going to solve real problems. customer education is not about building a fiefdom, we are never going to be the largest team in the company, we should be small, but mighty, we should be versatile. And we should be connected to to solving real problems for the business. So I love I love that you brought that up. And naturally, what’s going to happen is, if customer education gets really good at solving them, solving these problems, people are going to start coming to us more and saying, hey, you know, what can customer education address this. And then we might say, hey, you know, what, would love to solve that I actually need now these resources to be able to solve that just because we’re at capacity, like we’d love to be able to do that we can’t right now. But we can either make trade offs, or we can make an investment in customer education to solve them. And that’s where the motor really starts humming. So love it. Really love it.

Tiffany Taylor  31:30

And the day that happens, I will message you, I’d be like, I have to say No, today out of it’s coming. It’s coming together, it’s coming together.

Adam Avramescu  31:37

Love it. So you you pointed towards a lot of areas where customer education is solving real business problems. And I want to tie that back, as well to the idea of customer education supporting a scalable customer success. Motion. What I’m what I’m taking from that, or maybe reading into what you’re saying is that customer education also has kind of a cost saving story for your business. Am I Am I getting that right?

Tiffany Taylor  32:05

100%. I think now I’m coming up on my four years at handshake four years ago, we would have for CSMs generating. Again, I know the story isn’t unique to handshake, but for CSMs, generating an ad hoc training requested by a school to tailor it for their use case. And, and of course, it’s all you could do at the time, Adam, if you and I were working physically in the office, you didn’t have time to check in with me to see if I already had this asset, you were just trying to get through your list of goals for that day and serve your book of business as best as you could. Now, I don’t think any member of my team has ever recreated a single thing. And that frees up time for what you and I know successes meant we want success to be about strategic, thoughtful, nuanced workflows to meet that specific customer. Whereas now they have a consistent, highly vetted, hopefully high quality, I would like to think product that is done by my team. And I love now that many of our courses are accessible or capture all those things. And they can send that they can build off of it. They can use it as a pre watch before the customer comes to the call. And so I tell my team now they laugh. They are a better CSM today than I ever was Good god, I wasn’t as prepped, I wasn’t as savvy, I couldn’t give the detailed and nuanced that my team can give now, because of the creation of a customer education team.

Adam Avramescu  33:43

Yeah, and that, to me is the it’s like the or customer education story and how we help scale customer success and the rest of the business. It’s actually like the the reason why at this point, I think it’s a cliche, but but I always say customer education is the scale engine of customer success. But

Tiffany Taylor  34:00

that is absolutely true.

Adam Avramescu  34:04

Yeah, and I think that it’s something though, I like that you’re bringing it up in this context, because even though that’s probably the most typical customer education story at this point in at least in the relationship between customer education and customer success, it’s it’s something where when you kind of boil it down just to that phrase, maybe it sounds like a bit of a slogan. So I like the idea of recontextualizing it in the needs of the business, like when you frame it as a cost saving story as an efficiency story while still maintaining quality. Well, again, that’s something that is going to get your executives attention. So I really liked that framing.

Tiffany Taylor  34:43

I think we’re also helps if if someone if any of your listeners have customers that have again, I think for us we call them power users super users, these very these these accounts that have strategic, nuanced ways. of working and utilizing the tool. It frees up the ability for a CSM to give that kind of care. And that’s what we need, like, that’s always end goal, right? You want every customer to feel like a special, unique flower that is getting the deep attention that they need. But before customer education, we just couldn’t do that. Now, with a customer who has a team of 12, we can say, Hey, give your team one week, watch this course. So we know everyone’s baseline knowledge so that when you hop on this call, we are giving, you know, again, a great CSM will know the school’s workflows, their students, their major, all those things. So that that cone is just 10 times different than than the call I could have had with them 10 years ago, and for our leadership that really matters, because again, our strategic accounts are some of our oldest champions, we hope, but our oldest users our highest power, these are the ones that are going to recommend or not recommend handshake to another customer. And so the experience of those customers really matters to our leadership.

Adam Avramescu  36:06

Yeah, that’s actually you mentioned this earlier. And I thought that this was fascinating. It sounds like while there might be some correlation between who’s in your strategic customer segment versus say, the size of the account, or the dollar value of the account, that doesn’t sound like the only criteria that you’re using to put someone in in the strategic segment. It sounds like putting someone in the strategic segment is also related to their complexity and their their their advocacy or their propensity to to be a champion for your product. That’s really interesting.

Tiffany Taylor  36:38

Yes, I it is, it is something we get asked a lot as you can imagine, when we’re hiring CSM, because it’s not a it’s not an exact math. But I do appreciate, I think a part of me having come from a higher ed background myself, and not coming from Tech, I appreciate that it’s a little nuanced and chewy and not really exact that we’re looking at the leaders of those institutions, we’re looking at the evolutions or the or these institutions, schools that are the game changers for their field. Yes, of course, we should be based in data. So there is us world ranking, because that’s how the institutions of the United States are right. So it’s very much a hodgepodge of size, usability functionality, what you’re doing in the industry, and because I think that’s, that’s a brilliant business decision on the company’s part of how we are managing and targeting and being intentional for each of those segments.

Adam Avramescu  37:36

Yeah, but I mean, I love I just love the idea, because when we think about what customer education, and here are, maybe I’m not, I’m not talking about the narrow definition of customer education, which is customer training. But the broader definition of customer education, which includes things like documentation, but especially say community, or customer engagement. Well, now we are actually talking about customer advocacy. And when we think about the types of outcomes that we’re driving in customer success, as well as to some extent customer marketing. That’s a huge piece of the story of what increases customer lifetime value. It’s not just about how much they know about the product, it’s about how deeply they’re using it, how many, how many problems they’re able to solve with your product, and ultimately, how much partnership they feel with your brand and customer education. Plus really great customer success management together, I think make that incredibly powerful. So I want to ask you, you know, maybe you maybe this is a good pivot point into the last thing we want to talk about. Because we’ve been talking mostly about building internal cases. I’d love to talk externally for a moment about the experience that you’re having with with your customers. I’m curious about how you are continuing to evolve your programs to meet your your customers needs.

Tiffany Taylor  39:00

I love something that you just said about this is how you ensure that your customers feel that you’re doing this in partnership with them because my team if they listen to this podcast will giggle because for the for the purpose of the podcast. I’ve been saying customers but they know that they can’t call our folks customers we call them partners, their partners. Yeah, right. And it truly is and and I’m I’m complete completely comfortable with saying this on this. When I mentioned earlier in our in our time here that we just released or we call it our viewers to your voice of the customer survey that we released twice a year. And we read through every single thread of the free text comments. And when folks right handshake no longer feels like a partner that those are the ones that we really marinate on because it is something that is incredibly powerful to us. Again, I am not I don’t read it just read it But when I became aware of how we build our product, we have this product, hexagon and happy to share with you. But every portion of that hexagon is done in partnership with our partners where we have betas, we have an advisory board, we have early release feedback, we and I love that I’m very, very much wanting to give credit to my C suite manager that our team rolls up into, because it was very important to her that if she was going to be on board, or education partners would not be customers, they would be partners, we would build this with them. And so I say that to say, there is no other way to do or I couldn’t get away with not doing some of the things that I’m about to share with you. And I think again, going back to where I’d started, that becomes very easy, because of the two hats that I that I that I serve at handshake. But we continue to do this through feedback to get feedback. I’ve said it on many, many podcasts when I talk about customer education. And I’ve had a lot of you and I our own

Adam Avramescu  41:00

guest you go on your celebrity

Tiffany Taylor  41:02

uses the first of the year as your reference. But I share and a lot of folks will ask how do you get this feedback? How do you get this feedback and, and I often have to say I wish I could take credit. But these, these this audience that I’m telling you about Adam, they love to talk and we love to listen, but they are an audience that there they will write, they will hop on our call, I could after our call right now, I could easily find 20 customers that want to hop on a call with me right now to get feedback on anything that I can ask them about a feature, I could ask them about a training I could. It’s just that I want to take credit for it. But it is truly our customer base. I think our higher ed partners know that we are trying to build something with an honest with them when we haven’t done it. Well, we’ve been honest that we are taking this feedback. And so they’re always willing to speak to us. Where I will take credit is that we do it in a variety of ways. Yes, I just mentioned this voice of the customer that is a very formal, beautiful savvy, you know, metric driven survey that we do at two to two different times of the year. I think it’s q4, and q2. But at the end of every one of our courses in our academy, we have surveys, at the end of our webinars, we have surveys, or RMS are sent our CSMs are sending out surveys after their programmatic images, we have our product feedback that happens. That happens basically as easily as someone sending in a ticket. All that to say that we even when I was doing published work in higher ed, I said, I love messy data. So I don’t care how it comes in. I just care that it comes in. Nothing is worse than a silent customer, you and I know this right silent customers scare the bejesus out of me.

Adam Avramescu  42:44

What’s worse than getting like a bad NPS is no NPS

Tiffany Taylor  42:48

is no NPS agreed. And what I love is that we have high volume, high volume coming in from every which way. And that absolutely helps us win. And then of course, again, my team is often sending back out, Hey, you said that you found this in our courses. Here’s what we’ve changed. We tried to then give back the feedback loop. I think that’s what’s tough to do when you have this whole team is that comes in and they’re like, Did it go into a void. But we really try to be good about sending back. Hey, thank you for this. And because of this, look what we iterated on.

Adam Avramescu  43:21

This is also you know whether, again, this is like a capital C or lowercase c community thing, right? Like whether you’re creating a community on community forums or user groups, having having some way to cultivate that community of customers or partners. Take On one hand, the voice of the customer and make sure that as represented within the decisions that you make, and on the other hand, have a place to be able to communicate with them and and among them, right, because communities are just as much about customers and partners being able to talk to one another, I think ends up forming that that feedback loop really, really nicely. And so in a way even though you’re not talking right now about like a community forum, you are talking about a voice of customer and a community activity, which, which I think is really cool.

Tiffany Taylor  44:10

Can I share with you my mecha on my external rip is like what I’m going towards?

Adam Avramescu  44:15

Yes, please

Tiffany Taylor  44:18

my dream. And I hope to have it if I said that I have to do it in 2023 is that we actually want to co create some of our courses in our handshake Academy with our partners. So finding out again, lovely because I also oversee our success side, which of our champions just really are whizzes at x part of the product really good at metrics, our analytics tool or whatever these aspects are. And then I actually want to record them and I think there’s this piece around it not coming from my brain not coming from a customer education brain but really coming from Career Services person to career services person And I think there’s this element that we have yet to tap into. Because I think at the end of the day, I am still busy showcasing the product from my product brain, like, here’s what handshake needs you to learn. And I am so excited in having a career services partner, show it to a career services partner. And

Adam Avramescu  45:18

it’s more trustworthy when it comes from someone who is a not the vendor, right? Like an another user versus the vendor makes a lot of sense. But also someone who does what you do that imparts credibility. They’re there, they have the same struggles and challenges and opportunities that you have day in and day out. Yeah. So if you managed to make this happen, then you’ll you’ll come back on the show. And we’ll we’ll talk about user generated content.

Tiffany Taylor  45:42

Absolutely, absolutely.

Adam Avramescu  45:46

So, speaking of the next episode, you know, I look forward to that. And I hope that this not just has been, but will be your best podcast appearance of 2023. But let’s let’s firm it up. Let’s make sure that it is Is there anything that we haven’t talked about yet that you would want to share with SCI labs listeners?

Tiffany Taylor  46:07

No, we got through everything. But I always tell folks, even when I taught if you forgot, or fastball we did or didn’t catch some part of this. I think the key takeaway is to ensure that customer education is a part of the solution for your team and Company.

Adam Avramescu  46:26

Love it, couldn’t have said it better myself. And so I think with that, I would say thank you, Tiffany. This has been an amazing discussion truly inspirational. And if you if you want to connect with Tiffany, listeners, Tiffany, what’s the best way to get in contact with you?

Tiffany Taylor  46:48

Please find me on LinkedIn Tiffany Taylor backslash learner, not hard to find. I’m connected to Adam. So hopefully you all are connected to him. And if you’re lucky, you can enjoy a Taylor tip every Tuesday where I share tips on management, customer success, how to stay morale and driven at work. Every team

Adam Avramescu  47:08

that’s that’s tailor last name and tailored tip with a y, y with a Y. And so listeners if you are interested in learning more not just about tailored tips, but also about customer education. We have a podcast website at customer dot education. I too am on LinkedIn. As is Dave, you can find all sorts of great content on our site. We have a LinkedIn page, you can subscribe now to our LinkedIn page where we post updates and relevant content. Thank you Alan Kota. For the theme music I’m doing this without a script. I’m doing this completely from memory. If you are a another podcast who is thinking about booking Tiffany, you are welcome to do so and use that contact information but please don’t have a better conversation with her than the one we just had. And to our listeners. Thank you for joining us. Please go out educate and find your people. Thanks for listening