Customer Education Update (April 1, 2024)
Everything that you need to know this week in the world of Customer Education!
Welcome to the Customer Education Weekly, where we break down the world of Customer Education each week to keep you informed and empowered! We’ll keep it as simple as 3-2-1, like this:
3 Resources, including articles, blog posts, or other CE goodies
2 Social posts, likely from LinkedIn or one of the CE communities
1 Job highlight, either someone looking for their next role or a role needing to be filled
Additionally, we’ll always include a list of new podcast episodes and upcoming events.
Let’s get to it!
Big Update!
As you all know, I put a lot of time and effort into the Customer Education Weekly. To keep things worthwhile for me, I have decided to continue the newsletter for only paid subscribers.*
News and Resources
Are Your Customers Learning and Your Business Thriving? Discover the Customer Education Parity Principle
The misalignment between executives and Customer Education teams is a critical issue impacting business revenue and customer loyalty. To bridge this gap, the Customer Education Parity Principle is introduced, emphasizing the need to align around both customer learning and business priorities. This principle ensures that Customer Education efforts positively impact key company goals while facilitating customer success with the product. By implementing this principle, businesses can stay in the Zone of Scale, where customer learning resonates with business needs. Real-life examples illustrate how Customer Education focuses on customers' success while also driving business outcomes, such as increasing gross margin or reducing resource-intensive onboarding processes. Customer Education involves providing scalable educational interactions to guide customers towards achieving their desired outcomes with the product. It's about helping customers develop skills and knowledge to use the product effectively and extract maximum value. Alignment in action requires trust between executives and Customer Education leaders, embracing business priorities, and working together to achieve scalability through alignment, ensuring a win-win situation for customers and the company.
The Anatomy of a Great Help Video
Video has emerged as a preferred learning tool, with 83% of people favoring it over text or audio for accessing information. Rich Benavides, Director of Customer Success at Videate, shares insights on crafting effective help videos. Three key elements include being straight to the point, specific, and following a What-How-Why structure. Rich recommends keeping videos under a minute to maintain engagement and ease of updating. Best practices include minimizing branded intros, limiting context-setting, addressing viewer drop-off, and embedding videos into help articles for added context. Leveraging AI tools like Videate streamlines the creation and updating process, ensuring videos remain relevant and impactful. Ultimately, simplicity, specificity, and meaningful content are crucial for creating engaging help videos that empower learners and foster genuine connections.
7 User Onboarding Best Practices
Creating a seamless onboarding experience is essential for retaining new customers, yet many companies overlook its importance. External training programs offer specialized instructional design to craft compelling onboarding experiences tailored to diverse stakeholder needs, driving engagement and value. By segmenting users and understanding their prerequisites, companies can strategically guide them through the onboarding journey, enhancing relevance and avoiding cognitive overload. Leveraging various communication formats and delivery methods ensures optimal knowledge absorption and engagement. Quality surpasses quantity in onboarding content, with regular evaluation and iteration based on data-driven insights essential for continuous improvement. Promoting training resources and measuring key metrics like completion rate, time to value, feature adoption, and user feedback are essential for assessing the success of the onboarding strategy and driving ongoing optimization.
Getting Social
Getting 2% Better with Blair
This is the kind of stuff that I live for (professionally, at least). I have already gotten multiple messages from people pointing me to Blair’s post about how he improved some processes around video maintenance, and I AM HERE FOR IT!
Can Your Training Content Pass the 8-Second Test?
Well, is it? If your content isn’t grabbing (and holding) the attention of your learners, then you should check out Matt’s tips for crafting an unforgettable hook. We’re focusing a lot on video now (and in the future), so you can bet I’ll be putting these into practice.
Career Spotlight
Director of Customer Education
Location: United States (Remote)
Role Summary:
Vast is seeking a self-starting strategic leader to join the team as the Director of Customer Education. As the Director, you will be responsible for building a team from scratch, developing and implementing a comprehensive customer education program aimed at enhancing our customers' knowledge and skills, driving product adoption, and ensuring a positive customer experience. This role requires a blend of instructional design expertise, leadership skills, and a deep understanding of customer needs.
Responsibilities:
Develop a long-term vision and strategy for customer education aligned with company goals, collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Design a comprehensive customer education curriculum addressing various skill levels and learning styles, implementing instructional design best practices.
Lead a team to develop high-quality educational materials, including multimedia content such as videos, webinars, tutorials, and documentation.
Manage a learning management system (LMS) for content delivery and tracking, integrating education into customer onboarding and interactions.
Establish KPIs to measure the effectiveness of customer education programs, analyzing data to assess impact and identify areas for improvement.
Work with product teams to align education programs with product updates and collaborate with sales and customer success teams to enhance customer satisfaction.
Qualifications:
10+ years of Customer Education and/or Enablement experience.
Demonstrated leadership skills with experience in team management.
Strong understanding of adult learning principles and instructional design.
Ability to create engaging educational content in various formats.
Familiarity with e-learning platforms and delivery mechanisms.
Willingness to travel up to 40% of the year.
Click here for the job listing!
Upcoming Events
April 17: Roundtable: Education for Growth
April 23-24: CEdMA empowerED Conference (Atlanta)
April 24: Digital Customer Success: Scaling CS, Personalization, and Automation
May 1: Roundtable: Growing Your Education Program
May 7-8: Adobe Learning World 2024
May 15-16: Gainsight Pulse (St. Louis)
May 16: How Customer Education Programs Drive Measurable Business Impact
Latest Podcast Episodes
Customer Ed Nuggets: The Road Ahead for Customer Education
Customer Educated: Building automations to drive data-driven customer education programs (with Eric Mistry)
The Digital Customer Success Podcast: Applying Common Sense to Digital Customer Experience with Rob Zambito of Success Scaled
The Jasons Take On…: The Future of Customer Education (with Vicky Kennedy)
*Of course this is an April Fool’s Day prank. CE Weekly is free for everyone!