CELab: The Customer Education Lab

Adam Avramescu and Dan Ennis discuss the evolving field of digital customer success, emphasizing its focus on leveraging digital-led programs to improve customer outcomes, retention, and growth. Dan highlights the importance of proactive and reactive digital programs, such as email and in-app series, to engage customers at scale. He stresses the need for clear definitions and metrics, including leading indicators like adoption and performance metrics like open and click-through rates. Collaboration between digital customer success and customer education teams is crucial, with regular feedback loops ensuring alignment on customer outcomes.

In the evolving world of business, customer education plays a crucial role in driving success. Yet, creating impactful, scalable programs can be challenging. Traditional methods often fall short, requiring innovative approaches to enablement and education.

We’re joined by Melissa Kruminas, a global enablement leader, now at Docebo, where she focuses on customer education that connects business outcomes with learning. Join us as we explore Melissa's approach to value-led, product-supported education, and how she’s driving initiatives in community learning and customer success.

Summary:

Melissa emphasizes that customer education goes beyond teaching product features; it's about helping customers realize the full value of their investment. She discusses her focus on scalable learning through experiential events, certifications, and knowledge management.

Melissa highlights the importance of balancing creativity with efficiency in customer education, drawing parallels to delivering a five-star meal versus providing quick, actionable resources. She shares insights on building communities, capturing institutional knowledge, and scaling learning solutions.

Ultimately, Melissa's work centers around helping customers achieve long-term success by aligning education with their business goals, while fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.

In business, the need for engaging learning experiences is staggeringly important. Yet the “how” is elusive.  Conventional educational approaches don’t work well.  You can be tempted to fall back on trusted methodologies only to find them to be too slow, unwieldy, or frustrating.

We’re joined by Michele Wiedemer, Customer Education consultant and expert who’s hard at work to learn more and to expand her already impactful approach to learning in B2B SaaS.   Join us as we dive into the Learner-Centered Design approach that she and many of us leverage to build amazing content!

Summary for Part 2

In business, the need for engaging learning experiences is staggeringly important. Yet the “how” is elusive.  Conventional educational approaches don’t work well.  You can be tempted to fall back on trusted methodologies only to find them to be too slow, unwieldy, or frustrating.

We’re joined by Michele Wiedemer, Customer Education consultant and expert who’s hard at work to learn more and to expand her already impactful approach to learning in B2B SaaS.   Join us as we dive into the Learner-Centered Design approach that she and many of us leverage to build amazing content!

Summary for Part 1

Books Cited in this Episode:

Non-Designers Design - Robin Williams

Michael Allen’s Guide to E-Learning

Geoffrey Moore - crossing the chasm

Malcolm Knowles - Self-Directed Learning

Certification - it's a challenging and sometimes contentious topic for Customer Education professionals. At CELab, we hear this question come up quite a lot. Chances are good that you may be asked to create a certification, or decide that you want to offer one.

So how do you get started? Should you even be trying to build such a program? In this "mini" episode, Adam Avramescu answers that question down including:

We've covered this topic a number of times here at CELab, so make sure you check out the following episodes:

In addition, we recommend bookmarking and reading Debbie Smith's article (found on LinkedIn) called "The 13 Principals for Certification". Essential reading for anyone working towards developing their own certification!

Disclaimer: We are not giving legal advice in this episode. Make sure you consult with your company's legal team to understand their risk posture - especially if you're going to develop a legally defensible high-stakes cert.

Customer Education is evolving rapidly. We've come a long way from the days of "smile sheets" and attendance metrics being our guide to success. Gainsight, is one such innovative business that's showing how education data and usage data connect so we can measure its impact on business outcomes.

Lila Meyer shares her journey at Gainsight, from early roles when the organization was new to her current position leading the Education Services team. We cover a lot of ground including the importance of developing transferable skills and collaboration within the customer education community.

Key points:

As technology evolves at lightning speed, how can we keep up with educating our customers? We pose this question to the legendary Geoffrey A. Moore, author of the iconic book "Crossing the Chasm". Geoff argues that while technology outpaces traditional education methods, the core customer problems remain the same.

In this episode we'll discuss Geoff's perspective for understanding different customer segments and adapting education approaches. We'll also get his take on balancing product knowledge with true customer empathy.

"Education starts with the student, not with the teacher. You're trying to change the behavior of the student, not trying to execute your own agenda."

And what about AI? Will it be our savior or our downfall in education? Stick around for the whole discussion - you don't want to miss his sage advice on connecting educators with executives to maximize impact.

How do you get from 6th grade science to a role leading Customer Education at Notion? It's a great story that's behind the evolution of customer education at Notion, where our guest - Zoe Ludwig - focused on bridging the gap between product adoption and user success. From emphasizing the importance of understanding the audience's needs - to codifying knowledge to create a single source of truth for users check out this episode with so many topics including:

Here's a link to the Education Template mentioned in the episode!

In this episode we're joined by Special Guest - Shannon Howard - as we dive into the Intellum-sponsored study from Forrester:  “Driving Business Success Through Customer Education”.  This is a refresh of the 2019 report, which is crucial for those in our field to review and absorb. What's changed? Are there new trends?

Highlights? Here are just a few we cover:

Grab your copy of the report and a beverage and listen in to this deep-dive that you won't want to miss.

Missed the 2019 report? You can find it here, and our coverage in Episode 41!

"If you just focus on educating your customers, you're missing a HUGE opportunity!" says Mark Kilens, Co-Founder of HubSpot Academy and Drift, and now CEO and Co-founder of TACK ⛵️ & ClubPF.

Tune in to as we discuss: