RESOURCES: 7 Reasons to Build a Customer Education Program.

TRANSCRIPTION

Rob Ayre

0:00 Welcome back to the learning elevated podcast brought to you by Docebo the show where we help you elevate your learning efforts and move up in the world of enterprise learning and development. Guiding you on your journey up the tower is always will be your elevator operators myself rob air and my co host Emily Dukes.

Emily Dukes

0:21 Here we are again we’re so excited to be back on another floor ready to elevate your learning as we’re joined for a family meal, with some Docebians. Jared cook VP of customer experience and Adam Ballhaussen Director of Customer Education join us today in, you guessed it, the dining room.

Rob Ayre

0:40 That’s right and, unlike some family dinners that i’ve attended in the past, the only thing burning this evening are going to be the questions.

Now we hope you’re hungry for those answers, but before we get into that we’re going to set the stage a little bit so. You know, as you can probably guess by who we’re talking with today, the real focus of the conversation dives into customer education and it’s such a growing area within the world of L&D and we’re so thrilled to to really be at the forefront of that here at the Docebo and, as always, you know, we want to kind of set the stage a little bit and because this is sort of a new and growing field with an L&D I think it’s important to sort of talk about the the background of customer education and why it’s so important and so, as always, you know we kind of did our pre research right Emily and we looked at the an article in hubspot that really lays out the seven reasons why you would want to build a customer education program and I was thinking we could just sort of chat a little bit about that article before we jump into the interview, how do you how do you feel about that.

Emily Dukes

01:33 For sure Rob. Yeah actually so my favorite part of the article is my favorite because it’s the thing that i’ve experienced the most since i’ve been with Docebo and that’s just it’s actually if you’re looking at the article it’s a number six its “customers creating their own online communities” like what cooler thing, could there be than your own customers getting excited about your brand and kind of doing your work for you i’m giving them all that autonomy and giving them the tools in their tool belt to go forward and kind of create these awesome communities where they support each other that gets me pumped up, and I know it gets Adam and Jared pumped up to.

Rob Ayre

02:15 yeah absolutely I mean community is such a big part we always talk about our Community and customers and I know for myself, every year, we have the Docebo Inspire learning conference it’s great to have everybody together but what’s awesome about a customer education program is that it allows that to happen on an ongoing basis and regularly you know, the first day of Docebo Inspire is always what we call Docebo U but you can go online right now right, you can go to the Docebo, which is our customer education platform which, of course, Adam talks about in detail But one of the things that this article talks about as well and, and this is one of the areas that I think folks are really kind of thinking about when you’re trying to build out their cases is, you know, what that’s going to do for my business where’s it going to help where, am I going to see that ROI and I think one of the big areas and one of the things that I hear from our customers a lot is that cutting down on support time, so if you think about the hour that it takes or the two hours that it takes to complete a course about your you know your platform if say you’re a SAS company the amount of time and let’s say it takes two hours to learn a certain feature functionality with your within your platform so that’s time that they’re in your platform learning that and that’s also a time that’s not being done by your CSM or your professional services team. And that you know, really, really adds up over time, like we’re talking 10s of thousands of hours. And it’s not just hours, like we’re talking weeks, we’re to potentially talking years of time that you could be saving by using an effective customer training platform and customer training customer education and approach to your entire base it allows for scalability and I think the ROI becomes  pretty significant, you know, one of the other things, to add on this point that i’ve been i’ve been listening to lately and really been thinking about is how do you inject customer education, not only on the latter side of the customer lifecycle but even before that you know if you have like a free trial or if you if you’re trying to educate people on the services that you that you provide, you know, people want to consume content they’re going to go to Google they’re going to go to the review sites are going to do all of these things. You can provide that information to people in a format and in an educational way that really allows them to dive into your product in an important way in that it allows them to do it as they feel right so it’s not like they have to go and set up a DEMO it’s not that they have to go to Google and search and you know, go through these long list of different things to find information provided all four of them, and they can you know self discover it.

Emily Dukes

4:40 Also side note if they’re going to Google chances are they might stumble across one of your competitors and then you lose them right or they’re impressed by the way that a competitor is doing customer or pre customer education, and you know, the biggest thing to me Rob that just kind of is the umbrella the cherry on top here of this customer conversation is that we always talk in detail about how learning is changing right how people just learners in general human beings, we know we want what we want, when we want it, and we know where to go typically to find answers, whether it be Google or YouTube or Facebook. I think that it’s so important to have this information from a trusted source aka your companies to give to your customers so they’re not floundering and potentially running across some bad information that you might not want them to see. I think it’s so fun to give them the power right.

Rob Ayre

5:44 yeah absolutely and you know, as always, if you want to dive into that article, a little bit further hop on to our website, but it looks like the elevators just about this Florida I think it’s time that we hear from the experts on this.

I hope you guys enjoy the interview and we’ll chat afterwards.

Rob Ayre

5:52 And we’re back with another episode of the Learning Elevated podcast. I’m really excited about this episode. We’ve got a couple of internal folks who are joining us for the conversation today and we’re still, you know, really diving into the whole idea of the learning culture and trying to just sort of explore the concept a little bit further.

Today we’re joined by Jared Cook the VP of Customer Experience over here at Docebo. Jared experience comes with over 18 years in business and corporate strategy, product Management and consulting leadership for high growth enterprises. 

Additionally, we’re joined by Adam Ballhaussen Docebo’s Director of Customer Education. Now Adam is a seasoned eLearning platform administrator and he’s really passionate about creating intuitive learning experiences that delight customers and as a lifelong learner himself, you know, he really does have a knack for making complex concepts easy and fun to learn. 

So to the both of you gentlemen. Welcome to the Learning Elevated podcast.

Rob Ayre

2:45 And we’re back with another episode of the Learning Elevated podcast. I’m really excited about this episode. We’ve got a couple of internal folks who are joining us for the conversation today and we’re still, you know, really diving into the whole idea of the learning culture and trying to just sort of explore the concept a little bit further.

Today we’re joined by Jared Cook the VP of Customer Experience over here at Docebo. Jared experience comes with over 18 years in business and corporate strategy, product Management and consulting leadership for high growth enterprises. 

Additionally, we’re joined by Adam Ballhaussen Docebo’s Director of Customer Education. Now Adam is a seasoned eLearning platform administrator and he’s really passionate about creating intuitive learning experiences that delight customers and as a lifelong learner himself, you know, he really does have a knack for making complex concepts easy and fun to learn. 

So to the both of you gentlemen. Welcome to the Learning Elevated podcast.

Jared Cook

Hey. Thanks, Rob, appreciate you having us on.

Adam Ballhaussen

02:45Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that intro.

Rob Ayre

02:47Perfect. So look, I want to, I want to sort of set the stage get things going a little bit. A little bit light and easy for this conversation. So the first question that I have for you guys is in… Actually, before I get started here. It’s important to know. We also do have Emily on the podcast, as well as always, Emily. Great to have you here for the interview.

Emily Dukes

03:05Thank you so much, Rob. I’m so pumped to be here. We’ve got a great hour planned.

Rob Ayre

03:10Awesome. Alright, so let’s get started right at the beginning. And when we talk about a learning culture, what, what exactly does a learning culture look like?

Jared Cook

03:19Yeah, I can take this one, Rob. So, to me, a learning culture is really about three things. You got to have people who are very curious and they want to learn, you’ve got to have an environment where learning is encouraged so that usually comes from the organization. And then the third is people have to have the right tools so that they can access the right content and and get learning at the right place, right time.

Rob Ayre

03:47Absolutely. Adam, what do you think?

Adam Ballhaussen

03:50Yeah, I fully agree with Jared and you know there’s so many aspects to the vehicle of delivery for the content that makes up a learning culture because the content is such a big piece of it and we, at docebo are developing not only continuing to expand or formal learning strategy, but really trying to dive into the informal and social learning elements of our strategy and that does play such an important role in a learning culture as a whole is equipping our in equipping your ecosystem your customers, your members, your employees to be able to talk to one another and engage with one another to share best practices. You really start to develop that culture when you involve your customers in the conversation and you know the traditional styles of learning, that really were a unidirectional company providing information to a learner, really didn’t have any sort of compounding effect and couldn’t scale and have lasting effects for four months or even years. But when you incorporate a social strategy into your content, you start to allow people to compound the impact of every piece of content that you share, there’s sort of an 80/20 rule that permeates throughout content when you have both the formal and informal learning piece where you have a head of 80% of the questions that you answer are handled by the the top level of your formal learning strategy of courses and learning plans and curriculum that you have set up to eight answer 80% of those questions and then you have this long tail of additional questions and conversations that can happen in a community or in a social space when you enable people to talk to one another. And that really empowers you to focus on that core of introductory knowledge level and ultimate power each other.

Jared Cook

05:46And what Adam is saying here, If I could just chime back is like this idea of social learning is critical because if you go back five years, 10 years learning was always just unidirectional. There was a  professor who knew everything, teaching all the students in class.

Now learning is very different. Learning is multi directional. So it’s not just about the professor teaching a student or a company teaching their customers. It’s about customers talking back to companies and teaching them about how they use their product. It’s about customers learning from other customers and that’s this social component that Adam is hitting on. So I think that learning culture has to be multi directional from the get go.

Emily Dukes

06:36Totally. Thank you guys so much. I think you know in many of my conversations we’re finding out that some businesses are just now discovering this because of the pandemic, so I think you know solutions to help make that transition a little more seamless and are fantastic. So I’m just curious in terms of maybe some specific examples, what kinds of positive business outcomes have you guys seen from, you know, really establishing that culture of learning among the customer base?

Jared Cook

07:11Oh Adam and I both came from the, from the customer world. And so, you know, it hasn’t been long since we were in the shoes of somebody leading a learning program. In my former company, I was in charge of all customer learning and partner education. And so some of the outcomes were that we were looking for software as a service, business, how do you reduce churn, how do you improve customer retention? You know, improve NPS rates and CSTAT scores like those are some of the things that we were trying to effect because our hypothesis was if somebody was well trained they knew how to use the product they were much more likely to stick around. Right. But I think that same principle applies to whether you’re teaching customers or employees employee retention is also improved if employees have great ways to continually learn and develop their skills.

Adam Ballhaussen

08:12Yeah, I think, I think those are just as Jared said, I came from SAS as well previously was a Docebo customer and was measuring each and every one of those outcomes to see what impact training and what our learning culture was having on them and beyond that there are adverse effects that you wouldn’t necessarily think of right off the bat that will benefit your organization, similar to what Jared mentioned in the previous conversation about multi directional impact of learning culture customers can provide input and feedback directly on your product or service that your company develops or provides and that that’s just crucial is that you can start to realize huge improvements in your product and service by listening to the customer and empowering them to provide input, back to you.

Rob Ayre

09:01So what I love, you know, having you guys both on the team. Now you guys kind of like soundbites for me. I’m, I’m, you know, marketing stuff that I do something right is what I’m saying. Does it really make sense to you, you know, as somebody who’s experienced this on the other end, somebody who’s run programs like this. And the more that we, you know, on this podcast and in different different pieces of content that we’re even writing started exploring this idea of a learning culture. You know, it’s great to go from like articles about in different pieces of sort of thought leadership that people have put out but you know in your guys own experience. What are some of those ways that you’ve actually developed that learning culture and some of those past rules.

Jared Cook

09:38For for me learning cultures like you know, you’ve got to have the right measurement and this is hard to do you guys like I’m not trying to say that this is just easy out of the box, you’re going to flip a switch and all of a sudden, know that direct impact of of learning on your business outcomes but what, what you do is you start by looking at the content itself like what’s the content effectiveness. And so we would look at completion rates we would measure satisfaction around a specific course to people like it, whether that was ILT, you know, instructor led, are elearning. The second thing is you got to see the engagement of your learners so not just the content but focus now on the person. So is that is the learner coming back for more? Are they engaged in the platform? can they find what they’re looking for? Do they get nudges to remind them to come in and complete training and then just are you utilizing the tools to the best of your ability, this kind of sweet utilization, regardless of the tool that you use it’s important to know are you maximizing the use of that tool. So, where, where I started was just you start measuring the things that you can you start measuring some content effectiveness, you start looking at how many people are logging in? how frequently do they log in? If you’re on a monthly active user, Kind of model, we would look at visits per monthly active user time spent learning in the platform. So all of these are metrics that really helped us gauge is the learner is learner engaged is the content, effective and are we as a company making the best use out of the tool. Adam. I don’t know what was your experience.

Adam Ballhaussen

11:39Yeah, absolutely. I think just as you put it, measuring the quality of content that again. That’s like the tip of the spear and the 80/20 year. You’re educating every new employee or every new customer with that content, you should be empowering them to have the knowledge that they can intake and repurpose and share with others. And so making sure that that’s hitting marks, just from a simple survey of, you know. Was this helpful? are you more impactful or prepared for success in your role. And then also, obviously, like you said, looking at engagement metrics number of logins number of enrollments number of completions

And the numbers that you’re looking at, and the goals are sitting there are going to vary pretty widely based on your content strategy and the size of your organization, but you have to, You know, pick those targets that you’re looking at on a weekly a monthly basis to see if you’re on track, but you can’t ignore the bigger business outcomes that we were talking about earlier, right, like those are all inputs that are leading towards a greater goal, but you should definitely overtime be looking at those bigger targets of, you know, customer satisfaction customer retention improved NPS and making sure that you’re you’re having a positive impact there and you’re seeing the results that you would expect with the amount of input that you’re putting into your program.

Jared Cook

Can you, can I maybe just throw a another question kind of related to that outcome is, I mean, we all talk about learning. And I think everyone sits in their office and says, Oh yeah, I definitely want to take time and learn and then you get a million emails and you get phone calls and you get internal requests and fire drills and all of a sudden your weeks gone you like man I didn’t spend any time learning Right, like so, practically, what have you seen effective in helping change that so that your customers are devoting the amount of time that they need to to learn and employees do the same thing. Like, what have you seen successful. I’m just curious.

Adam Ballhaussen

13:41Yeah, it’s a good question. And, you know, education is a hot topic for pretty much every business and every service. And much like the marketing world everyone, every provider out there, every vendor is seeking people’s attention right like everyone to an extent, once you to learn about their product. And I feel like the, the best way to meet a learner where they need to be met, and especially if you’re talking about customer education is going back to again one of your earliest points you have to find them in the right place at the right time. They’re not just going to intuitively, you know, see a 30 minute window open over their lunch break and I’m going to take that time to learn. Rather, they’re gonna you know be frustrated by the product while they’re in it, trying to do something that doesn’t make sense to them. And that’s when you need to find them. That’s when you need to engage them with that content. And so there are there are periods in time in a customer journey like onboarding and implementation, where it’s going to be, where you’re going to be most effective trying to target them with the right content, you really have to capitalize on that time for them understanding they’re already in the mindset that they’re going to be learning. They’re already prepared to apply themselves to get the most out of your product or service so capitalize on that and get the content that you need them to consume in front of them at that time.

And over time, develop strategies to drip out helpful tidbits here in there that are going to help them down the road with, you know, struggles that they might be facing or problems that you know will be relevant to them at that moment.

Jared Cook

15:12That’s so important. I think one of the tips that I’ve learned was, you know, learning comes in a lot of different forms. You got written form video form right categorizing your knowledge, resources, if you’re in software and you’re trying to teach customers like out of an eye. We’re over. Over a SAS business is like categorize your learning content by product area. And then when a user is in that product area, don’t just have a generic question mark that’s like click here to contact support. When they hit that question mark what are you going to surface? You’re going to surface the content that’s relative that’s relevant to that area and that does a couple of things. It puts learning in the flow of work just huge. But it also has a downward effect on burden on your support teams, right. People are going to learn to self serve call deflection case deflection and that has that has positive impact on the rest of business.

Emily Dukes

16:18You guys clearly know your stuff. This is, this is incredible. I feel like I’ve already learned so much and it’s only been like 15 minutes, but I do have a question. I’m kind of going to shift gears a little bit here and we’re going to speak directly to those organizations that don’t really know what they’re doing, right, that they, they’re just getting started. Let’s say maybe they’ve had an internal solution built out for their employees, but it’s time to move to the customer education side. What would you guys tell them, if you could be on the phone with them. What would you say are them like the top technologies that lead to a successful customer education program.

Jared Cook

17:00The key is to not try to boil the ocean, right. Don’t do it all at once. These are heavy lifts So it goes back to what I was saying a minute ago learning happens in different formats written format video format or audio like we’re doing here. Elearning or instructor led courses like an actual content course. Social learning through community. So each one of these, if you, if you think about it in that way. The types of technologies that I’ve seen most often, a knowledge base and it can be as simple as just your website right of just question and answer. What are the most frequently asked questions that you get so you’ve got a knowledge base a video or an audio streaming platform so that if you’re doing, how to videos where is that going to live and how are you going to surface that to customers. A learning management system is critical in bringing all of this together into one place, it’s critical for us serving up more that structured learning courses curriculum instructor led courses events all of that really comes from an LMS

Community is another technology and people can do this different ways like sometimes LMS is have great community features and social sharing features and that’s sufficient and that’s a good place to start. And sometimes you may need like a pure community platform right so those are some of the core ones, obviously, you’ve got other ones like support ticketing and if your international you know technologies around translation memory and translation services authoring tools. I mean, we could go on and on, but there’s a lot of technology. I would just say start simple start making sure that you’re capturing the most important learning for your audience first

Adam Ballhaussen

19:04Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Jared and the point about not boiling the ocean is a good one right. You don’t want to try to take on every technology at once. You know, like start paying for all of these services, you know, have a plan for as Jared mentioned it takes time. It takes investment. It takes resources to develop a strategy and you have to start somewhere. And I think the really the best advice would be to be really, really critical and intentional about understanding your organization’s needs and the strategy that you need to implement to meet those needs. It can vary pretty widely right there. There may be some organizations that can get away with only using a knowledge base for 95% of their content and they may never need people to engage in a community and discuss in a forum or at least at the point that they’re at in their you know, in their life cycle as an organization.

Some needs may be far lower priority than others. So you don’t want to boil the ocean, but you want to make sure that you have a bit of pot to grow and to add technologies and features.

And the other big point that I would make there is just to make sure that you’re developing an integrated experience for the user. There are so many organizations out there that tackle multiple of the solutions that we just mentioned in one and at the very least, you need to make sure that those are all going to play nicely to give your customer or your employee a seamless and intuitive experience to find what they need. What you don’t want is them having eight to 10 different silos to find information and having to go on a scavenger hunt, because at that point they’re going to lose interest and they’re just going to dwell on the frustration that they have of not being able to do what they want to so you just need to make sure that all of those different technologies and tools work together in some way and you can centralize a point of entry for them, but also present them were relevant when needed.

Rob Ayre

21:00So you know it’s it’s the idea of playing nicely together as an interesting concept and kind of leads into what I’m curious to learn a little bit more abou you know, in the way of how does, how does Robin support Batman. Or maybe how does Batman support Superman and the Justice League is a bit better. An analogy for the question here, but how do you guys think that customer education and customer success or customer experience teams should work together for the best results within an organization.

Jared Cook

21:30Lots of thoughts there.

Rob Ayre

21:32Yeah, it’s good to say, don’t jump in all at once. I like I like collect them so many

Jared Cook

21:40I think what I would just say is the reason. Those two have to be so tightly coupled, is it customers are going to be successful, the better they understand how to use your platform. Right. The customers who churn and leave often cite reasons of, “Hey, I didn’t get value out of, out of the product.” What does that mean that means that they had a problem that they felt that the product couldn’t meet. But with better education, a lot of times people say, oh, you know what, actually, I can solve what I’m trying to do with this product. And so that’s where if you can surface education in the context of what the customer is trying to do and not just throwing, you know, how to information to the customer, but really understanding what is it that they’re trying to achieve and then you bring to the table product solutions that that’s that’s how education in my mind with customer success really really ultimately leads to customer success.

Adam Ballhaussen

22:47Yeah, and there’s, there’s definitely a complimentary role that the to play. And there’s a lot of handoff their Customer education is one ingredient in a much greater recipe for customer success. And it’s really about preparing and enabling customers to get more out of their experience withcustomer success manager or with some sort of advising role within an organization. Customers have to have a be brought to a certain level of understanding of the product as Jared was saying they need to know about how the product works and how it should be used to be able to apply their organization’s needs and strategy back to the product.

You know you. You’ve got to have some sort of process or platform in place to develop a foundation of knowledge. So a CSM can be successful in their role in advising and consulting and really coming up with planes there to make that customer successful