Customer Education - Phases and Challenges

Heather Wendt

Customer Education programs can be broken down into four phases:

1. Chaotic
2. Developing
3. Scaling
4. Strategic

In the April 27th GGR Office Hours, CS Leaders came together to talk about what these phases look like and connect with their peers in small groups to talk about their own CE programs with a focus on the following questions:

• Who owns CE at your org and what challenges does this create?
• What challenges are you currently facing in your CE program?
• Any goals/changes you are planning to make this year?

You can read the overview and the key takeaways in the Office Hours Summary document.

How is your own Customer Education program going?

Chitra Madhwacharyula

I have run Customer Education Programs in the past in startups and also in big companies and yes, they can be of different types and can roll up to different leaders. Customer Education is also a key function to help scale customer engagement functions like Customer Success and Support. The motivation for creating my first CE (or L&E) team was because my CSMs were spending way too much time answering baseline customer questions about our products because the customers were not trained on how to use the products properly. And it grew from that point to encompass not only full fledged customer training but also partner training, certifications and so on.

No matter where it rolls up, it is important for the Customer Education team to closely collaborate with other customer facing functions and field teams to have a continuous feedback loop on the gaps in customer education and training. They also have to closely align their roadmap with the new product releases in the company. Setting up a tight collaborative process with the field team to get them invested in promoting the right training materials to a customers is extremely important and often overlooked. The job of the CE team does not end with releasing the trainings and learning content. They have to have clear metrics to measure the success of their trainings and need to have a strategy to effectively promote their offerings to increase awarenss and adoption.