CELab: The Customer Education Lab

“Now is the right time for Customer Education.” as Cushing Anderson and Lisa Rowan say in the their Thought Industries’ sponsored report. As the discipline of Customer Education has grown, this report dives deep into...

In the lead-up to Fall 2022 Conference Season, we will be releasing a three-part mini-series covering a number of reports. Here, we cover Skilljar’s 2022 Customer Education Benchmarks and Trends Report. Each and every year...

In this episode, we speak with Phil Byrne, Manager of Product Education at Intercom. Through the lens of choosing the right metrics, Phil takes us on a journey through one of our favorite topics: breaking...

Customer Education programs grow and mature alongside products and platforms as a software business grows. And, at some point, Localization becomes a hot topic. What is Localization in Customer Education? In this episode we welcom...

How do we think about leadership in Customer Education? In previous episodes of the CELab Podcast, we have talked about next generation of leaders and what they need to do up to set the stage...

Customer Education is not a “walk in the park”. But in this episode, Adam and I take a stroll (literally) through the Hirim M. Chittenden Ballard Locks in Seattle, Washington and talk about our learning...

For Leaders and Practitioners, there are few books out there on the market which appeal specifically to the Customer Education Market which is why we always put the spotlight on any new seminal work on...

Over the years, many Customer Education practitioners have come to us at CELab asking, “How do I move up in my Customer Education career?” What are some of the big mistakes we’ve made or even...

While Customer Education has been around for many years, we at CELab attribute it’s re-emergence to the Customer Success movement. And with that, we invite special guest Nick Mehta – CEO of Gainsight – to...

For this episode, we welcome Melissa VanPelt who leads Seismic’s Global Education and Advocacy program at Seismic. We’ve hoped to have Melissa on the show for some time, and this is an episode you’ll truly...

It’s Valentine’s Day and our gift to the CELab Community was intended to be a “Mini”. Turned out, both Adam and Dave got on a roll and at about the 31 minute mark, Adam can...

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash Are you wondering how to move from K-12 to Customer Education? Or academia to corporate learning? In this episode, we’re diving into how Customer Education professionals get into the business. Many professionals make a move into Customer Education from teaching, K12 or academia. Others move from Customer Success to Customer Education. Today’s guest has actu...

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash Join us for Part 2 of our crossover with another great podcast: He Said, Dee Said with Dee Kapila from Miro and Ryan Roch from Cisco . We continue our Pop Culture thread on how Video Games, Music, and Video does or doesn’t apply to Customer Education. We range far and wide with this final episode of 2021! Happy New Year from CELab and all of us in the Customer...

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash In previous years, our year-end episode is where we like to kick back and have some fun! We’ve done episodes on what Radiohead and David Bowie can teach us about Customer Education. But this year we thought we’d mix it up and do a crossover with another great podcast: He Said, Dee Said . Where the Dee in question is our friend Dee Kapila , who leads Customer Educ...

Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash It’s one thing to say that you “Lead with Data” (emphasize air quotes).  It’s another thing entirely to build the kind of dashboards and reports that will allow you to do it. In this episode Christy Hollingshead , Senior Director of Customer Education at Heap , guides us into safely into that territory. While many of us lean on metrics like...

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash We’ve covered Instructional Design 101 topics on CELab before, but what about more advanced techniques? Once you’ve covered the basic frameworks, what are other evidence-based concepts that you can incorporate into your learning programs? In this episode, Mike Di Gregorio, PhD, Director of Client Onboarding at Top Hat , walks us through how he incorporates advance...

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash One of the most common questions that those new to the field of Customer Education ask about when beginning to develop a program is, “What kind of equipment and/or software do I need?” What’s a good microphone? What do I use to edit and record audio? Should I buy a high-end video camera? In this episode we have a candid discussion on what kinds of products we hav...

Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash In Episode 66 of the CELab Podcast we discussed Best Practices for keeping your Customer Education content up-to-date despite the rapid-pace of change that we experience in Software-as-a-Service businesses.   But what happens when you also have a highly-configurable product?   Charlie writes: I have been tasked with creating a customer education program at ou...

Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash We are back from Summer Break and are entering Season 3 of the CELab Podcast! In this episode. we start to get beyond the Fundamentals into more Advanced material by empathizing with your first “aha!” (and potentially, “ouch”) moment as a Customer Education team or leader. Building content is easy. Keeping your content up to date? Well, that requires some diffe...

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Who should I hire for my customer education team? This isn’t a new question. In fact, we first covered this topic on the show – if you can believe it – nearly three years ago! But there’s been new research in this area, and the market has changed quite a bit in that time. We’re seeing more new customer education teams form than ever before, and the people hiring...

Photo by Eduardo Buscariolli on Unsplash In Adam Avramescu’s book, “Customer Education – Why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter”, he first introduces that, “Customer Education is your scale engine for Customer Success” (p 11).  This concept – the Scale Engine – is novel in that it channels the fundamental challenge of many rapidly growing Software-as-a-Service businesses:  All your...

Photo by Frank Busch on Unsplash A key part of CELab’s role in the Customer Education Community is to keep you updated on the research and reports coming out of the Customer Education world, especially when they address the state of our industry. This episode covers two great reports: TSIA’s 2021 State of Education Services and Thought Industries’ 2021 State of Customer Education. We like these re...

In this episode we return to the subject of Certification, this time focusing on how to adapt development of programs to meet the breakneck pace of change with growing Software-as-a-Service businesses. Dave interviews Debbie Smith, who is Sr. Manager of Smartsheet University and an expert in credentialing and certification programs. Pencils down, it’s time to write your certification! Photo by  An...

Continuing in our Customer Success series, we dive deep into the thoughts of Sam Cummings , Author, Data Scientist, and Customer Success professional, currently working as an Enterprise CSM at LinkedIn.  Education takes many forms in the world of B2B SaaS Software and Sam takes us on a journey:  How to Inspire, Cultivate, and Distribute Success.  Beginning by telling human stories, anchored in dat...

Photo by Adrian Curiel on Unsplash In this episode, we return to our Instructional Design 101 series, where we informally cover key concepts from the instructional design world and apply them to customer education. In previous episodes, we’ve covered frameworks like the Kirkpatrick Model of Evaluation , which helps you measure the effectiveness of your course, and Bloom’s Taxonomy , which helps yo...