CELab: The Customer Education Lab

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash Steve Cornwell is CEO and Founder of Northpass , the LMS that powers learning experiences for some of the top SaaS, sharing-economy, and subscription-economy companies. He joins us for the return of our CEO series, where we get CEO-level perspectives on the Customer Education market. In our discussion, Steve talks about the Evolution of Customer Education, poin...

Photo by Larisa Birta on Unsplash Does Onboarding Matter?  That’s what Donna Weber, veteran Customer Education professional and President of Springboard Solutions firmly asserts in her new book, Onboarding Matters ! She says: “Onboarding is the most important part of the customer journey, yet many B2B companies fail to act proactively at the start of the relationship.” In her book, she outlines th...

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash Brian Childs , a customer education leader with experience at Moz , TapClicks, and more, has developed a Maturity Model that emerging Customer Education teams can use. In this interview, he describes how you can use the Training Maturity Model to scale your customer education team faster. Brian Childs has been building customer and adult education programs for over...

Photo by Lance Grandahl – Two become one. (or one becomes two?) On this episode of CELab we continue both our CEO Series and Customer Success Series as Michael Harnum , CEO of ESG Success, walks us through his journey to Customer Success as a Service. Typically, Education Services used to be standalone activities where customers would consume training credits, but that approach often left customer...

Photo by the blowup on Unsplash Product-focused afterthought! – that’s what most Customer Success clients get wrong about Customer Education according Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures .  But what does this mean, exactly?  In recent episodes, SaaS executives and investors perceive Customer Education as a growing and integral part of scaling their organizations.  This begins our “Customer Success...

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash What are venture capitalists thinking about the potential for Customer Education and Customer Success? As the industry becomes more profitable, we’ve seen more investment activity in the space. Eugene Lee from OMERS Ventures joins us to talk about his view on investing in this market, and what he wants to see from Customer Education and Customer Success companie...

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash One theme that’s on the minds of many Customer Education professionals is learning how to “bridge the divide” between our teams and other education-focused teams. In Episode 19 (Sharing with Others) we kicked off this discussion. Growing organizations in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplace follow standard patterns, and begin to introduce Learning an...

Photo by Gabriel Bassino on Unsplash In 2019 we did our first “pause and reflect” style episode over the holidays, which was one of our top five episodes of all time . With this episode we, once again, let loose and do a “fun” episode to close out the year and start off the new one. And after this year, we definitely need to let loose a bit! To bridge the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, we’...

On October 6th, we presented – live – at Thought Industries’ COGNITION 2020 . This was a great event with many leaders from our Customer Education category. In this recording we unveil our Customer Education Manifesto . This is composed of six guiding principles that we believe can help Customer Success organizations strategically accelerate account and user growth.  Most Customer Success organiza...

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash In this episode, we’re celebrating some milestones from CELab! First, we are celebrating two amazing years of working out loud. We kicked off our very first episode, “ Getting Started with Customer Education ” on November 11th, 2018. Like many of you who have found yourselves here – in this field and listening to this podcast – we dove in head first and in...

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash This is the time of year where we see conferences like DevLearn (which we spoke at last year), The Guild’s Learning Conference, and this year, for the first time ever, we had a three-week run of Customer Education conferences! Now, these were all online conferences since we’re in the midst of Covid-related travel and gathering restrictions, but in a way this m...

In October we attended Skilljar Connect 2020 and hosted a Live Mailbag episode at the event!  Attendees submitted really amazing questions.  We couldn’t tackle them all – so stay tuned for yet another Mailbag episode soon! In this episode we’ll answer some questions that may be on your mind too including: Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash What advice do you have for those that are working wit...

Let’s put Microlearning in focus for Customer Education (Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash ) In this “mini” episode, we focus on microlearning and share some things we learned from one of the industry experts on the subject. At DevLearn 2019, we had the great opportunity to talk with Carla Torgerson , the Director of Instructional Design at Bull City Learning immediately following her “ Create Ef...

Welcome back to Instructional Design 101, where we’ll ask whether Customer Educators need to care about Bloom’s Taxonomy . What’s that, you ask? Bloom’s Taxonomy , created in 1956 by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom , is used by many K-12 educators and instructional designers to categorize learning objectives by what the learner is expected to know or do. The taxonomy has been revised since...

In this episode of the CELab Podcast, we’re joined by Maria Manning-Chapman , the VP, Education Services Research at TSIA where we expand upon the TSIA’s “State of Education Services 2020” report – which we covered in Episode 38 of this podcast.    Photo by Arlington Research on Unsplash Here, we’re diving deeper into monetization strategies which our listeners and the network that we’re in as Cus...

In this episode we talk with Chip Ramsey – Founder and CEO of Intellum and one of the early pioneers in our field with the first ever platform for Customer Education.  We talk about the transition to creating a great platform and how Chip says to “start with science” to make amazing material that helps both your customers and your business. Many Customer Education Professionals may know Intellum a...

Part 2 of our Customer Education Mailbag episode continues the conversation with our listeners.  How do Content Developers become more self-sufficient with their LMS? How many people can we expect to join a new program? Where does Customer Education Belong? Listen in to find out! This podcast and website are not about our opinions and perspectives.  We focus on our community of Customer Education...

Early listeners will remember that we used to do a segment on the show called “Customer Education Mailbag” where we would answer a quick question at the end of the episode, usually unrelated to the main topic.  We’re finally brushing the dust off all those envelopes and open some of the letters that have been coming in. We actually asked our listeners to record their questions, so listen into this...

Our next “State of the Industry” report review comes from Forrester and Intellum with their 2019 paper: “Increase Revenue and Improve Customer Retention Through Customer Education Programs”. This report differs from previous ones in that it focuses on how Customer Education programs can contribute to revenue and customer retention. Customer Education is growing, driving a measurable impact in bott...

In this episode we look at Skilljar’s 2020 Customer Education Benchmarks and Trends report. This report is one of the most comprehensive to-date featuring insights from over 250 customer and partner education teams.  Come listen to our response to this report’s insights related to COVID-19 impacts, budgets, target audiences, training formats and engagement, completion rates, monetization strategie...

In this episode we react as we discover that “only 14% of respondents believed that their customers were adequately trained.” Join us as we break down a report from Thought Industries and Claire Schooley (formerly of Forrester Research) that gives us an eye into what training professionals really think about the State of Customer Training in 2020.

In this episode we kick off a new series that focuses on “The State of Customer Education” in 2020.  We take a deep dive into Maria Manning-Chapman’s report for the Technology Services Industry Association, or TSIA.

In this episode we feature a fireside chat with Daniel Quick, Head of Customer Education at Asana.  How can you really leverage what we’ve learned about game design and apply it to Education and Learning?  Tune in to learn more!

In this episode of our CEO Series, Adam speaks with Jonathan Anderson, Co-Founder and CEO of Candu on the Power of the User Interface in your Product Adoption journey.