The Customer Education Playbook - Daniel Quick

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(“not trained”) and measure product adoption rates between the two groups. Although this isn't a causal analysis, it'll still give you a great understanding of the relationship between consuming that content and product adoption rates.

      Pre/Post Content Cohort Analysis With this approach, you push the customer education content to all of your customers by, for example, creating a three-minute video that new users watch the first time they sign into your product environment. You then track the data for product adoption after this content has been viewed, measuring the difference between the metrics you had before you launched the video. If you can get the support of your business leaders to push content to all of your users, this can be a great replacement for a true A/B experiment. While the pre/post analysis is also correlative and not causal, it more or less controls for confounding variables.

      Scaling your support offerings through customer education comes in the form of self-service resources. Whether that's help centers, online communities, or FAQs, self-service customer education can have a big impact on scaling your support team through documentation and resources.

      Let's look in detail at one of these examples – online communities. These are often thought of as a means to build brand enthusiasm and customer advocacy. However, when done right, they can also play a huge role in ticket deflection. Customers can turn to the community with pressing questions, and an active community can often generate answers more quickly than a support team. On top of this, the best communities include experts with knowledge, experience, and best practices that can outweigh your in-house experience 10 to 1.

      Of course, a successful community doesn't spring up overnight. You can't just build an online forum and expect it to succeed. This isn't Field of Dreams. Most communities suffer from the tumbleweed effect. The chemistry of a thriving online community takes a lot of work to spark it into lift and requires investment to nurture it from the ground up, from attracting new members to moderating conversations and helping it to scale and grow.

       Stop Thinking about Self-Serve as a Compromise

      Once upon a time, self-service meant doing something yourself to save on money or time, often at the expense of the experience. Think about it. A self-service café, even at its best, cannot match the experience delivered by a fine-dining restaurant. Mowing your own lawn might not get you those smooth lines, but hey – you've saved a few dollars in the process.

      Of course, that doesn't mean your support reps can't get the ball rolling. With the right content and training in hand, support interactions can be transformed into learning experiences, and as your support agents continue fielding tickets, they can begin to create macros in response to the specific kinds of questions that they're being asked. The macros could include links to helpful resources, a recommendation for additional training content, or even the support agent themselves doing a quick tutorial on the spot. In this way, your customer education program begins to transform support interactions into learning experiences and even operationalizes them in the moment.

       Made to Measure: How to Show the Success in Scaling Customer Support

      Your main metric for this goal is ticket deflection rate. Your support tickets will naturally scale with the growth of your customer base. However, once you invest in self-service resources, you will see that trend reverse. With each additional month, more self-service resources become available, and more customers join your community to offer one another help and support. Customers will file fewer support tickets even as your company expands.

Schematic illustration of Optimizely Support Ticket Deflection

      Every time a new customer is onboarded to your product, your customer success managers (CSMs) have the same conversation. They may have these conversations dozens of times a week; they could probably recite them word-for-word in their sleep. Does this sound like your company? If so, then your CSMs are massively underleveraged. How can they offer deep strategic value if they're always dealing with basics?

      Daniel on Customer Education as a Scale Engine

      When I led customer education at Asana, I reported into customer success, and I was dismayed to learn on my first day that my director – who I liked and respected – was leaving. We took a walk and I asked him about his thoughts on the role of customer education. He explained that he had a lightbulb moment when he realized that he had been traditionally building customer success teams by starting with CSMs first and foremost, so that as the organization grew, accounts could get the value and training that they needed. However, he had since realized that to keep up with the growth, he would need to hire more and more CSMs. Instead, he had recognized that it made a lot more sense to start with a customer education program, and then the whole customer success team would be in a better place to scale. He could ensure the team had on-demand training in place, and he would need fewer CSMs to do repeat training. This mirrors the idea we spoke about back in Chapter 2, that customer education is a scale engine that allows you to build your organization far more proactively.

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