Читать книгу The Customer Education Playbook - Daniel Quick - Страница 32

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.

If your customer education team is tasked with maximizing customer success, try asking your CSMs to list the things that they say repeatedly to most of their customers: the standard onboarding questions that they answer, the company information they provide, or even the sales pitch repeated for new customers who join the account. If you can create content that covers this material, then you're leaving your CSMs with a lot more time to deal with more nuanced questions around use cases, which is likely to offer far more strategic value to your customers.

One idea to cover this material is to run an ongoing live webinar program teaching the basics of your product, and then strongly promote it to new customers. If your product is relatively complex, you might also run additional webinars to teach more advanced material. You can also record on-demand versions of the webinar. Then, you can provide these prerecorded versions to customers whenever they choose, or you can schedule to play them live at a regular cadence, while ensuring someone is standing by for live questions.