Customer education professionals often find themselves operating in a small team that would ideally be bigger. Some even operate as a team of one. If that’s you, you’re not alone! More importantly, you can still produce quality content and make a real difference for your customers! However, you’ll soon encounter the next challenge: how to scale your customer education program.
If you’re good at your role, and your work attracts the attention of other teams, your output will be in demand. This is good, but it requires a smart approach.
You won’t succeed simply by working twice as hard; in fact, the more selective and strategic you are in your approach, the greater your chance of success. The secret is to step back from your content output and pay attention to people, process, and priorities.
Here are five best practices to follow as you scale your customer education program, which I’ve found essential in building and scaling ChurnZero’s own award-winning initiatives.
1: Build a roster of subject matter experts.
Like many education content creators, you might not be a subject matter expert in the content you’re teaching. Instead, you’re an expert in packaging and delivering it in a way that is optimal for learning.
This means that to create quality education, you need the help of subject matter experts from your customer success, product, and other teams. You need to identify your SMEs, then build a relationship in which they understand their role in your customer education program.
You can map these roles out against the stages of your process, noting which SMEs can provide the most value at each stage:
- Ideation – helping you identify goals and prioritize content.
- Design – helping you identify the scope and focus of the content.
- Review – helping you finalize your content and ensure it is accurate and engaging.
- Post launch evaluation – helping you identify gaps and opportunities of improvement.
2: Dive deep into your customers’ learning journeys.
Expect to redesign and update your content continuously as your product matures and your internal processes and priorities change. Don’t think of updates as something you’re fixing because the original design was bad; treat them as an inevitable step in your process instead. This will help you anticipate update cycles and organize your time around them.
Just like new resources, updates are time-consuming, so you’ll need to prioritize them wisely. To do this, make yourself intimately familiar with your customers’ learning journeys. Take the time to understand:
- Who your learners are: their roles, their interests, and their skill-building goals.
- Their role challenges AND their learning challenges. How much time can they dedicate to learning? What learning formats do they find most compelling for mastering the content you’re sharing with them?
- What topics do they need to digest (and retain) at which point? For example, what content is essential for successful onboarding before learners can progress to more advanced topics?
ChurnZero’s range of customer education content formats includes text, video, interactive blocks, images, and quizzes.
3: Define your most important processes clearly.
There are several processes in the life of a customer education professionals and teams which are cyclical. To avoid getting lost in these tasks as you scale your operations, you need a clear and detailed process for each of the following:
- Designing net new content.
- Executing a new project.
- Reviewing feedback.
- Existing content updates.
- Gathering ideas for new content from team/customers.
As well as defining your processes, identify annual goals and large projects you want to accomplish. This will keep you from losing track of them as you tackle your everyday challenges and needs.
Don’t skip this step. Without clear plans and goals, you might find yourself only addressing product updates, and revamping assets continuously without creating new content or launching new education initiatives.
4: Scale your tools to scale your operations.
As you scale your customer education program, you will need to expand your tech stack to account for more content creation and more upkeep of existing content. Before you dive into researching tools, review your priorities and budget to identify exactly what to research and invest in, because research and testing takes time.
For example, if you rely heavily on demo videos, you need to invest in a video editing tool like Camtasia. If, however, you are at the point of needing to edit hundreds of videos in a short time, consider scaling up to a tool like Videate that uses AI to create videos from a provided script.
Anna and her team use Camtasia to create high-quality training videos in-house.
Remember to scale your knowledge as you scale your tools. Your vendors and their competitors are constantly growing and rolling out features. It can be overwhelming to keep up with everything, but try and expand your skills on a regular basis. It will not exponentially improve the quality of your content and also make your design process faster. A lot of the latest features use generative AI, which can automate some of your processes and leave more time for creative work.
5: Don’t be afraid of radical change.
Rethinking, restructuring, or repackaging your educational content can make a huge difference in the way it is digested and retained by your learners. Don’t be afraid to undertake the task.
A while ago, as we gained a deeper understanding of our ChurnZero learner personas, we realized that learners often became overwhelmed when going through our courses. On investigating the issue, we found that many learners were tackling content that was more advanced than their role required, which was causing much of the overwhelm.
We decided to categorize our lessons into levels, clearly marked by numbers. 100: beginner. 200: intermediate. 300: advanced. 400: expert. Now, a learner who uses ChurnZero Plays to engage and manage customers can go through the 100 and 200 Plays courses to learn about the feature and how to analyze Play reports. A learner whose role includes designing and launching Plays will also take the 300 course, learning how to create and set up Plays. The first learner can skip that course or take it later when they’re ready.
Our structural update was ambitious, but the difference it made for our learners and our completion rates was immense.
Ready to build and scale your customer education program? Learn how to integrate customer education and its tools into your workflows in this webinar with ChurnZero and Absorb Software.
