Although Evernote now has approximately 350 employees, Josh's team for managing the Global Customer Education and Community functionality is very small. He and one other full-time person manage all of the content, education and community activities. When we spoke in late May, he was also looking to add an instructional designer position. (How I would love to be magically transplanted to Redwood City, CA to join his team!)

Though Evernote doesn't currently "connect the dots" between customers who have consumed a certain kind of educational content and their usage of the product (especially renewals and upgrades), Josh mentioned that it's something they may add in the future. They do know anecdotally that people who consume certain kinds of content, like reading the blog or using templates, tend to do better with the product.

But along with the challenges of having such a diverse user population, one of the educational challenges is that Evernote is a flexible product that is used in almost as many different ways as there are users.  Josh believes that "the company doesn't have to be the only one delivering the message." So he designed the Evernote Certified Consultant training program, which has existed in its current version for about a year (and existed in a different version for about a year before that). There are now approximately 800 Evernote Certified Consultants, as well as approximately another 800 Evernote Community Leaders, all of whom are helping Evernote users learn more about the product.

The program that potential consultants must go through is fairly rigorous (and must be done in English). Candidates who meet the requirements must plan on spending 20-30 hours with just about two weeks to complete several modules designed to help consultants learn detailed information about Evernote's brand, standards, and procedures. The program offers lots of practical experience working with Evernote, as well as access to other students' work to share and collaborate on different ways of approaching different problems. But the percentage that make it through the program every month adds to Evernote's ability to train a global audience. Josh personally reviews every single assignment, so you can imagine the amount of time he spends grading assignments. My graduating "class" included 30 new Evernote Certified Consultants, but Josh says he's had as many as 300 students in one month. Josh and I talked quite a bit about the benefits of charging for this training to offset some of the costs, as well as weeding out some of the folks who never finish the program.

Evernote will keep evolving it's educational offerings as the team is able to make improvements. But if you need help starting out with Evernote or optimizing your use of the app, there are so many options and people available to help. Just ask!

I'm super exited that I have another guest post to share to help in your journey for creating educational content for your customers, brought to you via blog post exchange. This time, the Nozbe team members share with us how Nozbe turns a passion for productivity into different ways to educate customers of their to-do, task, project and time management application.​​

I started using Nozbe in Jan 2016, and now I absolutely couldn't live without it. It helps me manage multiple client engagements, as well as my volunteer, family, and personal projects. If you'd like to give Nozbe a try, please tell them I sent you by signing up with my affiliate link.

You can read my contribution to the Nozbe blog at https://nozbe.com/blog/michele-wiedemer-adding-to-nozbe/.

​Nozbe blog
We regularly write on our blog. Basically we can distinguish three types of entries we publish.

1. One type are the Nozbe use cases - short articles that explain how Nozbe can be used in various contexts, and what options can be employed in specific situations and fields. We also share some funny tips and tricks about our tool. This group of posts also includes the guest posts by Nozbe users in which they explain how they work with our application. Michele's article for our blog post exchange is a perfect example.
2. The second type of blog posts are general productivity-related articles. We advise the readers on writing everything down or how to use our strengths at work.
3. Finally we use our blog to communicate with our community: we announce the new version releases or tell the readers how we spent the last Nozbe reunion.

Please note, that Nozbe is available in 10 different languages and thus, we actually run 10 blogs. Most of the articles we write are translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Korean, Spanish, etc. and are published on the Nozbe blog in corresponding language, eg.: nozbe.com/de/blog or nozbe.com/jp/blog.

Adam Avramescu has provided another great guest post. This one is a bit longer, but worth the read!

​Adam is head of the Customer Education program at Optimizely, the world's leading experimentation platform. The Optimizely Customer Education program is called Optiverse, where customers learn about more than how to use the Optimizely product features, and includes a knowledge base, academy, academy live, community, and certification. I met Adam at the Learning DevCamp 2016, happy to meet someone in a conference full of training professionals who also focused on training customers vs. employees.

I'm thrilled to share another guest post from Adam Avramescu, who is head of the Customer Education program at Optimizely, the world's leading experimentation platform. The Optimizely Customer Education program is called Optiverse, where customers learn about more than how to use the Optimizely product features, and includes a knowledge base, academy, academy live, community, and certification. I met Adam at the Learning DevCamp 2016, happy to meet someone in a conference full of training professionals who also focused on training customers vs. employees.

I will be forever grateful to the early leaders at Optimizely who began recruiting for a dedicated Customer Education headcount at around 50 employees. Because they saw the need early, we evolved past the “fix-the-Knowledge Base” stage into a more mature function that serves as a competitive differentiator and scale engine for the broader Customer Success team.

End Content Poverty

Perhaps no surprise for a 3-year-old, 50-person company, our documentation was far from feature complete. The early Customer Education task force did some analysis of the product features and wrote basic documentation to fill in the gaps. This wasn’t necessarily every minor feature or setting, but the major components of the product.

The feature documentation also wasn’t in the greatest detail. Taking a lightweight approach here allowed us to avoid documentation bloat and add content based on questions that actual customers were asking, not every edge case we could imagine.

This approach evolved into our “80/20” principle of documentation: document the common features, issues, and practices that 80% of your customers will find relevant, and leave the 20% edge cases and specifics out.

​Highlight the “Head” Issues

The original documentation had different tone based on which agent wrote the article -- great for personality, bad for consistency. The “FAQ” didn’t have the most frequently asked questions, but just random questions that people had asked (personal pet peeve).
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We found the support team members were solving the same issues repeatedly, so we prioritized making the most common support questions and best practices easy to find. We asked our Strategy Consultants and Technical Account Managers what best practices they shared over and over, or what they found themselves teaching customers most often. We turned these issues into FAQs and articles.

At this point, we had an article for each major feature, and special articles for the most common questions, issues, and techniques.

Lights, Camera, Action

Written content is great, but video works better in many cases -- especially for visual workflows that users can replicate. We created short video content for the most common and most valuable in-product workflows. Video content has a higher production cost, but articles with video tended to receive higher ratings, and were easier to understand than stepwise instructions. Some of those videos endured for years after they were first created, especially the ones that were more conceptual vs. describing specific UI components.

A few things that I think made our videos particularly successful in the early going:

• The videos were short and sweet. None of the original videos passed 2-3 minutes in length, which also forced us to focus on the most important information.

• We invested in the production quality, using a professional-quality microphone and editing to take out unnecessary clicks and movements.
• We also used a more friendly, inviting tone for the voiceover, while still keeping the videos tight and scripted. For example, we started the videos with, “I’m going to show you how to…” and ended with, “Happy Testing!”
• We only made videos for content that needed videos. No abstract feature tours for their own sake; we kept videos focused on workflows and practices that weren’t intuitive in the product UI.

A Little Something Special

You can’t do everything well. (We didn’t, and still don’t.) But my strong opinion is that you should find at least one way to differentiate yourself, measure it, and invest in it as a differentiator. For us, there were two: videos and “This Article Will Help You” sections.

“This Article Will Help You” is a concept similar to learning objectives in the instructional design world. Learning objectives entice the learner to commit to a learning experience by telling what they’ll be able to do. For example, “create an Audience in Optimizely using targeting conditions” is a good, practical learning objective, because it describes something that a customer can actually do. “Understand how audiences work” is a bad learning objective because no one needs to understand this for its own sake.

We still use the “This Article Will Help You” section today, and receive good feedback from customers that it helps orient them within articles.

Define Success
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The final thing we did in the early days: define success metrics based on discoverability and value, but that is a story for another day.

For many companies, the most successful customers with the highest LTV are the ones who are educated - not just about product features, but also about key workflows, best practices, and maturity in the broader industry.

Many early-stage Customer Success teams haven't begun to use Customer Education as a key to scale. Customer Success teams who make a true investment in Customer Education will see a positive change in the way their team's tribal knowledge scales out to have an impact on Sales, Marketing, and even Product.

If your CSMs are doing trainings, and your support agents are writing articles, with no centralized guidance, then you have a recipe for linear growth in your customer success team. Your individuals are likely spending a lot of time creating duplicate content, and it probably takes them longer to do it because you didn't hire them to create scalable content, so they don't have the competency and they're task-switching to do it. Even one professional dedicated to capturing the expertise of your Customer Success heads will help you create reusable, scalable content.