Lessons From the Optiverse: Why Train Customers

​This week, I'm excited to bring a 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.

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"Customer Education is a competitive 
​differentiator."

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Why You Should Invest in Customer Education in 2017 (And Your Customers Will Thank You)* ​

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.

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"The most successful customers with the highest LTV are the ones who are educated...about key workflows, best practices, and maturity in the broader industry."

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Beyond that, Customer Education is a competitive differentiator for your business if you're in an industry that requires your customers to change the way they do their work. You can see great examples of this not only at Optiverse, but with resources like the Asana Guide, Salesforce Trailhead, and Hubspot Academy. Each of these go beyond the basic question of "how do I use this product?" to something more fundamental: "How can I do my job more effectively, and how does this product help me do that?" Because we help customers understand the strategy behind optimization, not just how to fix problems as they use our product, our customers are more successful.

Key Performance Indicators of an Education Program
What direct impact does your Customer Education program have on your business?

• Number of 1:1 training sessions that CSMs deliver should decrease as education content consumption increases
• Support customer contact rate should decrease as education content consumption increases
• If you measure NPS, CES, or other CSAT metrics, make sure to measure that for your educational content. If you have existing content, those metrics should improve as you invest.

Beyond that, if you have the ability to measure attribution, determine how education consumption drives increased adoption of key features, or average speed to first value.

*This article is an excerpt of the article Adam Avramescu published on Linked In on January 6, 2017.