Gainsight hosted our first Customer Advisory Board focused on Customer Education with an amazing group of education and post sale leaders.  Learn how companies are blending education and customer success to scale. 

See below for Summary, Key Points, How to Get Started, Common Org Structures

Summary
The lines between educating users, driving adoption and guiding customers to achieve ROI are completely blurred.  If your education programs are not strategically woven into your post-sale experience, you’re missing a huge opportunity to scale while increasing adoption, retention and expansion!

The discussion focused on improving the customer experience through education, aligning customer education and success, and using data/metrics to demonstrate education impact. Key themes were enabling customer and CSM efficiency and utilizing CSM insights to enhance content.

View the recording

Key Points

• The ultimate educational experience from the customer's perspective is seamless, searchable, easy to access, has a uniform voice/look across assets, and guides the customer through their journey. It should provide a blueprint for customers to follow.
• There is often a maturity gap among customers in understanding the full potential of solutions. Customer education needs to focus not just on the product but on inspiring customers and maturing their practices.
• Harmonizing customer education and customer success brings major benefits. Customer education enables low/high touch CSM models by providing training customers can self-serve on. It allows CSMs to focus on more strategic, high-value conversations.
• Getting CSM feedback on content helps ensure it is relevant and aligned to the customer journey. Some companies have CSMs take courses to provide input. Intake processes like Jira allow CSMs to make content requests.
• There is increasing demand from customers for detailed training data and metrics that is difficult to scale. Teams are trying to tie training metrics to outcomes like retention and risk levels. But finding the right metrics and methods remains a challenge.

What are three tips to get started?

1. Align closely with customer success from the start. Structure teams and collaborate on goals, metrics, and workflows to avoid silos. Utilize CSM insights to enhance content.
2. Focus on both product capabilities and customer maturity transformation. Guide customers to realize the full potential of your solutions.
3. Obsess over the end customer experience. Make content seamless, motivational, and tailored to their changing needs across the journey.

What org structures are working well to support education priorities?
The discussion touched on a few different organizational structures for customer education teams based on the participants' experiences:

• Cross-functional collaboration - Adam's team at Personio includes educational content, customer engagement, training, and CX enablement all together to provide a unified customer experience.
• Internal services - Matt's team at SPS is structured like an internal services group that takes requests and provides support across the customer success organization. This promotes a culture of collaboration.
• Closely aligned with CSMs - Allison mentioned her team matured closely with the CSM organization rather than competing over resources, enabling mutual value and reliance.
• Shared metrics - Several teams are trying to incorporate customer education metrics into the existing CSM dashboards to show joint impact.

While there was no definitive conclusion on the "right" org structure, the key themes were:

• Break down silos between customer education and success.
• Promote collaboration through cross-functional teams or internal service models.
• Foster direct communication channels between the teams.
• Share goals/metrics to demonstrate mutual value.