CEdMA Conference Takeaways: Customer Ed Nugget 17

Increasingly, companies around the world are discovering the strategic value of customer education. So it’s no surprise that this business function is attracting a growing community of practitioners. Many are members of the Customer Education Management Association (CEdMA) — the only non-profit association dedicated to customer education success. And last week, I was fortunate to meet scores of these professionals in person at the EmpowerEd24 CEdMA Conference in Atlanta.

Although I’ve been involved with customer education for nearly 30 years, this event was a first for me. I’ve never had an opportunity to attend a CEdMA Conference before. Hindsight is 20/20, but now I know I should’ve been participating all along.

Everyone seemed right at home. Talking with newbies and long-time members clarified what’s top-of-mind for the community these days. And seeing the latest from product and services providers was equally eye-opening. We discussed everything — marketing, metrics, content strategy, accreditation, learning management systems, tech integrations, governance, data management and much more.

All the sessions were phenomenal, delivered by people who spend their days steeped in customer education challenges and solutions. I learned more than I could’ve imagined, and a few important trends emerged. So, while this CEdMA Conference experience is fresh in my mind, I want to share highlights in this episode of Customer Ed Nuggets…

Today’s Guest Expert

For true insider insights into CEdMA and the rise of customer education, we’ve asked industry veteran Kristine Kukich to join today’s conversation. You may know Kristine from her years in product education at Oracle and Taleo, or from her recent tenure as a customer marketing executive at Thought Industries.

Last year, she made the leap to consulting, as Principal Owner of The Training Sherpa. She also launched the Mixology podcast, which focuses on the intersection of customer education and customer marketing.

Over the years, Kristine has attended many CEdMA events. Also, as a CEdMA Conference Trustee since early 2023, she has played a central role in planning this year’s forum. So she’s an ideal conference tour guide!

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Top 10 CEdMA Conference Takeaways

1. Take Your Seat at the Executive Table — For decades, HR and employee training professionals yearned for a seat at the executive table. Yet, they’ve struggled to articulate the business value of training. That’s not the case with customer education. Every day, these teams prove the value of their function by demonstrating how it moves the meter across numerous KPIs.

This is serious stuff. That’s why CEdMA Conference keynote speaker Donna Weber set the tone for the event by challenging attendees to step out of the shadows and into the light. Here’s my interpretation: Don’t be shy. Step up to the table, speak boldly about the impact of customer education on your business. Then sit down and own your seat. Hopefully, your HR counterparts will find a way to follow in your footsteps.

2. Building Customer Communities is Big — I know it’s important to build customer communities. But until now, I didn’t realize how important it is. Providing an integrated space where customers can ask and answer questions, build relationships and solve problems is not just a smart way to outsource support. It also helps fuel adoption, reinforce desired behaviors, increase customer satisfaction, reduce churn, identify advocates, and of course drive traffic to and from your LMS. Wow.

This agenda is often owned by marketing. But a partnering strategy can help customer education tap into the budget, horsepower and complementary skills of a well-funded marketing department. To illustrate this approach, Kris-Ann Nansen of Oracle University presented a terrific case study about how her company grew its user community from 150,000 to nearly 1 million in less than 2 years.

3. Leverage the Power of Your Marketing Function — In 2014, I coined the term “instructional marketer” to describe the blend of skills customer education professionally ideally need. I was right about the skill set. But the term needs more finesse.

The term “educational marketer” cropped up multiple times. It also became clear that many customer education teams work within or under their organization’s marketing department. Again and again, people emphasized the benefits of harnessing the marketing’s power, experience, measurement know-how and budget to exponentially expand and accelerate customer learning experiences.

4. CEdMA Members Are a Close-Knit Group — The HR/employee training industry and the LMS market have traditionally prioritized employee needs over external audiences at industry events, as well as in product features and development roadmaps. So, for decades, customer education organizations had to succeed mostly on their own.

This is why the CEdMA community developed organically over the past 30 years as a support group where like-minded professionals can share challenges, ideas, examples, best practices, strategies and results. I was impressed by the  collaborative, supportive nature of this year’s CEdMA Conference attendees. Everyone seemed living-room comfortable, easily engaging as fellow professionals, colleagues, mentors and friends. I even saw someone knitting.

5. LMS Vendors Are Investing Heavily in This Space — Luckily for customer education professionals, a subset of learning systems vendors has emerged with solutions designed specifically for this purpose. Customer LMS market leaders were front-and-center at the CEdMA Conference.

For example, Absorb, Eurekos, Intellum, Gainsight, NetExam, Thinkific, Skilljar and Thought Industries all enjoyed hefty traffic and seemed engaged in meaningful conversations. To learn more about these and other vendors that support customer education? Check out our new 2024 Customer LMS Buyer’s Guide.

6. Metrics Matter — Measuring and proving the impact of customer education is rightfully on everyone’s mind. Why? Demonstrating business impact is rewarding and fun.

Plenty of useful metrics were front-and-center at the CEdMA Conference — courses launched, log-on volumes, community engagement, and various traffic patterns. More importantly, attendees focused on how those metrics link to business metrics like onboarding time, customer satisfaction, time to advocacy and quantity of education-qualified leads. Also, of course churn, churn and more churn.

7. The Customer Lifecycle is Key — It was especially inspiring to see members and vendors focusing on every stage of the customer lifecycle, from early-stage marketing to onboarding, ongoing support and advocacy.

For example, Atlassian Sr. Digital Content and Marketing Program Strategist, Andrew DeBell, presented a compelling case for embracing and promoting independent YouTube and social influencers who are already actively talking about Atlassian. This kind of strategy is a highly leveraged way to expand and educate the Atlassian customer community while helping influencers grow and thrive.

8. Don’t Forget Accreditation and Certification — Although I didn’t hear much about accreditation and certification in presentations and discussions, I saw serious representation from vendors, including Accredible, Bongo, Caveon, Kryterion, PSI and Surpass. All of these vendors attracted significant traffic and engaged attendees in meaningful conversations.

I met with them all and learned about their latest advances. These vendors are investing in AI (among other things), to automate and simplify the accreditation process. In my travels, I see high-stakes certifications primarily in professional education circles. It’s less prevalent in customer education. But I appreciated the presence of certification solution providers so I could catch-up with each of them.

9. Look for GenAI to Shape Instructional Design — It was interesting to see the birth of next generation standalone AI-infused authoring tools. These GenAI tools are transforming many instructional deliverables and processes, including course creation, microlearning development, assessment questions, video production, skill models, practice, user guides, rubrics, workbooks and more. Now, it’s possible to produce all of these in a fraction of the time typically required.

I recommend researching several examples from the CEdMA Conference and beyond. For instance check out , Greenmusk, Learn Experts. However, keep in mind that the competitive race is heating up, with customer LMS solutions also developing innovate capabilities like these.

10. Think of Customer and Partner Learning as the Same Thing — Looking at the titles of CEdMA Conference attendees, I saw just as many roles focused on partner enablement as customer education. In fact, among highly strategic organizations, partner enablement and customer education are two sides of the same coin. And typically, they are managed together.

Watch This Episode of Customer Ed Nuggets

Which of our top 10 CEdMA Conference observations matter most? Join Kristine and me for a fun conversation where we discuss our favorite takeaways…

If you’d prefer to listen to this conversation, tune in to the audio podcast right here at TalentedLearning.com.

The Bottom Line on the 2024 CEdMA Conference

The customer education discipline is changing at warp speed. If you’re a customer education professional or a vendor that competes in this space, support from a strong community can help you stay ahead of the curve. I recommend joining this association and attending the CEdMA Conference.

It’s hard to believe I didn’t participate in the past, but I won’t make that mistake again. I’m already marking my calendar for next year’s gathering in Austin, TX. See you there!

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• CEdMA – Customer Education Association
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Hosted by Talented Learning CEO John Leh, the Customer Ed Nuggets podcast is a trusted source of advice, guidance and best practices for customer education professionals of all types. In this series of brief video and audio “nuggets” (each 10 minutes or less), we explore key topics with numerous guest experts.

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