Podcast 104: Should You Manage Customer Education as a Product?

EPISODE 104: Customer Education as a Product

Melissa Kruminas, Sr. Director of Learning, Docebo

By any measure, knowledgeable customers are good for business. That’s why I’ve always stressed the strategic importance of strong customer training programs. It’s also why I’m eager to talk today with a professional who is highly successful at managing customer education as a product.

Melissa Kruminas is Sr. Director of Learning at Docebo, one of the world’s most popular enterprise learning platforms, where she spearheads customer and partner education, as well as employee learning and development. That’s an ambitious agenda. How does she make it work?

Find out as we dig deeper on this episode of the Talented Learning Show…

CUSTOMER EDUCATION AS A PRODUCT — KEY TAKEAWAYS

• In today’s tough business environment, treating customer education as a product is a smart way to gain a competitive edge. Companies that provide instructional guidance through every stage of the relationship lifecycle often drive much higher revenue and profit than their counterparts.

• Whether you offer it for free or for a fee, customer training is a business growth engine. That’s the most compelling reason to approach customer education as a product.

• In the same way marketers quantify success, the right metrics are essential for any company that manages customer education as a product. For example, the Docebo team relies on three key measures — cost deflection, direct revenue generation, and revenue attribution.

CUSTOMER EDUCATION AS A PRODUCT — Q&A HIGHLIGHTS

Welcome, Melissa. Could you start by telling us about your role?

Sure. I am the Senior Director of Learning at Docebo, a learning platform serving more than 3,500 organizations worldwide. I oversee our customer education team. And, as of a few months ago, I’m also responsible for Docebo L&D. So, we’re all together now.

That combined focus on internal and external learning seems unusual. How did that happen?

Interestingly, at two prior organizations, I led global enablement. That included sales enablement, partner enablement, and customer education, as well as employee learning and development. So, these pieces can naturally go together.

Actually, I’m a former Docebo customer who joined the team about two years ago. Initially, I stepped in to focus on customer education. But when our Chief Learning Officer came onboard early this year, he wanted to bring all the pieces together in a center of excellence model. So now, our operations are more effective and efficient.

Plus, many of our customers do what we do. They deliver customer education along with partner enablement, sales enablement, and employee L&D. So, why not share our journey with them and vice versa? Now, we’re learning from each other across internal and external agendas.

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Very cool. Let’s talk about how that comes together strategically. Could you tell us about your governance council?

Well, we actually have two governance councils. Although L&D and customer education are parts of the same team, the cross-functional partners they work with are not always the same.

Historically, the L&D team partners with the HR department. They look at employee pulse surveys, Glassdoor reviews, talent development paths, and those sorts of things.

But on the customer education side, we partner uniquely with product marketing, customer success, our professional services team, and other functions.

So, for me, it’s about having the right people in the room for a couple of reasons:

• These people are all important as partners to help us promote curation over creation. Because I’ve never met a learning team with more people and budget than they need.

• Also, we need to understand what’s going on across the business, so we can prioritize in ways that are best for Docebo and our customers.

• And when things change, this ensures we’re aligned and supportive. Change happens. When it does, instead of being alone on an island, we have peers who understand our concerns, support our decisions, and help provide a rationale.

These three things make governance not only helpful, but absolutely necessary for our ongoing success.

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Sounds good. But other organizations may think that sounds really laborious. How do you make it work?

Well, when I started, I definitely bit off more than I could chew!

That’s easy to do…

But this year, we’ve implemented OKRs (objectives and key results) that change on a quarterly basis. And our steering committee comes together in the middle of each quarter.

So, our OKRs are a holistic snapshot of the quarter’s priorities. And in the middle of that time period, we do a quick check-in to be sure we’re on the right track. This gives us a chance to pivot a bit if needed.

It’s only a one-hour session. Honestly, it could be a full day. But committee members report some items beforehand. And people also share updates between meetings.

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Mmhmm…

We also look at any big rocks or initiatives we share.

So, we’re looking at the metrics to be sure we don’t continue working on something if it’s not making a difference for the business. Or sometimes when something changes, we realize we don’t need to work on one of our priorities anymore.

Nice. And is this working?

I think it’s working really well. Here’s a recent example:

We’ve been updating our customer onboarding content because it was a bit bulky and needed attention. But halfway through that project, our professional services team changed the way we activate customers. And this affected our onboarding model.

It meant we needed to stop and revisit what we were doing. We had to reconsider the kind of content needed during the redefined onboarding phase. Should it be different? And the answer was yes.

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Great example. So, I know you’re focused on customer education as a product. Could you tell us what that means to you?

Sure. Originally, Docebo hired me to monetize training. We offer complimentary online learning through Docebo University. But my mission was to monetize ILT, and we did that.

Regardless, I think it’s important to treat education like a product, even if you don’t sell it. As I see it, a director of education at any company is really the product marketing manager for education.

In other words, you need to understand the value proposition and what your competition is doing. You have to understand your customer personas, how much time they have for learning, and how they want to receive information.

I see…

So, when I talk about customer education as a product, that’s what I mean.

We need to think of it as a go-to-market motion and understand we can’t just load a course in an LMS, release it, and hope somebody will find it and engage. It just doesn’t work that way.

Right…

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And on the monetizing side, when I was brought onboard to monetize ILT, Docebo was releasing a feature in the LMS ecommerce module called training credits.

Well, I’m a fan of drinking our own champagne. And I wanted to leverage that new training credits feature, so we could demonstrate its value and also give feedback to the LMS team.

I think of our education team as customer zero. That’s one of the cool things about working at a technology company. We can provide feedback to our internal partners so they can continue to improve the product.

And what happened?

Well, we launched Learning Credits. This is the product we sell from Docebo University. (Not to be confused with training credits, which is the Docebo LMS feature.)

And it was amazing. Within the first year, we brought in revenue somewhere in the ballpark of seven figures.

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Excellent. But I’m surprised there’s so much demand for ILT. Why do you think that’s the case?

Since our customers are learning professionals, themselves, I think they crave professional development. They crave training.

And many of our programs are accredited by both ATD and SHRM. So, when people come to our ILT or our complimentary webinars or our DU Training Camp at our Inspire Conference, they’re not just learning about our platform. They’re also learning about how to be better learning practitioners.

Plus, they’re earning continuing education credits for their own professional development. So, I think that’s a big part of why our program has been so successful.

No doubt. Since we’re talking about revenue outcomes, could you tell us which metrics matter most to you in managing customer education as a product?

Sure. I measure our impact in three ways. The first is cost deflection. This is about the cost associated with all of our support tickets. In other words, are we seeing a reduction in support tickets? How substantial is that decrease?

Actually, there’s a funny story about this. A year ago, we saw that one customer had submitted 107 tickets. Obviously, they needed education and practice, even if we didn’t charge them for it. So, we sent them to ILT.

Recently, we were reviewing our ILT program. And now, in the year following their training experience, that customer has had zero tickets. That’s a 100% reduction.

Wow, That’s wild. What are your other two key metrics? …

… For complete answers to this and more questions about managing customer education as a product, listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Amazon, or right here on our site.

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Find Out More About Docebo

Learn more about the learning platform that treats customer education as a product. Check my Hot Take Review of Docebo on YouTube:

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