Podcast 79: Proving the Business Impact of Customer Education

EPISODE 79: The Business Impact of Customer Education

Greg Rose, Chief Experience Officer, Intellum

If you know me, you know I’m obsessed with customer education. It’s not just because this intersection of learning, technology and customer experience is so dynamic and fascinating. It’s also because the best way to grow and sustain any company is through educated customers. And I care about learning that makes a measurable business impact.

But how do you know when your strategy is really working? And what’s the best way to demonstrate this to leaders and other stakeholders?

Glad you asked! Because today’s guest, Greg Rose, is the ideal person to answer these questions. Greg is Chief Experience Officer at Intellum, one of the world’s top customer education platforms. He has helped countless companies make the most of customer education, so I know you’ll want to hear what he says on this episode of The Talented Learning Show…

Proving the Business Impact of Customer Education – KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Educating customers is not just a good idea — it’s good business. But how good is it? And how do you prove that? For better answers, look beyond LMS data, alone. Also, focus on metrics that move customer education from a cost center to a profit center.

• There’s still plenty of room for improvement here. For instance, of nearly 120 case studies Talented Learning has published from learning systems vendors, only 15-20% focus on moving the business needle. The rest emphasize training progress statistics.

• Some organizations have implemented highly sophisticated ways to analyze the business impact of customer education. This is where specialized consulting services can help. But getting started doesn’t need to be as complicated as you may think.

Proving the Business Impact of Customer Education – Q&A HIGHLIGHTS

Welcome to the show, Greg. Why don’t you start by introducing listeners to your company?

Sure, John. Intellum is the platform that large, recognized brands rely upon for customer education. Think of Google, Meta, Amazon, Atlassian, Xero, and TikTok. Also, Mailchimp, Gusto and a very cool company called Impact.com. They all rely on this platform to drive business outcomes through education.

We’ve been in this space for 25 years. We have a long track record of innovation. You know, we built the world’s first cloud-based LMS. We delivered the first native mobile/social learning app. And we’ve just launched a true personalized AI learning assistant in the platform.

So now as an individual learner, you can tell the onboard AI system about yourself, and it will determine your learning goals. It will map your key skills and create a custom profile for you. And all of this helps provide hyper-personalized learning plan development and tracking.

It’s pretty amazing stuff. And that’s why we get to work with such high-caliber clients. I’m honored to be part of it.

You’ve been there a long time, right?

Yeah, 10 years.

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And your job title is unique — Chief Experience Officer. Could you tell us about that?

Well, I think SaaS companies are great at selling outcomes. We can dig into our buyers’ personal motivations and connect them to things that help them envision what the future looks like if they use a solution we sell. But generally, we’re terrible at teaching customers how to actually achieve those outcomes.

In other words, there’s a big difference between a SaaS buyer and the people that actually do the work. A big disconnect often happens when the buyer hands-off a solution to users. So, at the end of the year admins say, “This platform sucks.” And buyers are thinking, “Wait, this isn’t what we want.”

There are so many stories like that…

Mmhmm…

We’re thinking about all of that a little bit differently, so clients can show that they deliver more than traditional learning. We want to help them demonstrate a direct business impact from customer education.

So, we’re pulling together things that were historically separated. We’re tearing down the hard lines between post-sales responsibilities.

Think of the familiar sequence in the customer journey. First, implementation, and then onboarding, and then support, and then education. Those things traditionally lived in their own respective, siloed teams.

But we bring all that together into one functional area we call customer experience. So now, implementation, onboarding, the continuous cycle of support and education work together — even along with some deeper platform and program consulting. This enables our clients to contribute directly to outcomes that matter to their company.

So it’s not just about learning outcomes. It goes a step deeper. It’s about demonstrating that these programs make a significant business impact.

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And in selling solutions, you see a need for advisory services?

After 25 years of working with organizations to ensure that their education programs have a real business impact, we know this is hard. It’s especially hard if you’re trying to do this for the first time. So we’ve gone deeper on consulting. And we’ve baked this into our platform, as well.

How so?

For example, you can see high-level best practice program metrics. These benchmarks can help you determine how some of your specific initiatives like onboarding and certification are performing.

But still, organizations need to sit down with folks with our unique purview. We look at data across hundreds of customers. I can see large enterprise initiatives with millions of learners that engage with content every day. And I also see very small, nimble initiatives where the audience may be smaller, but the improvement cycle is managed in a hyper-continuous way. For example, some of these organizations measure performance and make changes on a weekly basis.

From those diverse scenarios, we draw perspective and define best practices that other customers can apply in their situations.

I see…

It’s important for clients to know how to use the platform — that’s table stakes. But especially in today’s business environment, we want to make sure these organizations are moving to the next level, so they have visibility and recognition for driving business outcomes.

Yes. Customer education needs to show how it moves the business needle. But everyone struggles to get the right data or apply the right analysis. How do you help?

To clarify, think of two different scenarios with similar challenges. One involves setting up a new customer education program from scratch. The other is about improving a large, long-running program.

Both teams were focused on learning outcomes and metrics related to the consumption of content inside the learning platform. But they wanted to do more.

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Sure…

Of course, increasing learning progress numbers is a good thing. These are great leading indicators. But external education initiatives should be directly tied to some kind of business outcome like growth, revenue, retention, performance, cost reduction.

And in today’s environment, these goals are shifting constantly. We’re all experiencing that. So, we had to figure out how to help companies in both of these situations quickly get to a place where they could demonstrate their business impact.

Why are they having such a hard time moving from basic training progress metrics to business impact metrics?

In one word, it’s data. That is the core challenge.

Traditionally, education teams tend to be a bit silent. There’s a tech stack — most likely an LMS. And they deploy and manage content through the LMS, so tracking engagement and results is tied to things that live in the LMS. They measure the effectiveness of content with an assessment, or a survey, or something. That’s all they can see.

So it’s easy to get into a cycle of looking at user acquisition and performance in terms of that content consumption.

But when practitioners talk about education that drives business outcomes, none of that data can live inside the learning platform. All you can do with an LMS is deploy content and measure its effectiveness through something like assessment scores. You can track who’s doing what. But that’s all.

I think the challenge is about jumping the fence and correlating that content consumption data with business data.

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Is this a technical issue or a business challenge? How do you navigate that?

Great question. I think it’s both. Certainly there’s data stuff. At the highest level, you should be piping out all of the data from your LMS into something else.

That depends on your organization. It could be a data repository tool like BigQuery. Or it could be a data visualization tool like Tableau. Whatever your data science internal process is should determine where that data should be going…

Good point. So, looking through a customer journey lens, let’s talk more specifically about the benefits of this kind of strategy…

Absolutely. Forrester recently published new research based on Intellum clients and other companies. And the findings show that the business impact of this kind of orchestrated customer education is insane. Metrics like closed won ratio, retention and lifetime value increase dramatically…

…For complete answers to this and more questions about how to demonstrate the business impact of customer education, listen to the full 30-minute podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Amazon Podcasts, or right here on our site.

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Watch This Podcast on YouTube

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