and ways to personalize content that's aligned with the different audiences in your customer base. As we said earlier, you need your customers to want to be here, so engagement and consumption-driving features are a must-have. Make sure that your LMS offers deep integration with other business tools, like ecommerce functionality so that you can charge for the content you're producing, the videoconferencing software you're using for VILT (such as Zoom), the CMS that you're using for your knowledge base, your customer relationship management (CRM) such as Salesforce, and your support ticket software. Don't settle for anything less than advanced reporting capabilities that provide a true understanding of the impact of your learning on the business. For the content that lives on your LMS, you'll find it a lot easier if you have native authoring tools available, but you can supplement these with video and audio editing software such as Camtasia and potential eLearning authoring software like Articulate or Captivate.
When you're thinking about how to staff your academy, look to hire instructional designers, sometimes called learning experience designers. These will be people who can create learning experiences optimized for learning transference. You may also want an academy program manager to holistically stay on top of the academy's progress and look for ways to expand and collaborate across the organization. As it's a different skillset, you might want to hire an LMS administrator who can handle the back-end technical configuration of the LMS itself. The content you want to include in your academy may also dictate what staff you need – for example, trainers for instructor-led training (ILT) or someone with experience in psychometrics for building exams or certifications.
In-Product Education
Next up in the customer education portfolio is in-product education (IPE). One of the most effective ways you can teach your customer is in context of the task they're performing. Rather than ask a customer to leave your product to learn about something, why not teach them just in time, when they're actually using it? Conventionally, IPE is focused on performance support, guiding customers to perform a specific task. This is more akin to a knowledge base program rather than deep learning and encouraging longer, more sustainable behavioral change.
However, more and more companies are discovering the impact of offering deeper learning experiences within the product, such as videos and interactive quizzes or activities. In fact, in many cases we've started to see the idea of an academy and IPE slowly converging, where fully fledged academies are popping up from within the product itself, and customers can access all the learning in-product.
How to Build and Staff Your In-Product Education It's vital to build and staff your IPE. You'll want a digital adoption platform (DAP) like WalkMe or Pendo. You can build your own IPE, or you can use a tool like Thought Industries that surfaces content from within your product. While your instructional designers can support creating these experiences, you'll want to make sure that someone on your team works closely with the product to create super-engaging, concise learning experiences that fit the bill.
Community
Sometimes marketing owns customer online communities, but we think it fits nicely within customer education's remit, because the primary function of a customer community is to connect and learn from one another. A community is a channel for experts and advocates to influence and teach one another. An active customer community is a powerful support ticket deflection tool. You can use your community to ask questions, get feedback, and even draw threads to create new content.
How to Build and Staff Your Community Community platform software like Insided will make it really easy to create, manage, and moderate your community. You can't get away without a dedicated community manager; they are essential because they moderate, encourage, promote, reach out, and manage the overall experience. Without one, you're seriously hampering the community's growth, and it's likely to fail.
Sometimes you'll find that communities pop up where people are naturally interacting, like on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Reddit. It's important to have someone with social media skills who can merge ideas together and follow and participate in communities wherever they might be. As a general rule, organic social media communities lack the sophistication, moderation, and customization to form a dedicated customer community that achieves brand advocacy or community-driven content. For this, you'll want a separate, clearly defined experience.
Blog, Social Media, and Email
You'll usually find the blog, email marketing, and social media accounts housed under marketing, but customer education is beginning to take on some of these responsibilities, too. This is especially true if your customer education program functions as a center of excellence focused on the industry to which your customers belong. Blogs and social media are a great way to address the learning needs of potential customers earlier in the funnel, but they're super helpful for your customers, too! It's unrealistic in the modern era to assume that people are always going to head to your academy and learn. It's much more likely that they will find something by Googling organically, while they're scrolling through a social media feed, or because of a well-timed email marketing campaign. People are learning everywhere, from YouTube to TikTok, and you need a strategy in place for that. Customer education has a perspective around the industry that other departments may not have; we understand what people need to learn, and we have plenty of experience developing engaging content. If this content isn't under your purview, make sure you're at least a close contributor with the content marketing team.
How to Build and Staff Your Blog and Social Media Accounts If you're taking the wheel with marketing content like the company blog and social media accounts, your technology stack is actually catchy videos and snappy content! What you really need here is just a content strategist who is savvy around social media and knows how to create engagement levels that go through the roof.
Fee Versus Free: Should You Monetize Your Customer Education Content?
The final decision to make at this stage is whether your customer education program will be a cost center, a cost-recovery center, or a profit center for the business. In a cost-center model, you're spending more money than you're making; a cost-recovery center will aim to break even; and a profit center earns direct revenues. As your customer education program matures, you will probably find yourself wondering how to move from being a cost center that helps other teams scale to being a revenue-generating arm of the business in its own right.
Remember That Training Has Value
In a 2021 webinar with Thought Industries, Maria Manning-Chapman from TSIA spoke about how, if your customer education department remains a cost-center, you'll always be similar to the teenager going to their parents for money when they want to go out with their friends.1 In short, if you're not making your own money, you don't have control over your own behavior or growth.
We know many customer education professionals who are reluctant to charge for customer education, often citing that they don't want a price tag to be a “barrier” to learning content consumption. However, the barrier to content consumption is more often related to a lack of consumption strategies than it is to whether training content has been monetized. There are many programs that have customers who gladly pay for valuable training content! In fact, benchmark data suggests that the split between fee-based and free content is about 75 percent paid to 25 percent free. Sure, no one is going to start charging for support articles or marketing content – that's included as part of the 25 percent. However, when you think about that 75 percent, whether it's going to help the customer get better at their job, provide a certification for their resume, give them some kind of digital badge for their LinkedIn, or open their eyes to industry best practices – that's worth a price tag.
Don't be worried that charging for content will turn the customer off from engaging. When people pay for content, they are often intrinsically more motivated