How to Maximize the Business Impact of Customer Education
Building an exceptional customer learning program doesn’t come naturally to many organizations. Learning teams often find themselves challenged to “make do with less” while driving innovation and serving as evangelists for the value of education… all without a tried-and-true roadmap for success.
So, it didn’t surprise us that our last State of Customer Education Report found that despite making significant investments, just 34% of respondents say they can demonstrate the clear business impact of their training, and 53% say their team is overloaded. These are challenges which directly relate to an inability to prove ROI and get buy-in for expansion.
One way to understand these gaps, and to work to close them, is to consider your customer education journey against the Thought Industries Maturity Model for Customer Learning.
We frequently hear from leaders who use the maturity model that they’re working to realize benefits at multiple stages simultaneously, but are unsure which initiatives will make the biggest impact on their programs, and are concerned about what they may be overlooking.
Below, we uncover the practical levers and dials that leaders can use to grow their program to the highest levels of maturity.
Our hope is that these key components of program maturity will serve as useful focus points as you plan, prioritize, and accelerate the growth and impact of your own program.
Master the 8 Components of Customer Learning
We found that underpinning all stages of maturity are 8 components of customer learning. As programs gain competence and mastery in these components, their impact on their customers, and their business, increases dramatically. While some teams focus tightly on just two or three components and may have made quick strides in the early days of their growth, those same programs tend to plateau at lower levels of impact down the road.
As you review the components below, do a quick cross check: which have a strong strategy in place today, and which may be opportunities for more thinking and investment?
- Advocacy: How well do you (or others) demonstrate the value of your program… and secure resources and support in return?
- Discovery: Your team’s strategy to identify and prioritize future content needs, including what to build, who to build it for, and how to design it.
- Profitability: How does learning generate “return on learning,” through profit, impact, or both?
- Engagement: Ensuring the right learning reaches the right users at the right time, helping customers realize the maximum value of your offerings.
- Capacity: This is the process your team uses to build learning content at scale, maintaining both efficiency and high quality.
- Measurement: Both the metrics that quantify overall impact of your program, and the methods used to calculate those KPIs.
- Technology: The tools, platforms, and systems that enable you to run a scalable, personalized program and optimize it over time.
- Team: How the learning function orchestrates and deploys different skills at critical moments – whether with dedicated full-time employees or “borrowed” support.
Before you race toward the finish line in any one component, we recommend you ask yourself: Where is your program’s foundational weakness right now? Where are you not yet reaching “table stakes”?
Stay Tuned for More Details on Customer Learning Maturity
While we hope thinking through your current mastery of these 8 components is a useful step toward evolving the impact of your customer learning program, we want to provide even more support! Check out our interactive self-assessment, where you can see how you stack up against other customer education leaders across each stage of the maturity model–and get a custom action plan to level up your program.
In the meantime, keep in touch! If you’d like further insights on how to boost your customer learning journey, prove ROI to the C-suite, or measure the impact of learning — contact us here.
