Small But Mighty: How to Scale a Customer Education Program with Limited Resources
Starting from scratch to develop a comprehensive Customer Education (CE) product suite can be daunting, especially with a small team. This session will guide you through the process, providing clear, actionable steps to create and implement an effective CE strategy, even on a limited budget. Learn how Hornbill has successfully delivered diverse learning workstreams through their Academy with just a team of 2, and discover how you can empower your customers to succeed independently too.
Hi, good morning everyone. Thanks for joining track 4. I'm so excited today to
introduce
Two of our speakers which are actually my customers as well. They've built an
amazing academy
So we're really excited to hear about their best practices today. We have Joel
Ian Dr. Joel Ian
He's the head of product for learning at Hornville and also Albino Barty
Who's the learning developer for Hornville as well, so please welcome them
Thanks, Nargis
Just a quick reminder actually
We will have a poll and also Q&A's are on the app so you can definitely go in
and ask your questions there. Thank you
Thank you
Are we on?
Can you hear me? Excellent
Thank you very much for coming to this afternoon's session. Sorry this morning
session
We hope you're having a good time here at Pulse
A couple of disclosures before we start
This session is not about AI. Sorry
Seems to be a bit of the theme. So if you're here for AI now's a chance you can
get out
Secondly this session is purely about customer education. We are a customer
education customer
We use gain sight see we've been using it now for a year and a little bit with
our customer base
So with that in mind, hopefully you are at the right session
We're gonna get started. So my name is Joel
I'm the head of product for learning at Hornville
Hornville our UK based SaaS company
We have a very deeply technical product base and we have a lot of customers in
Europe and some in the US
Hello everyone, I'm Albino and I've joined Hornville for a year now as a
learning developer with Joel
Great. So before we get started, we're gonna get you to do something
So if you can log on to the app
We've just got a few questions and it's really just to get a bit of a
temperature check of who's here today where you're at
In your journey with customer education and some of the challenges that may
face you
So if you can log on and just take a look at these questions
Yeah
Yeah, we got some responses coming in
So while we're waiting what we're here to do today is to talk to you a bit
about our journey with customer education
And particularly with the gain sight customer education product
We're gonna talk about our successes
We're gonna talk about some of the things that worked well for us
But do know it's quite easy to talk about only our successes for every win we
talk about today
There's been two step sideways one step backwards. We're an iterative work in
progress
so great to see
most of you over half of you almost have started your customer education, but
still finding a feat great
Tell me when you fully find your feet because I've never been in a place where
we have we're always moving
If you not started yet pretty mature great. So the majority of you are really
at that early stage excellent
Next question
Great so in your organization, what's the main challenge that you want customer
education to solve?
So here we can see content in different places brilliant
Distribute in content getting it to the right customers in the right place
Making our customers successful with the product and knowing what to do to
reach their goals. Yeah, that is a challenge. That's a universal challenge
customer retention through adoption and
To provide the self-serve
Streamlined ways within our product to educate customers without relying solely
on emails excellent
Yeah, how to actually get meaningful content to customers at the right place in
that customer journey
Time to implement an adoption lead gen self-service get customers to be chill.
Wow
You're asking a lot of your customer education teams. I
like it
Okay, so the final question
and
Again, this is really just to kind of gauge what?
the themes of customer education are within
This group. Yeah, reduced onboarding time. That's often one of the number one
Elements and it's that an idea of that's the time when we really start thinking
about scale one-to-one training
only goes so far
Reducing on boarding time gets customers in the product more productive quicker
and faster. So yeah
Great to see that
So
Moving on I apologize at the back
This is basically like a free visual test
It's quite hard to read some of these slides. So as I said today
We're gonna talk about our journey on what we've done with customer education
We're gonna talk about the stages that we've implemented and rolled out to get
to where we are today
And this isn't a one-size-fits-all model. It's not something that we're saying
is the perfect approach
But it's working for us at Hornville
We're gonna look at some kind of more practical tactical tips and tricks some
best practices that hopefully
Might resonate with some of you, especially if you're starting out on your
journey with customer education. So hopefully there's something for everyone to
take away and
We're gonna talk about
Navigating those early stages of what does success mean should we just try and
drag in some?
Generic metrics and use them to track how well we're doing. What's the best
approach that can work for you as a company and your customers?
So
This is where we started I joined Hornville two years ago, and we had no
education programs no formalized education
We were doing all of our onboarding all of our
any technical training was happening on a one-to-one basis and
It was kind of hitting breaking point really we were training our partners
We were training resellers and it was all done manually no consistency
We had pretty scrappy documentation
So it was a real mess and a real challenge
One of the big responsibilities of that coming in to look at this the state of
play is that actually anything would have been better than nothing
but anything isn't always gonna
Work in the long term so it's really a case of starting to assess the lay of
the land and where we were gonna go
So step forward today
Where are we now?
Well, we launched our Academy towards the end of last year to existing
customers
Every new customer has to go through our Academy
We have engagement across 80% of our accounts, so we know we have active
learners from 80% of our customers
We deliver four main work streams and we break our kind of strategic
Objectives down into practical work streams that we deliver against
We have on-demand courses and learning paths
We have lab-based virtual instructor led training some practical hands-on
learning experiences that are
Really popular with our customers
We produce informal learning we call it
We don't say that to customers and that's tips and tricks videos we publish on
Host on YouTube just to kind of increase that
Engagement within our customer base and that's stickiness and we support new
product
Enablement as well, so we made a commitment to customers last year
Which is something that we weren't very good at beforehand, which is every new
product?
Every new feature would have minimum documentation
And beyond that any
Enablement materials that we identified as required and that's something that
we contribute to in overseas as well
We as a learning team we also send a monthly newsletter
to all of our customer base to our partners and
We also send it internally as well
So one of the key things about doing something new from scratch is telling
people about it
And not just your customers, but we tell people internally all the time. This
is what we're doing. This is what we've made
This is what we're showcasing. We want our internal users or sorry internal
employees to be advocates of the Academy
and when we're creating best practices and
Learning materials that form the foundations of what we want to say about our
product. We need our employees to be on board with that, too
So I'm going to spend a bit of time talking about the key stages of building
customer education function from scratch and again, this is just
The story of where we've gone with Hornbill and how we've got to where we are
today
So the first thing I did when I started Hornbill
To be honest was listen I
listened to a lot of noise. Yeah, and I was speaking to people about it this
week about where to start
Noisey customers want advanced learning on boarding teams want onboarding
training now so they can reduce their workload
Support teams want user guys to deflect support queries
The company wants certification because it makes them look good, but actually
Where do we get where we're going to start and where we actually going to make
some impact?
There's so many things to choose when we can quite overwhelm it. So I always
bring it back to two things and
It's finding the balance of your business objective. So your company's
objective not just learning or customer success
But what are some of the wider objectives of your company?
against your customer goals and
They can be high level they can be tactical, but they need to be meaningful
So for us at Hornbill
Reducing manual training interventions. It's a big one for everyone and it's on
the surface quite a straightforward one to fix sometimes
But we wanted to do it and we wanted to do it well as our company was growing
and we were taking on more customers
We had a big challenge that identified of improving customer sentiment. So
before I started we had a customer survey and
We got absolutely hammered on our documentation our enablement materials
anything around education
So it's not often that education is there to support customer sentiment, but
actually that was really bringing our customer
Based down with the lack of access to anything
And finally the develop the capacity to scale learning which kind of is in
tandem with our reducing the manual training interventions
But we have a huge user base that we've not delivered any training to before
and that ability to scale
Is something that we really wanted to set the foundations up for in the first
instance?
So on the flip side of that I
Spoke to our customers and this is something I do a lot. I listen to our
customers find out what their pain points are
Find out what they want and then realize that actually it's not always what
they need
But they were really struggling with some of the complex topics around our our
products
So we have a very deeply technical product
But our learners aren't always deeply technical themselves and how can we
bridge that gap and make access to the product
better
Our customers were struggling when they were employing new starters in their
company and getting them up to speed with our products
If they were struggling themselves then having to take on the burden of
training new employees
while then having to
Reler the product if it's been updated recently and
Access to up-to-date relevant content. That was a really big must-have for
customers
So these were our kind of six
Kind of quite high level wider objectives that we really wanted to support
through our work
I apologize if you can't quite see this right at the back
But I like to lead with this slide every time I speak to my internal
stakeholders or senior leadership about the value of learning and education
Education is not just an afterthought. It's part of our product and what we
sell
Yeah, it's the worst experience in the world to sell something to a customer
shake their hand pat them on the back
And wait them goodbye and say good luck with that. We should be embedding
Learning and success at every stage of the customer lifecycle
Wow
One thing I often do is actually extend this diagram and I map out well
What are all our current offerings as well? What do we do for professional
services? Where does that sit?
What about our success packages?
Where does consultancy sit where are the big gaps? What do we have in terms of
user guides now and actually you can kind of get a great matrix about where
your
Existing world is and what you can do to support tying things together building
journeys not just with education
But education and professional services. Where's the trade-off between
consultancy?
custom training
So the second thing I did
Was really a line internally with who are the key stakeholders in my
organization and who are the subject matter experts who know our customer
base and
Mostly who are the ones that are going to be really tricky to work with?
And I got them all in a room together for two reasons
One to get them on side to get them to see the value of education and where it
can have an impact
But also to get them to do a lot of work for me
We spent the morning talking about education talking about where we could
actually drive value what things customers struggled with
And we spent the afternoon of this education kickoff that I did
mapping out the core competencies and skills and knowledge of some of our lear
ner personas that I'd created
Essentially I've been dining out on that ever since they created a framework
for curriculum and which is underpinned some of our
certification program as well
They were the best people to have there to do it. We worked with
Product leaders people from support. I had customer success and consultants
there
And it was a great way of not just getting them to see what education can do
We're getting them to be part of it as well
Okay, so after all that we were ready to start creating creating content
creating the foundations and
Identifying some of those initial wins that we could actually demonstrate to
the business the actual impact of education and start really
Building the foundations for us to scale
So a few key practical tips about starting customer education from scratch
You don't need a massively complex overthought out pedagogical instructional
design framework
It can be pretty straightforward
Here and again apologies for those at the back. This is a very simple approach
of we call working backwards
It's actually lifted from one of Amazon's
major leadership principles about working backwards from the customer problems
What are their outcomes to be successful in their job?
And in their day-to-day roles and work backwards from that so we define those
learner outcome comes
Then we define well, how are we gonna measure them? How are we gonna know that
we've taught them this and that they either have these skills on any knowledge?
Then we design a blueprint then we build it and we keep it as simple as
possible and as direct as possible
Secondly create a process
This seems like quite a convoluted process with lots of steps and stages
But actually we kind of creep everything in one document when we start from an
initial
learning design
our
Course design if we're creating a course then to production depending on what
we've identified to create and
Then we publish and we have a kind of a review stage all the way through that
Thirdly document how you want things to be done create some kind of operations
guide even if you have a small team
Yep, the clues in the name of our presentation today small, but mighty. We're a
team of two
That is a lie actually last week. We have just taken on someone else
But more on that later so even for a small team
Having everything documented out having your templates all in one place having
your approaches to things your pedagogical
pedologies your writing guidance where to go for graphics and imagery it just
makes the focus more on the
Content the needs of the customer and then when we put the content together
It's kind of like painting by numbers. We've already got these resources to
actually make that content quickly and efficiently
So our next stage was then to build
Yeah, and this stage I joined the team. I should have gotten it here
Yeah, so Joel had already
created the foundation let's say of building a customer
Education function
So at the time I joined the learning team
We created the four main
Workstreams that Joel mentioned earlier and we created a clear roadmap that
provided a practical path forward with very clear
objectives clear timelines and most importantly we also had defined
How to report what to report and when to report it which was very important to
actually measure our progress and impact as well
Next stage is the scaling not only scaling within our own means but also scale
in terms of our reach
This year we have been working on completing our initial
objectives that were around
One of our two main audiences which is Hornmill administrators
This is an audience that is the smallest one
But it's the most important one and once we have the content for them up and
running and refined
We can then on 2025 start working on
content for Hornbill analysts which are 20 times the size of Hornbill
Administrators, but this is not just about scaling on the reach. It's it's a
whole progression
like we
Create ongoing content for our prospects and then we also have created
Clear digital onboarding journey for our new customers and then we help them
throughout the whole way
by also
inspiring creativity and innovation through our live sessions where we have
hands-on
Trainings and they can experiment and they can also see new use cases and best
practices on how to use our
product and the final stage the most important one
It's the growth stage not just them expanding their use of Hornbill
but also
Finding ways on how to support their broader business goals
Now how do we work as the effective small team that we are
We have adopted a scrum a dial framework
This might seem a bit overkill for a team of two and to be honest for me
It was a bit. I didn't really trust it much when Joel first introduced this to
me
But now I just cannot do without it because we have these bee weekly
cycles where we help one another we I got feedback from Joel and I
Tell Joel my feedback we can revise together we can better collaborate together
And we're always on track and throughout this whole year. I've been working for
Hornbill. I never felt overworked or
Burnt out. It's it's been it's been actually great and we use plain for this
Plain is an open source free tool
Doesn't cost at all. It just you just need some work until you get used to how
to
work with that and
updating it regularly and
Speaking about cost effective tools. These are some of the tools we use
Everything that you see on this slide is all created on PowerPoint and this is
on the website Joel created these
so we are no graphic designers and we create the whole
iconography and every visual element in PowerPoint we also use PowerPoint for
slides and presentations of course
But we don't use any graphic design software to create our visual elements
It's everyone is familiar with PowerPoint. It's very easy to use and it does
the job
Next we use gain site CE for course authoring
It's great. It's very easy to use. It's simple our customers understand it
It's really self-explanatory. We do some
simple animated videos for conceptual
trainings and then we use
Text and some interactive elements that the inside offers us
but the main reason why we use
Anate the
the gain site platform is because
Of the accessibility so it's very easy to actually share a link of a particular
lesson to answer a specific
Customer query and it will be hard to do that using a scoring package
It has many too many clicks and it's too complicated and you can share a
particular thing when you're on it
So it's much much easier
Next we use quizzes for formative assessments. This is not just a way for
learners to
Test themselves, but it's also interactive and this is how we also avoid
producing more content because we have replaced
The key take points or the summary of the lessons with quizzes. It's
interactive. They can test their their knowledge and
Yeah, it reduces work for us. So it's great
We also use GINIALLY GINIALLY is a great
third-party tool that we use is very cheap and
It helps gives the content engaging you can do lots of stuff there out
recommend GINIALLY
To use GINIALLY for everything really we use it also for course ratings and for
collecting feedback
It's so engaging because especially if you have lots of text
You can you can find different ways to to put the text somewhere else
So it's great and we haven't measured the affectivity of this yet
But we have received very positive feedback from our customers at least anecd
otally
Now
Hornbill is a software company and it's hard. It's very technical, but not all
our our customers are technical actually
They're often quite non-technical. So here are some tips if for technical
training
The first tip is stay out of the product teach concept and not clicks
It's this is very very important those videos where you just click here and
click there are just not enough and
Another thing is that if the product changes continuously
You have to update those videos every time and it's not a good practice
While if you teach the customer why is he doing that thing to actually
understand the benefits
Extaining the core of of a concept or or a feature then the execution of it is
very straightforward. So
That's why we highly support this teach concept not clicks
And if your product needs lots of those types of videos
Maybe that's a product gap because if you need so many content that's just
click here click there click here click there
Then maybe
There's something should change about the product
Provide an example for everything however simple it is this not only
demonstrates empathy
but also
It helps the learner to understand the concept better and to memorize it better
because he connects it with they connected with
With a real life. So it's easier to remember easier to to understand
Just put there an example about about anything as simple as it can be doesn't
matter. Just put an example
This is very important
If you don't understand the logic of what what you're teaching if you just have
a vague idea on it
Your learners won't just be confused and frustrated
but they will also lose trust in your material and also in the in the
Instructure and that's that's bad. So
Before creating content of something make sure to fully understand it to break
it down
Understand the why and how of every step
Tip four don't abstract away from the source unless you really need to now in
attempts to simplify some things
Sometimes they just provide some technical writers provide
many
Examples to simplify things, but they abstract away from the product way too
much
Just be straightforward and give a screenshot of or a diagram of the system or
the software and no need to
Expand over details that don't really help
Help the customer or or the learner
Yeah, I touched upon this earlier on product issues are not training issues
We it's not our
Task or duty to explain product flaws or
Product limitations if there if the product has I don't know feature missing or
not such
intuitive
UI then that's a product gap. It's not a training problem and you should be
able to differ
differentiate these these things
this is
Need tree that Joel actually can talk more about this because he created this
during his work on Amazon
So I'll leave him to explain this part and I'm going to sit
Thanks, Avina
Hands up here who's faced this problem. We'll fix this in training that like
training deal with that. Yeah, yeah, exactly
Hands up how easy it is to say this is not a training issue go and fix it in
product
Yeah, it's not easy is it?
but the more we can embed this mentality and
Through forging relationships with development teams through product teams to
get them to see that actually this is this is not the right use of education
and training
Yeah, this is not our best scenario to be
showing work around hack around how to how to do things that really should not
be training's problem
This is just an example here. I've had to redact it a bit of of things that I
've done in the past to kind of help
Almost put a mirror up in front of people when they ask for training. So I
actually realized what it is. They're asking
And this here is like a decision tree really and it's kind of like well. Do you
get to the bottom?
Yes, then okay, you're gonna get your training evaluated your request
So I have a question here that says is there data here to support the issue?
No, well, then there's not a training problem. We're not gonna fix that
Is the issue valid for a short period of time or likely to change in less than
three months
Not a training problem
So almost giving people the information without having to say no all the time
will be the bear of bad news giving them
I guess that upfront educating them
Will help you really
Deal with these kind of problems and I actually think we're very fortunate at
Hornville
We have a kind of being at such a small company
We have a big seat at the table whereas I can turn around to other product
leaders and say hey
This is so hard to teach someone and it's it shouldn't be this complicated
This conceptually should be is quite simple. Why why is it so many clicks? Why
are we doing it like this?
and actually
9 times out of 10 maybe nothing happens
But those one times out of 10 we can actually have an impact on the product for
the better for our customers, which is great
A couple of tips
Sorry secrets to our success and I think this applies to all small teams not
just customer education
But things that we found we've had to either implement or that work well for us
The first one and I think this is hugely important
It's very easy to get kind of trapped in your silo to think about well
I've just got to protect customer education or customer success. This is what
we do
This is what we're going to focus on other businesses kind of doing crazy other
stuff
What happens outside of your four walls and I mean that in terms of your team
your department your organization and your company is
Consequential and your responsibility. Yeah, so get to know your products get
to know your customers
Find out what's happening in the product world because that's going to affect
you and it's going to impact on the work that you do in the long run
Secondly
Small teams transcend levels
Yeah, we would be a pretty
Ineffectual team of two if I as the head of product just sat back and strateg
ized all day and just told Albin on what to do and she created it
We can't work like that. We are deep in the product. We are learning the
product. We are creating content
We are empowered to speak
for learning at all levels throughout the company and that's a great
environment to work in as well
so
traditional
I guess hierarchical standards they're kind of out the window in a lot of cases
. Yes, we have different
accountabilities responsibilities, but I want to work in a company where people
are empowered to transcend levels
Okay, so we talked a bit about I guess our high level approach
We've given you some tips, but how do we know that we've been successful in
what we've done at Hornbill?
I'm going to go back to our
Business objectives and customer goals. So these are the things that we set
ourselves up
as wanting to have an impact on and these are things that we actually
got buy-in we had signed off and
Can anyone tell me what's in common about all these things?
Let's find out
They're kind of measurable in some respects some of them are a bit more
Less metric based, but let's start with the first one reducing manual and
training interventions
so for our partner training
We have reduced our manual training interventions by 96 percent. We had a VP of
sales spending
Time every week training our resellers. Yeah, that was a high expense
We've reduced all of that by creating
a digital first approach
The only 4% of the time he spends on that is enrolling people and checking the
reports to see if they've done it or not
and following up
We've reduced our onboarding training by 85%
That's not necessarily the onboarding training time that our customers have to
take to get trained up
We did simple things like
We were spending four hours on discovery calls with customers when they first
joined four hours
And even then we weren't even getting all the information we needed
So the first thing a customer does now when they sign up to Hornbill
Before they meet an implementation partner a customer success manager. They
have to take a readiness course
It's not that long
But the aim of it is they fill out a discovery document
They they write down the information themselves
Again, we're holding a mirror up to them for them to say, am I ready for this?
Have we got all the information yet? Do I want to be sitting on a call with
Hornbill going? Oh, yeah, sorry
I've got to come back to you on that later
Okay improving customer sentiment
I'd really love to have some great metrics on this, but we actually haven't
done a survey yet since we've had the academy rolled out
um, which
I'm hoping we would have
Our on-demand courses are currently rated as five star in our academy, which
okay, is it telling that we're moving the needle in terms of our
customers productivity
Not necessarily but their reaction to it that kind of reactive feedback is that
okay?
It's improving. That's high sentiment at least
Our virtual instructor led sessions are they're always oversubscribed
I think we're tracking about 4.6 4.7 out of five star ratings for all of those
um, as you can imagine they are a bit more
Tricky to manage and set up and gauge in that real-time space
But here's a couple of just choice quotes that I picked out of some of our
recent sessions the other day
Okay developing a capacity to scale learning
I mean that's a bit of an easy one to box tick really
We have the capacity to scale in terms of numbers with gain site CE. We've seen
that it's a straightforward
uh
Exercise of enrolling people we have an integration with our CRM tool
And we're preparing to offer training and certification for up about 20,000
learners next year
So for a team of two now three, that's pretty good going in terms of scale
Okay, so in terms of our customer base
Are we demystifying complex topics and improving their baseline skill set fast?
So the only way we know this and unfortunately we don't have access to in-
product data about usage
Our tools are not that sophisticated. So we asked our learners and we asked
them anonymously. Hey, be honest
And we found that 92 percent of learners said that they okay
They're more motivated to grow more motivated to grow their use of formable as
a result of the training they've been on
So that shows that they're actually
Coming back for it and it's been a positive experience
But 93 percent of learners report that it's had a significant impact on their
ability to improve their use of the product and meet their goals
So
That really does show that we are hopefully moving the needle there
Learn on demand and upskill
New employees when they join our customers accounts
We have over 25 on-demand courses consisting of short bite-sized lessons. We've
created customized learning paths
and we have enrollment rules
To provide personalized journeys for different audiences if you're an onboard
ing customer's hornbill
The academy will look very different to if you're just a customer who's been
with us for five years
If you're a sales partner your our academy will look completely different for
you. So we've managed to really
Provide an accessible shop windows to our academy so people are not
Being bamboozled by the academy
The rather more bamboozled by our products
We also have record rewards and recognition embedded into our
Learning as well in our academy. We've heavily customized it. We have what I
like to call
Something called passive incentivization, which is a bit of a fancy way of
saying some kind of gamification
So every piece of learning that a user actively does and progresses through
Their awarded points. They get badges. They move up through the ranks
They can ignore that it just happens. That's why it's passive
So if it's not really their thing fine just happens in the background
However, what we found is that some learners are really taken to it
And one of the best success stories about that is I found out a while ago that
one of our customer success managers was having a competition
With some of his customers to see who was getting the most points and badges
and almost kind of playing them off with each other
I think there was maybe a
Bit of a bribe no, sorry prize about a giant tuber and who got the most points
But that was a great outcome that we had no
no
Influence over at all
And finally this idea of creating up-to-date relevant content
So we almost took on a bit more than we could chew with really trying to embed
with the documentation within Hornville
So we have aligned with subject matter experts in Hornville that every bit of
content we do on the academy
We're going to make sure the documentation is up-to-date as well
We also have customer-facing teams not inputting to content but involved in our
content as well
So we've had someone from our consultancy team
Seconded to us to give some training
So where are we going next? Well, we kind of showed you our roadmap for this
year. That's almost coming up
And we're really looking ahead now to what we're doing next year and it's just
going back to those two things
What's our business objectives as Hornville and what are our customer goals?
And hopefully we're moving on from some of those basics of what just access to
good content demystifying some of the basic topics
And we can really start
Raising the bar in different areas. So these are some of the things that we're
thinking about and that we're moving towards next year
This idea of supporting self-activation, which is something that
Up until recently we've been a million miles from doing at Hornville
We're using product demos that happen a lot. That's a great straightforward
thing that we can do takes time away from product teams
And things like certification and accreditation are on our radar as well
Great
So that's it. Thank you very much for your time
Thank you so much Joel and Albinah that was amazing. So we're going to go right
into the slide of polls and let the polls the questions
Awesome. So the first question is how do you connect together your various
customer education platforms in app academy community and knowledge base?
Badly is the answer to that but we do it's all very manual at the moment
We have a community. We have a documentation platform that we built. We
customized our own one in-house just before I started
So we have to get very kind of tactical and manual about that. We are looking
at
Well, we have an integration with our academy and our
With HubSpot which helps out with our kind of customer tracking, which is
really good
But a lot of the time it is manual, unfortunately for now
Okay, next question is do you have a community platform
Okay, there we go
Do you have a community platform as well? How do your customers navigate
between the two platforms?
Yeah
Yeah, we have a separate community platform
It's more like a forum based thing and that's a great way for customers to go
and self
Problems to ask questions between themselves and our product teams are active
on there
We promote the academy on there. We're always kind of linking people back to
the academy
Sharing links to the lessons on the academy and that's actually something our
beena spoke about earlier on the reason one of the reasons that
The gain site see platform so good is that everything is kind of linkable
You can get a link to a lesson could be a one minute video could be a text
lesson
I mean just post the links to that on the academy to answer questions
And that's something that we see more of our support teams and CSM's doing
Yeah, and we do have a lot of customers. I have a lot of customers who have
both
Community and education so whoever asked that question you can come see me
later and we could talk about that
Um next question. How do you keep up with rapidly changing product? Do you
constantly update your content?
It's a lot of work for a team of two
Yeah
Yeah, it is. Well, I think to go back to the point i've been a mate earlier on
We do try we don't always stay out the product we stay out the product until we
have to get into the products, right?
especially when
Our product is like a blank canvas. There's 10 ways of doing the same thing
And the right way is often depending on your use case
So we teach a lot of best practices with examples and then right at the end we
will show the product
So we have good tips
So yeah, we have some good techniques up our sleeves for making those
kind of instructional videos or bits of content that are easier to maintain
So we do have to keep up with the development teams
So I have a like a weekly sync with development teams just to find out where
they're tracking on their road map
Is that going to affect us? Is it going to impact our work and then I can bring
it back into our sprints
um
And we don't mind some bits of content going out of date
If you teach someone the reason why they're in the tool what they're trying to
get out of it
And you give them an overview of it and the main features of it then they're
going to be a bit forgiving if
The interface has slightly changed or a couple of labels have changed. Maybe it
's completely different
Yeah, you start there
But if they know why they're there and they've got the gist of what to do then
they're far more likely to be okay with that
And I will just add one thing as a CSM for CE. I will say that
I've been working with customers for about three years and the most successful
academies that I've seen have constantly updated their content
So it is definitely something that you need to be you know, upkeeping and
changing as well
All right next question
What tools are you finding most valuable for creating and managing your ce
content?
Yeah
Well for videos we
We use camped Asia. We also use powerpoint sometimes. I make lots of informal
learning
Videos I also use canva for this
So it's a bit
Whatever I find use most useful. Let's say for different types of
Features that I create I also use generally a lot which I I love
Using genuinely really the interactivity there
There's games that you can even create a whole game there or whole website.
Just click here click there. It's it's great
and then yeah just the
Gain site authoring
Course authoring
Platform it's very easy to use we just upload text there
Videos are very easy to upload as well. We also create pdf document sometimes
too and we just upload them there
So for videos, it's mainly camped Asia I would say and canva for interactivity
Genuinely
And yeah, just gain site platform
And mike chris off word. Yes
We also actually we didn't mention it too much. We use a product called a tool
called strigo for our lab based
Interactive classes so it allows you to spin up kind of virtual machines in the
cloud so your learners can kind of
Access an instance that's pre-prepared which has sets of instructions in a kind
of a window next to it
So you can kind of curate an entire package session for them and that
Strigo strigo
And that's the tool our customers love the most because they can do hands-on
training there
Awesome. So we are up at time. Thank you Joel and albina. This was a wonderful
session very insightful
Thank you so much and other questions. They can come up and ask right. Yeah,
awesome. Thanks everyone for joining. Thank you
[APPLAUSE]
