Customer Education: Why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter by Adam Avramescu

Author:Adam Avramescu [Avramescu, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781791729882
Google: enUxwQEACAAJ
Amazon: B07MCDPZ7T
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2019-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

Dismantling “Spray and Pray”

When many Customer Education professionals first start their teams, they start scrambling to create content: Help Centers, docs, classroom training, webinar training, online academies, communities, certifications, in-product tutorials, live labs, and the list goes on.

That’s gotta be overwhelming if you’re starting from scratch. But there’s no use in frantically creating content if the content doesn’t actually drive results.

The big mistake that Customer Education teams make is building all these things without thinking about how effective those things are. If you ask them what the point of educating customers is, they might say, “So they know how to adopt our product.” Or maybe aspirationally, “So that they become experts.”

And so they end up building training programs that are essentially large collections of knowledge and expertise. These get delivered in unreadable and undiscoverable docs, long and boring classroom trainings, webinars where participants dutifully check their email the entire time, online academies with staggeringly high drop off rates, tumbleweed communities, certification programs that don’t mean anything to a user, and so on.

Was “knowledge” or “expertise” really the goal? That’s what your business may think customers want, but is it really? It’s not true that customers just need information dumped into them so that they become experts. More often, they’ll forget all that great knowledge you dumped on them if they aren’t going to use it in their jobs. It simply cycles out of their short-term memory.

You’ve probably heard the statistic that you forget 50% of what you learned within one hour, 70% within 24 hours, and 90% within one week.

Scientists have been studying the “forgetting curve” since it was first hypothesized in 1885 by Hermann Ebbinghaus. Using a series of nonsense syllables, he tested his ability to remember the words and found that his ability to retain memories followed, essentially, an exponential curve where he forgot the most in the first day, then gradually less over time.

Today’s cognitive science around this isn’t quite so rigid in the 50%-70%-90% numbers that I quoted earlier, but the basic idea of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve still holds: without anything to strengthen our memory, we’ll forget the information quickly.

Complicating all of this is the fact that memory doesn’t work the way we think it does. Cognitive science has led to an interesting discovery. While we think that memory is like a video camera that captures information and plays it back at varying levels of fidelity, it’s actually a little more like video editing software: every time we access a memory, we also alter it a little bit, infusing it with a bit of the present.

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