Episode 59 - Steve Cornwell Discusses the Evolution of Customer Education and Learning Ops

Steve Cornwell is CEO and Founder of Northpass, the LMS that powers learning experiences for some of the top SaaS, sharing-economy, and subscription-economy companies. He joins us for the return of our CEO series, where we get CEO-level perspectives on the Customer Education market.

In our discussion, Steve talks about the Evolution of Customer Education, pointing to the ways that it is maturing as a category. As the subscription economy matures, building healthy recurring business is more important than ever, which places a premium on companies’ user experience. One effect of this has been the rise of Customer Success as a more defined function. The onboarding and learning experience for users can also make a huge difference.

Just as Customer Success as changed and matured over time, Customer Education is growing and changing as well. It’s not just something you do when you’re one of the huge industry players; you can increasingly invest in Customer Education from earlier stages with fewer resources to begin with. In fact, for many companies, effective Customer Education programs can help them accelerate their growth from earlier stages. With improvements in technology to produce and host learning, it’s easier than ever to get started.

But your Customer Education program isn’t just about producing content. It needs a strategy too. Steve talks about the evolution of Customer Education strategy, and how it has moved from a competitive edge to table stakes for many businesses. You simply need to be educating your customers if you want them to stay. This has also spurred the rise of Customer Education within Marketing departments, where efforts to educate customers aren’t solely tied to feature usage or retention; Customer Education is also used to drive pre-sales efforts, including industry or category education. As Steve points out, Customer Education is really about a company’s products, services, and best practices – not just features. It’s a way to supercharge the customer journey with directed pathways, interactivity, and even achievements.

Steve also talks about Customer Education breaking through boundaries. For one, Customer Education is outgrowing the classic “Academy” model where everything lives in a single portal or homepage. Now, Customer Education spans multiple properties and is increasingly embedded in the product experience.

As Customer Education increasingly spans multiple properties and involves more technologies to drive its strategy, Northpass has been a proponent of Learning Ops: a discipline of driving learning across the org to support multiple use cases (such as internal and customer education), integrated and in-app learning, and analysis of learning-related data.

Listen to this episode to find out more about Steve’s perspective on the industry!