Frances Kleven: Welcome back to The Learning Signal. I’m your host, Frances Kleven. For this episode, we’re joined by Courtney Sembler, Head of Zoom Learning and Content Strategy at Zoom, and former Senior Director at the HubSpot Academy.

 

In this episode, Courtney and I talk about why customer onboarding shouldn’t stop after 90 days, and how breaking down silos between internal L&D and customer education helps clear content backlogs.

 

We also cover strategies for embedding microlearning directly into your product, and how to leverage AI to speed up content production without sacrificing quality. Let’s dive in!

 

Courtney, good morning. I know it’s early morning for both of us, as we just realized we’re both in San Francesco. I originally scheduled this thinking I would be on Ireland time, but San Francesco time, and as much as I would love for this to be a podcast just talking about all the places we love in San Francesco, and I don’t know as much about the Inner Sunset, and I know that’s where you’re based, so I would love to just have this be a podcast of new restaurants I should visit in the Inner Sunset, but we do have to talk about customer education.

 

And I know I’ve said this on previous episodes with guests that we probably could talk about this topic for two hours, but I feel like customer education, we could talk about this for 10 hours. But we don’t have 10 hours. We have about 30 minutes, so want to dive in straight away. And you and I chatted before this of a lot of the things that we’re talking about today. I know everyone wants sort of the new thing or the magic bullet to something, and these are things that everyone has heard before, has been thinking about before, but it’s worth, as in education, it’s worth repeating.

 

It’s worth going over again because we really want people to internalize this, think about what they can do, think about what they can change. So excited to talk all things customer education, especially in the AI era.

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah, excited to be here and, you know, funny that we’re 11 miles away from each other right now. I mean, that’s just the universe saying that we had to have this conversation today. This was the right time to have it, and your point is so spot on. You know, customer education is not new.

 

I think there are some people who think it is. It’s not. It’s been around for a really long time, the concept, the practice, and in modern-day SaaS companies that are experiencing the AI revolution and the pressure, it’s more important than ever to be thinking about how you educate your customers. And I know that sounds very like, “Yes, Courtney, that could be the title of your book, Educate Your Customers,” but it’s true, and there’s so many different facets of it.

 

There’s the adoption side, the retention side, the onboarding side, or like I like to call it, everboarding side. There’s so many of those elements that I think we can pull on the threads, and something that I think for your listeners to really think about is just because it’s a practice that has been done before doesn’t mean in the AI era it’s not valuable.

 

And with AI, it can be even more valuable.

 

Frances Kleven: And one thing that always makes me a little bit sad is how little customer education and employee education interact, even in organizations. And I think about our own organization, which is a small enough company, in terms of, you know, we’re not 1,000 employees, and we have a corporate headquarters in Dublin, and we still don’t talk enough with our employee education and customer education.

 

But to your point about “more important than ever”, that’s the same story that’s on the employee education side of it feels scary in an AI era of what would the role of internal L&D be. But actually, it’s so being able to create AI fluency, being able to immediately upskill to provide ongoing training and learning opportunities.

 

It’s the same. And so one thing I think we can really lean into all of the L&D expertise here because it is the same narrative, it’s the same challenge, but it’s also the same opportunity.

 

Courtney Sembler: It is, and something I’ve been talking a lot about recently is why we’ve kept L&D and customer ed so separate for so long, and sort of breaking down that fourth wall of the terms of education, enablement, L&D, training. You know, a big conversation I have with my team and the folks that I’m working with is, “If we are gonna create something for customers, and I don’t care what it is, we’re gonna create it for customers, why on earth would we not share that with employees?”

 

Frances Kleven: I know.

 

Courtney Sembler: And if we need to train our employees on how to sell or service our customers, probably what we’re teaching them is relevant to partners. So there’s this, I think, funny element that we’re breaking into. Sure, there’s skills training that we’re only gonna do for employees because we’re not gonna train customers on certain things. I get that. Compliance training, 100%. 

 

But when you talk about product education and strategy conversations and theoretical methodology content, that is a two-sided coin with your employees and your customers. And the practices, ugh, the practices that you’re using should mimic each other because you wanna speed things up.

 

That’s the number one thing every CEO is saying right now. “Go faster. Do it faster. Can’t you just create this course with Claude or ZoomMate or whatever and just do it right now?” No, I can’t actually. However, if we’re talking to each other internally, we can make those processes better so they can allow us to be smoother in that, which will get us to the speed that everyone’s looking for.

 

Frances Kleven: And then, which still I don’t think I’ve still wrapped my head around this, which makes me sometimes embarrassed because it’s such a fundamental change. But the idea now that you can create one piece of content and immediately hyper-personalize it is… Because that was always the roadblock. We have a set number of hours to create a product training course, and we can personalize it for our customers, and that wasn’t even highly personalized. That was just personalized for one generic customer. But we can create one course personalized for our customers, then we don’t have time to personalize it for our sales team, so we will just give them the course that we created for our customers, which to your point, is great. But now you can personalize it with the tone, with the wraparound, with the assessments for your sales team, and that’s a different world that we’re living in that we can do that. But it also means it’s the expectation to do it.

 

Courtney Sembler: I talk a lot about this. It’s a lot of the relationships. I’ve recently been rereading the book The Speed of Trust, and I think it’s a great reminder internally, it doesn’t matter if your company is 500 people or 8,000 people, your teams have to trust each other that you all have the best intention, and that’s where content reusability comes in.

 

If I don’t trust you, I’m not gonna come across the table and say, “Hey, use my content,” or, “Hey, can I borrow your content?” And let’s be honest, we want to show that our team has value, and if I am borrowing something across the lane, it can feel like my team doesn’t have that value. I’d flip that for a lot of executives and think about, well, imagine the backlog that these teams have never been able to get to, and imagine the conversations you have, “Oh, we wanna do this new program for sales reps. We gotta do it in three weeks.” Imagine if the team is like, “Yeah, let’s do it,” instead of the constant, like, “You didn’t tell us early enough,” and like, “We don’t have the time.” Like, reusability and unified learning actually provides us the opportunity to do something we’ve never done before, which is clear the backlog. What a wild world.

 

Maybe get ahead of some things. I know that’s scary almost from a customer L&D professional perspective that I could be ahead of my content calendar. But that’s where those pieces can come together, headless delivery, all of that makes it possible, and you can still customize it, make it whatever you want.

 

I will say, I’ve said for many years, I’m like, there’s a huge difference between true customization and slapping the word like, “Hey, sales reps” in front of your training. Like, they don’t care. They need the thing that’s gonna make them more money, let’s be honest. They don’t care if it says, “Hey, sales reps.” They don’t care if it says somebody else’s name in front. If they have to watch it, they will, and they’ll take what they need from it.

 

Frances Kleven: Yes. No, it’s absolutely true. I even find myself, and I think the shift that you’re mentioning of we’ve been in the space, I think on the employee side too, of saying no to a lot of things for a long time, and nobody wants to do that. Nobody. And it doesn’t feel good when you’re asked to put together a training in two weeks, and you have to say no to it. It doesn’t make you feel good to say no, but it also doesn’t make you feel good that the person asking for that didn’t understand and respect sort of the time involved in that. Like, I think that just sort of slowly chips away, at sort of morale. But I’ve had to still remind myself of when I get those asks, and it was sort of an immediate no, and sort of how dare you think that we could turn this around in a day? But… we could.

 

Courtney Sembler: You could.

 

Frances Kleven: We could now.

 

Courtney Sembler: And, you know, we might have always been able to. I think part of it for us is prioritization. Not everything can be a priority. If everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority. And when you serve all sides of the business, you end up holding everyone’s priorities, which is awesome, love it, job security.

 

And at the same time, what do you do with that? Well, it’s a priority from the CEO, which means it should go ahead in line of everything. Well, the CEO has 50 priorities because they’re trying to run the entire business. So now you’re in a place where you don’t actually have that lever to pull, but with the way that we have content development today, we can produce things much more quickly.

 

Now, caveat, big flashing lights: AI slop is not training, and if you don’t have an intention of what you’re doing, you will still end up with subpar content that does nothing. You got it out there in a week. That’s what you did. And you will track completions, and you’ll never be able to show what it does.

 

Frances Kleven: Yes.

 

Courtney Sembler: That’s okay for some companies. For most companies, it’s not. We wanna see, did the sales rep sell more? Did the customer adopt better? Did they onboard faster? And that still takes the pre-work. And the pre-work, I think, is something where we’re doing a lot more of that proactively with really great AI templates where we can actually plug information in that typically would have taken us time with a whiteboard, time with the sticky notes.

 

Great, we’ve operationalized that, and good customer ed leaders and L&D folks, all of that sits in their head. And it’s just been the painful process of having to repeat it every single time. They’re now able to make that kinda second brain and say, “All right, this is what good education enablement looks like. Now it’s plug and play.” I mean, it was like when marketers got workflows for the first time. It changed their lives. This is our workflows. I keep saying that. I’m like, customer ed finally got the magic sauce, and, you know, marketers initially automated everything. Everything was automated. “Oh my God, this is amazing.”

 

And then we scaled back, and then we were like, “All right, what should be automated, what shouldn’t be automated?” We’re going through the same thing with L&D and customer ed. “Everything can be done with AI. This is amazing. Okay, now let’s scale back”. You know, let’s find where it should be and where it shouldn’t be so that we end up with the right recipe for success.

 

Frances Kleven: I think like clear the backlog is a great takeaway, for listeners here are: you can clear the backlog and, you know, certainly assess the backlog first and make sure that what’s there you actually wanna do. But what advice would you give people, “I’ve cleared the backlog”—and I think I’ve had this conversation a couple of times with, and again, on the employee side, but about idea that AI is giving us time back, which it is genuinely, and that’s always been a measurement, I think, in training of this should give you time back, this should make you faster, this should make you more efficient. But then I think the important thing is what do you do with that time that you’re given back? And I genuinely worry, ’cause I see it in myself and I see it in others, that we can’t just fill that with more admin. That’s not time back, that’s just reshuffling things. And so for people who are able to clear the backlog, what’s your advice of where should you… you now have some time back, where should you spend that?

 

Courtney Sembler: There was a really funny phrase someone said to me the other day, and I loved it. And it was like, do you remember at the beginning of the pandemic when we used to say, “Oh, like if I just had two weeks where I could be at home, I’d get everything done”? And two weeks went by, and I’m like, “I’m not a different person. I didn’t lose 20 pounds. My closet isn’t any cleaner than it was two weeks ago.” There was this like breaking of, “oh, no, like I actually had to go and like change things.” Like, it wasn’t just like being at home. And I think that’s what’s happening with this time back we get from AI, where like there’s probably a podcast from five years ago where I was like, “If I just had two weeks, I could get all these things done.”

 

Go back to what those things were. I know that every professional has the sticky notes, the whiteboard, something in their head that they’ve been talking about. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could do X? What if we did Y? And this is where you need to pull out those, those pieces of your tool belt, which is you gotta run some workshops, you gotta have some discussions.

 

You have to sit in the uncomfortable space of, well, what should we do and what can we do? You know, you and I were talking before we jumped on like most teams still don’t have content inside the product. When you start to tackle that, that probably starts with conversations with your product, you know, managers and your product team. That’s a really big strategy.It takes time to implement. Now’s the time.

 

Frances Kleven: And I don’t know that we always wanna admit, the things that are uncomfortable, but I think for a lot of people that is an uncomfortable space, which sounds like, maybe a low stakes conversation, but that it feels uncomfortable to go to your head of product and say, “What would it look like if we were able to embed our training in our product?” And I think it’s uncomfortable because we don’t have all the answers. It is, to your point, It has to be a joint project. It’s not something that on the customer education side that you can bring to completion. You can’t. 

 

So it does mean that there’s no way through this without agreement on your product team that they will prioritize this, and that they wanna work with you on this. And you have to show up with a sales pitch. Because I think product teams, they can be really excited about this, but initially it doesn’t seem that it’s anything that would benefit them

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah, this has been one of the most interesting, and I would say difficult parts of my career in customer education, is, you know, initially I think we go and we think we have the answer. Well, we know our education is great. Right, but put yourself in a product person’s shoes. Why does my product need education? “I’ve built it so that it doesn’t need education ’cause it’s simple to use”.

 

Right, so now we’re immediately coming in, in two different pieces. One of the things that I think we need to go into that conversation with a lot better, not data, not how great our training is, ’cause 1), our training, the data we have has nothing to do with what it would look like in the product. These are gonna be very, very different conversations. But what we wanna get at is what about this initial part of the product experience could we make shorter? ‘Cause that’s something that product folks really care about, which is like speed of value and like getting up to speed on the product, activating, et cetera.

 

That’s always a product metric that we look at. And that’s a great place because there’s always a zero state screen for every product when you turn it on for the first time, and it’s often blank and says, “Hi, welcome to this new product.” Great. That’s an amazing testing ground because it actually is pretty low stakes for that product person to adjust that screen, ’cause it’s not a permanent part of the product.

 

The other piece of it, and this is what you can do with all that spare time that AI has given you, “spare time”, still in air quotes for most of us,

 

Frances Kleven: No, it should be.

 

Courtney Sembler: but you have to keep your product education up to date. A product person isn’t gonna trust you if that video is gonna go out of date in three weeks, because they’re accelerating what their product looks like.

 

We have to meet at that moment. And so what does that look like and what is that commitment from your side to their side to make that relationship work? And then usually it takes one person willing to experiment, and then you’re gonna see the increases in activation, increases in product usage, and that’s the data you now take to everybody else.

 

Like, go and find a brand new product your company has and test the crap out of it with education because those product folks are always gonna be more willing to experiment than somebody who’s … You know. I’m pretty sure when I was at HubSpot, the initial one we tested with was like one of our oldest products and we couldn’t move the needle on it, and I’m like, “That makes sense. Like, I’m going to the product that’s been our flagship”. And then we had some new products. I was like, “Well, why don’t we test there?” And that’s when the door finally started to move.

 

Frances Kleven: And I think this is exciting, but I also do think it’s a bit of the uncomfortable space because we’ve been, as you said earlier,  we just sort of live in the world of the backlog, and we are behind on content creation, and we’re just trying to catch up. But in that conversation with product, there is such an opportunity, but also a strategy to go to them with an audacious, “What if we could guarantee 80% product adoption in the first week of a launch? Like, what would that mean to you?” Because we aren’t doing that now, probably nowhere close to that, but what would that mean to you if we could do that and if customer education could deliver that? And I know we generally don’t like to say those things, because it seems like, well, how could we possibly deliver that?

 

And to your marketing teams as well, like, what if we were able to deliver really sort of game-changer type results of we could consistently have products adopted in the first week of launch.

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah. Everything is possible. I mean, I think that’s really what AI is sort of unlocking for so many teams. And a lot more is possible to do with fewer resources. I know that’s not, you know, a super hot topic, but it is the reality that we’re in. And it actually unlocks more things than we think about, which is 10 years ago, I can’t create 50 videos without a video production team.

 

Today, I can buy one of 100 tools on the market and do that, and it’s gonna meet the standards of product and marketing, et cetera. Which is great, because this starts to also talk about what are the other relationships across the business that you haven’t been flexing into that you now can? And that, to me, is, all right, what is the art of the possible here? What can we do? What should we do?

 

How we can get there with our resources, and then, “Yeah, okay, this is the last 10% we need from this other team”. And there’s an undertone with, I think, a lot of these conversations that is very interesting, which is there are so many things that we haven’t been able to do before that we can do now, and it’s overwhelming.

 

It’s overwhelming to be in this position, and at the same time still feel like our jobs are at risk because AI might take them.

 

Frances Kleven: Yes.

 

Courtney Sembler: We gotta hold those two truths at the same time, and I think for leaders in particular, when you’re leading a team of IDs (Instructional Designers) and, or creators or, or whatever you call them now, that can’t be the secret man behind the curtain.

 

Like, we have to name that, which is, “Yes, there are some aspects of our job we’re never gonna do again”. I find that to be an extremely grateful standpoint, because

 

Frances Kleven: Yes, happy to give them up!

 

Courtney Sembler: I don’t wanna manually write a learning objective ever again. Like, Bloom’s Taxonomy, like please upload that into a Claude project and just tell me what my objective is.

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah.

 

Courtney Sembler: But there’s also things that we haven’t really ever been able to do that I wanna do. And I wanna free up time to do more in-person events. Customer education’s great at them. We usually don’t do them because we don’t have the time. I want more podcasts out there. I want more this, I want more that.

 

I want all these things that we haven’t really been able to touch, and so like any good change management practice, we have to think about the future and not necessarily hold on to what’s going on today

 

Frances Kleven: And so funny that you said the hold on, because that was going to be my next comment around, we have to also be brave enough to let go of some of the things that we’ve held onto so tightly, and for the correct reasons. So I think about onboarding, and that was such an important value that customer ed could say to the business that they provide, that our customer education program is critical to the onboarding of our new customers, and removing it would have a critical negative impact to the business, that it can’t just be pulled out. And that was a very successful and strategic way of talking about customer education for a good period of time, so that wasn’t wrong. Now there are people asking questions or thinking about, “Is that really a team of five IDs creating that content and managing that data, and isn’t a lot of that, can’t that be automated?”

 

And some of that’s correct, but I think then, “Okay, we have to be brave enough and forward-thinking enough to say onboarding is not 90% of our role.”

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah I have so many thoughts on onboarding, everboarding. There’s endless amounts of energy that I could talk about this because there are so many beliefs in these practices. And so for a traditional customer education team, you have one way you think about onboarding, and the company has one way of thinking about that time period.

 

Frances Kleven: Yes.

 

Courtney Sembler: What I have found really valuable for organizations is like, “Okay, pencils down. Imagine a world where none of that exists, and let’s talk about how we’d really want it”. And most organizations come to, I think, the same place, which is, “We want onboarding to be really quick”, which, sure, if you have a product that can be onboarded quickly, I think that’s a great goal.

 

But what are actually the things that you would consider turning on your product?

 

And that’s a really actually hard conversation for most folks because the product team has a perspective, marketing’s … Everyone kind of has a perspective that they’ve sort of sold in their brain. You know, marketing’s like, “It’s five steps. Don’t worry about it. Like, that’s what we sell.” And I’m like, “It’s definitely more than five steps.” And then the CSMs are like, “Hold on. When I get these accounts and none of these things are on, I don’t consider them onboarded.” So before we talk about even what percent of our role is onboarding, like, what is onboarding? Do we have a good definition of it today? Most likely not.

 

And this is where I like to break through, and so many folks before me have championed this, et cetera, but we’re finally in a place to do it, which is, “Hey, by the way, if someone gets onboarded in the first 90 days, and at day 91 we launch six new products, do they go back to the start?”

 

Like, the continuous onboarding, the everboarding, whatever you wanna call it, has to be a part of our strategy.

 

Like, yes, you win your retention in those first 90 days. Hell, you win them before the customer’s ever in the door based off your sales process on whether or not they’re gonna renew. But if you stop thinking about what they need to continuously be successful, you lose them.

 

There’s always the funny analogy with dating, which is, like, you can’t marry someone based off of how they were on the first date. You just can’t, because that is their best version of themselves. You wanna marry them based off of what you see five years later. And onboarding and everboarding are very similar.

 

Onboarding, we’ve often polished the silver, made it look great, et cetera. Everboarding gets into the more reality of what is it like for someone to be successful with your product at day 95, day 100, day 500. And if you can show that to your customer and you can share that with them and they can be a part of that experience, that is where you build the relationship that makes your renewal much more of a partnership conversation and much less of like, “Here’s how we can convince you to stay.”

 

Frances Kleven: And I think we need to challenge some of those. And thus did come from data at some point that the most critical piece in the customer journey was onboarding or implementation, and that that’s, to your point, that’s where you lose customers, that’s where you win customers. But that’s just become sort of gospel without really any critical eye towards it.

 

But I think everyone in customer education would have adopted that, but there’s really interesting conversations and opportunity for thought leadership in customer education, in customer ed leaders’ own organizations. Be out in front of that, like really challenge that, and there’s some of your time back that you could look at, is that true?

 

Because I have spent some time looking at that with our customers and thinking about it, and that’s not where our critical point is that we’re losing customers, or… It’s not there.

 

Courtney Sembler: It’s so interesting, ’cause all the data probably from the last 20 years would point to that, right? It’s like, “Oh, onboarding is so critical, implementation is so critical”. And it’s like, yes, it obviously is, and I think if you are in an organization where your customers are not getting onboarded at all, that’s a red flag you need to pay attention to that.

 

If your customers are getting onboarded, awesome. We love that. I don’t think that’s typically where you’re going to lose their business, and I wanna say there’s a formula out there, but it’s like, however long it takes you to onboard somebody, times that by two, and that’s where you wanna spend more of the value and all that good stuff.

 

But honestly, customers are lost because they can’t answer the simple question of what does your product provide them for their business? And typically, we lose that thread after onboarding. And I would say it’s the window where the honeymoon period ends, and they’re sort of left out in the dark, and whoop, that’s where customer education should be meeting them. Whoop, that’s where all of our resourcing and support should be meeting them, and it’s usually where we set down our guard for a second, ’cause we’re like, “Ugh, we’ve done the hard work. We’ve onboarded them. I can take a break. They’ll be back in a couple months.” Absolutely not. Typically, the second that they lose whatever connection they’ve had in onboarding is when they panic. There’s so many metaphors, right? It’s like the kid learning to ride the bike. Onboarding is like the parent holding the seat, and then the moment the parent lets go, that’s where their fear is at the peak. And I mean, think about your parent when they did that or whoever did it with you, your sister, your cousin, whatever. They’re taking pictures of you. They’re cheering you on. Well, in SaaS companies, we let go. We don’t cheer them on. We, like, walk away. 

 

So flip that model and think about those more emotional moments of what happens when these things end and where we should be, and that’s when you start to get more into what I would call more traditional everboarding methodology, where you’re not thinking about start and ends.

 

You’re thinking about milestones and checkpoints. And those checkpoints right after you kind of send them off is a really important piece for us to pay attention to from a customer ed perspective.

 

Frances Kleven: When I think about it, it feels less scary when I remind myself this is what we did in customer education with onboarding, where we said to organizations, “Hey, customer education can play a critical role in helping us scale our onboarding. So we can onboard customers faster with fewer resources more effectively, and we can be sort of a critical underpinning of that.”

 

And part of our growth strategy as a company of… we now have a way to say, “This is how we scale as we acquire new customers, and we have an answer to this”. And so we’ve done that. We just now are evolving that of what would it look like if we could provide that resource, which is highly-specialized, high touch, highly-personalized.

 

What if we could do that at any point in the customer journey? And we can.

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah, we can. Nothing is stopping us. That’s sort of the funny part to me is: I think a lot of organizations have put customer ed in a bucket. It’s onboarding, it’s retention.

 

Frances Kleven: Yep.

 

Courtney Sembler: Some organizations have thought about it in the full flywheel, but they don’t actually use it in the full flywheel, they just say they do.

 

That’s an interesting point, which is like, why are we limiting it? Also, to the previous point, if we can do things faster than ever, and we have the right checkpoints, why can’t we serve more and more customers? And there’s a whole conversation to be had in here too about your customer ed still needs to be human because if you’re pushing more people to it and they don’t have a human they’re talking to, they don’t want the AI avatar.

 

I don’t want the AI avatar, I’m gonna be honest. It’s not my favorite thing to learn from. I will get there just like I probably got there with everything else. But as of right now, customer ed is also still really a human touch element that delivers value at scale, which is… Isn’t that the whole name of the game for a SaaS company? Like, human touch at scale?

 

Frances Kleven: It is. I’ve heard this from, probably five or six customers who have come and asked for advice, “Hey, I’m getting a lot of questions from our CTO, should we be investing in customer education, and couldn’t we just put an agent on our knowledge base and all the questions are answered?”

 

And I actually agree with CTOs about asking that question, because if your content is coursified knowledge-based content, then yes, an agent replaces that. So they’re not wrong to ask that question, so that you have to have a different narrative there to say, “No, customer education ensures that at any point in our customer lifecycle, customers are effectively onboarded and enabled on new features.”

 

With that human touch piece where it’s not knowledge-based content, it’s best practices, thought leadership.

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah, if your entire customer education program could be written in a technical document, like, don’t bother. Like, just throw an agent on there, ingest the content, call it a day. Hopefully, your customer ed program is much more than that, and it’s connected to your community, and you have thought leadership content, and you also are able to bring the human voice to the new product release.

 

I was talking with this recently about SaaS companies now more than ever, it’s like product every day, and it’s exhausting. I know that’s what they need to meet the goals of the street and, like, to be competitive, but your customers are absolutely exhausted by the fact that every day something’s new.

 

And they’re not reading the release notes that you publish on your blog. They’re not. I’ve never chatted to one customer who’s like, “Oh, yeah, every morning with my coffee, I read your release notes.” It’s not. Like, it’s not happening. Maybe their AI reads it to them or, or something like that.

 

But what they really want is the just-in-time, you know where I am as a customer, and you’re feeding up to me the relevant product changes. And so that’s where customer education comes in, because I can go in to my LMS or to any surface where my LMS is connected, and I can say, “All right, Susan, here is this product release, here’s this thing, and here’s why it’s relevant to you.”

 

Frances Kleven: Yes.

 

Courtney Sembler: That’s what Susan needs. She doesn’t need to read your release notes, because half of it means nothing to her.

 

Frances Kleven: And that’s what I hope people are excited about and feel comfortable in that space of we… I think that was always a fantasy. And it was always like, “If only we could connect these systems. If only we could clear the backlog and had more time.” And so but in those things like, oh, now that’s a reality and probably an expectation, and I have to build it, and that’s scary.

 

I actually didn’t necessarily think about how I would do this because I thought it wasn’t possible. We’re coming up on time, but I wanted to, for a takeaway, and an action item of a customer ed leader or anyone working in customer ed, what’s one conversation you think they should go have in their organization next week?

 

Courtney Sembler: Ooh, great question. I’m gonna be annoying and say there’s two conversations.

 

Frances Kleven: Right. Two is fine. Two, they have all week. They can have two conversations, and they have all this time now.

 

Courtney Sembler: They have all this time. AI gave them all this time. They’re on vacation. The first conversation is I would start to break the ice about unified learning.

 

I think we’ve avoided the conversation for long enough. It’s happening in SaaS companies. There has been layoffs, restructures of customer ed professionals, L&D.

 

Now’s your time to talk about unification, not only from a job preservation perspective, but hey, it saves your company money and time if you all are working together. I don’t need you to reorg your entire company under a chief learning officer, but you do need to have some sort of learning council.

 

You need to have conversations, particularly if you’re evaluating external vendors to support you in your efforts. This is where companies get annoyed, when the right hand and the left hand, I just did the opposite, right hand, left hand, whatever, are not talking to each other and you have three LMSs on your budget, and finance is like, “I don’t understand.”

 

And it’s like, “Well, this team uses it, and…” Absolutely not. Start talking about unified learning. Start talking about how these things talk together. 

 

The second conversation I want everybody to have is we’ve had AI, we’ve messed with it, we’ve run experiments, we know what we know about it. Where is it going to live permanently in our content creation flow, our delivery mechanism?

 

Just make that front and center. I think we’re done saying we’re unsure. LinkedIn could convince you that you could create all the course content you wanted with any AI model. It’s not totally true, but we are at a place where it needs to be a permanent part of our creation, and we need to help executives and our leadership understand where it is and where it isn’t.

 

And where it isn’t, I think, is obviously the scary part, ’cause they’re like, “Well, why can’t you do it there?” But it’s like, think about it as an end to end, here’s where we’ve put it and here’s where we have it and here’s why, and start to break those conversations down instead of, “Oh yeah, it’s in there. Don’t worry about it.” It’s like, no, let’s worry about it and let’s talk about it. So unified learning and where has AI made its permanent home versus where hasn’t it yet.

 

Frances Kleven: I think the where it isn’t is that you’re right, it’s because it’s this what the scary part of how would I defend that? But I think as you said, where it isn’t is in live events. Everybody understands that. 

 

Courtney Sembler: Yeah, live events, human connection, community, peer-to-peer connections. Like, there are places it’s not gonna live, and that’s okay. You know, now we’re in San Francisco, every AI billboard would tell you otherwise, that AI lives everywhere and it is everything. There’s a great billboard right now on 101, from See’s Candy, that’s just a picture of chocolate, and it’s like, “No AI needed.”

 

And I’m like, amazing. Like, we love this. And I think that is what we wanna say is, as customer ed and L&D professionals is: no AI is needed here, and to insert it breaks the relationship and doesn’t save us time. You know, that’s the other piece. There’s some people who are like, “Oh, just, just use Claude and do prompting to create a course.”

 

And I’m like, “I’ve been in this space a really long time. That doesn’t save me time. Forcing Claude to give me some of this stuff doesn’t save me time”. I just can say I used AI, which if it’s meant to save me time but it’s not saving me time, what are we getting out of it?

 

Frances Kleven: And I almost think now I’m gonna add a third conversation, to have with maybe your sales or I would think the sales team, ’cause I like to get their read on sort of what they could sell. And what could they sell if you said, “Our customer experience team at LearnUpon has created customer education that—to your example—anytime Susan needs information or guidance, she has that at her fingertips”. But you also have a suite of peer-to-peer connections and in-person support and in-person events, like we’re not really selling that on the customer experience side. And so I would say talk to a sales team about what they’re hearing of how you talk about customer education on the sales side, and what they could go sell that.

 

Courtney Sembler: 100%. And they would, and people would buy it because when you turn around, I know we’re way over time. This is the exact conversation where it’s like you could talk about customer education forever, and I keep thinking about we have just scratched the surface on the AI customer education perspective.

 

Like, I can’t wait until these conversations also start to become the norm for everyone, ’cause it’s just gonna make us all better at our roles and our jobs and all that kind of stuff. But the customer experience, it is ripe again for disruption, and we can provide that because we’re able to focus on it more than ever. So I really appreciate this conversation and all the questions. It’s been great.

 

Frances Kleven: Yeah, me too. I feel invigorated for the day and for the weekend. So I hope you enjoy your weekend as well, and get a little bit of sunshine if it’s possible, in the sunset. Thanks everyone for listening, and check out our future episodes, and check out our website for the Learning Signal Podcast.

 

Courtney Sembler: Awesome. Thanks so much.

 

Frances Kleven: Thanks all.