Support + Content: A Win-Win for Customer Education [Coffee Chat Recap]

Have you registered for the premier Customer Education industry event yet? Connect 2021 is just one month away! Register now.

Skilljar’s monthly Coffee Chats showcase the different ways customers are using our platform, as well as tips and tricks from our own team to improve Customer Education efforts. Skilljar customers learn a lot from seeing other people’s programs and hearing what their goals and objectives are — and then use that information to reflect on and improve their own programs.

Another way to improve your customer education program is to attend Skilljar Connect!

Skilljar Connect’s focus on Customer Education allows you to really hone in on those things that other companies are doing well, that you can apply to your own business.
— Bill Kelleher, Customer Education Manager, AuditBoard

Register now for two days of insight-rich keynotes, expert panels, and roundtable discussions dedicated to creating best-in-class customer training and certification programs. Connect 2021 will take place at the Fairmont Sonoma, November 15 – 17, 2021 – in the heart of the beautiful wine country of Northern California. There’s still time to receive discounted rates on hotel and airfare, so join your peers for this can’t-miss event exclusively designed for Customer Training professionals!

Using Support Team Insights to Inform Customer Education

September’s Customer Education Coffee Chat featured a conversation with Skilljar’s own Mariah Ortiz, Support Manager at Skilljar. While it makes sense that your organization’s Support team is best equipped to know where customers most need help understanding and using your product, getting and turning this information into valuable educational content may not be top of mind.

Some of the benefits of working collaboratively with your Support team include creating a better customer experience, reducing the number of support tickets, and up-leveling the abilities of your agents with content. In return, they can provide valuable information on your existing materials and also help you determine needs for future content.

If you don’t currently work with your Support team or Support team leadership, they will absolutely love that you’re reaching out to them to work together. — Mariah Ortiz

Here are Mariah’s suggestions for how Support and Content can work together to benefit each other, as well as your customers:

Establish Processes for Collecting Feedback

Your educational content may be amazing but if the Support team doesn’t know about it, it’s not being optimized to help customers. Putting some processes in place so that support agents know where to find your videos, PDFs, and training courses — especially as you add new content — can make a big impact.

This can be as simple as chatting with Support team leadership from time to time, or setting up regular meetings specifically for this purpose, to learn the concerns they are hearing most and offer content solutions they can use to solve them.

Some of our best conversations have come out of our content creators or customer educators joining our meetings and just saying, ‘How are your conversations going? What seems to be coming up a lot that maybe we could help with? — Mariah Ortiz

Having one-to-one conversations with your Support team can uncover some gems of information that might not come across in a support ticket or call. Once they know about your content, they can refer customers to it during conversations, supply links in follow-up emails, and familiarize themselves with new ways to address common concerns.

Develop Content Tags

When Support teams hear the same problems over and again, a simple process could be set up for them to flag the topic or question in your ticketing system. Ways to accomplish this include adding a tag, checkbox, or even a “Notes” field to indicate we could use some content on this topic. Then it’s incumbent upon content managers to periodically check to see which items are being flagged.

Every support team has ticket tagging to collect helpful information for cross-functional data. Is there some way the support agent can indicate a need on a ticket that will better help you in your role? — Mariah Ortiz

If you already have content on a flagged topic, maybe it needs to be updated or prioritized so that the Support team has it readily available.

Ask Customers for Feedback

One way your Support team can be used to flag customer needs is to listen for feedback during support calls. Customers will give feedback freely on specific issues they are frustrated about – saying I wish your software did this… or I can’t seem to find a way to do that. Your Support team should probe to better understand the need.

Then, they can report back to team leadership or in direct meetings with Content to share the information, or flag it in their ticketing system as described in the previous section.

Better yet, make sure you have access to the Support team’s ticketing management system so you can see for yourself what issues are arising. (At Skilljar we use Zendesk and our Learning Experience Designer, Cutler Bleecker, makes a point of checking the system directly for content ideas.)

For ideas on future content, review support tickets, listen to calls, and read emails to see how customers are talking about your product with specific attention to:

• What topics do they seem most interested in?
• Where do they seem to get hung up?
• Where are they not quite feeling satisfied that they are fully up to speed on something?

Review Support Data

Another way to uplevel the Support team is to ask for data that you can review together to determine — What topics seem to be coming up most often? How quickly do these topics get resolved?

Together, you can create a dashboard that you review weekly or monthly and then identify video or other content that can help quicken the time to resolution.

These meetings between Support and Education teams drive some of the best content. — Mariah Ortiz

This type of data can also be gleaned through Customer Satisfaction (C-SAT) surveys. If your Support team sends these out, they can add an additional question such as: Have you visited our Resource Center (or Training platform) recently or Have you seen our latest video on…? Was it helpful?

Finding ways to submerge yourself in customer conversations using the insights of your Support team will prove invaluable to both teams, and most of all — benefit your customers.

In my experience, everyone on both sides always has lots of ideas and thoughts. From a Support side, it changes the way they think about the product and what future improvements the Education team could develop to help. — Mariah Ortiz