Underscore: How Community Supports Customer Education

When properly facilitated, community has the power to supercharge education programs. This match made in heaven can ultimately impact growth, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.  

In this live event, Erin Balsa, and Shannon Howard, discussed how to utilize community to supercharge your education programs and impact growth, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.   

Here’s what they cover: 

• What Community is and why it’s important to Customer Education
• How Community should be delivered/facilitated
• The do’s and don’ts of building and managing a community

This particular session had a few questions that we weren’t able to get to as thoroughly as we would have liked. Not to worry, we have answers!

Lingering questions: 

Q: What are some best practices for measuring the impact/success of a community and learning initiative?

A: ‍Engagement & activity are great metrics to use to measure impact. A few specific questions you could start with are:

• How many users are coming into the learning environment from community? (and vice versa) 
• How many conversations centered around the educational content are taking place?
• How does learner experience and behavior compare before and after adding a community element/environment?
  
  

Q: What does success look like for a community supporting customer education?

A: The ULTIMATE success metric is achievement of the business outcomes you set for your education program. Success of the community is therefore defined by how well the community assists your learners in adopting, retaining, and applying the knowledge your program delivers. A great way to evaluate this is to understand their learner experience and behaviors pre-community. Then compare to their experience and behaviors after adding a community element to their learning experience.

Q: Community and Education are clearly strong partners.  Any chance you can get into specifics of how this works?  What are some tips to leverage community to achieve customer education goals?

A: When using a community environment to support an education program, the ability for learners to pose questions, follow topics, and engage in a deeper way with others in a similar audience is what takes learning to the next level.

Q: Our Community is still growing, how do we get people to engage with each other rather than just us answering all questions?

A: Treat your community like a backyard cookout. The party may be hosted at your house, but your guests arent there JUST to see you and talk about how great you are!

• Facilitate topical conversations that are relevant to your industry by sharing links to articles and news. Then ask for learner opinions, insights, and thoughts in on interesting trends.
• Share and celebrate your customers and community members achievements
• Introduce learners with like-use cases to eachother, let them connect through the similar nuances of their learning experiences. 
• Host AMA (ask me anything) sessions with SMEs (subject matter experts) where learners can dive deeper

Webinar resources: 

• Learning Science Weekly Issue 52
• CELab Episode 75: Customer Education, Advocacy, and Community with Melissa VanPelt