The Customer Education Playbook

6Step 4: Execute Your Strategy Flawlessly with a Development Plan

Imagine for a moment that your company has just made a big announcement. This could be investing in a new product line, launching a new application, or building out a new department. For any truly mature project, you would expect there to be a thorough business plan.

Your customer education deserves the same focus and credence. That means it's not enough to define your goals, or even your customer's goals, and then just start training. You need a customer education development plan.

Your plan should include a complete project brief, which you can provide at the outset, and allows you to get cross-functional alignment on all the different stakeholders who will be developing customer education with you. To do that, you need to be able to show them a brief that answers at least the following questions:

• Who is the customer education for?
• What are you educating them on?
• When do customers receive this education?
• Where do they receive it?
• Why have you chosen this approach, including why should the learners care?
• How will you measure whether the education has had the intended impact?

When your stakeholders read this project brief, it should be enough to orient them so that they understand the goals and the focus of the customer education program, as well as how you're going to align to get there and how you will ultimately measure its success.

Identifying Your Stakeholders

Of course, you need to know who is being ...