The Customer Education Playbook

12Step 10: Did It Work? Measuring the Success of Your Content

We talk to a lot of customer education leaders about their challenges, and time and time again we hear one significant pattern. Customer education practitioners are creating a lot of training content, but they find it monumentally difficult to understand, demonstrate, and communicate the impact of the work that they do. In fact, according to our research at Thought Industries, 43 percent of our audience are struggling to measure the impact of their learning and training initiatives, with no change from one year to the next.

Being able to measure the impact of your education falls into two categories. First, assess the success for the customer. How much of your education has been consumed? Did your customers learn from the education, did they enjoy it, and did they change their behavior as a result? And second, has your program paid off for the business – has it shown return on investment (ROI)? We'll talk about ROI and how to explain your value to the C-suite in Step 12 (Chapter 14). For now, let's think about measuring customer learning, so we can see if your education is hitting the mark.

Data Doesn't Have to Be Hard!

There is a mental model prevalent in the customer education world that data and measurement are really hard. We're going to refute that claim right here and now, because while there are levels of complexity with everything – data doesn't have to be hard. If you focus too much on the ideal, where ...