Challenge
A well known software brand needed help understanding how to best talk to their current users about customer education to drive platform loyalty and proficiency
Focus
To gather the opinions and attitudes around messaging and imagery and identify market expectations associated with different value propositions
Methodologies
Contextual inquiry, secondary research, focus group
My role
Budget management, research recommendations and planning, participant recruiting, discussion guide design, interview moderation, data synthesis, report writing, strategic recommendations
Process
Contextual grounding - we spoke with current software users at various levels of proficiency on their education experience within the certification event environment. A key finding was that the current marketing and educational materials they were coming into contact with on the company website and email communications failed to build user confidence.
Secondary research - with a solid experiential framework, we began to explore competitor proficiency materials to get a feel for who our customers thought were getting the customer education experience right by instilling user confidence. A theme we uncovered was the consistency in the cadence of materials provided to the customer at each stage of learning.
Focus group - we talked to groups of users in various cities about sentiment and reactions towards various messaging and imagery examples they may come into contact with throughout the proficiency journey as well as the timing of that messaging. A key finding was that users defined customer education as a collaborative and community driven experience.
Findings
Make the customer education process easier to navigate
Help users through the certification process by providing helpful content often
Customer education doesn’t always best translate in a classroom setting
Users learn from one another...support the community
No fluffy content or cheesy stock photography
On-demand learning means anytime NOT anywhere
Recommendations
Build a supplemental automated marketing stream to provide users the support and access to resources they need triggered by the phase of certification they are in
Empower users to create their own learning groups by providing suggested agendas, presentations, and related materials so they can learn from one another in a structured way across the globe
Utilize community pages on the company website to reinforce messaging around useful tips and tricks for getting started and continuing customer education
Develop creative that is succinct, descriptive and realistic and carry that tone across all mediums