As Customer Education leaders, we're all chasing the goal of scaling customer education - but not all scale is created equal.



What does it mean to “scale customer education?”

This is a question I’m asking a lot these days as most of my zoom calls with folks involve “doing more with their training.” 


Most have experienced a successful launch, with great initial customer feedback, and generally want “more” from their customer education program.

But scale in customer education means different things to different folks…AND there’s “good scale” and “bad scale.”

• Good Scale refers to achieving more with less - expanding your reach, enhancing content quality, and increasing enrollments without proportionately increasing your efforts or resources.
  It's about leveraging what works in a way that multiplies your impact efficiently, ensuring that for every unit of effort put in, you get a disproportionately larger output in terms of customer satisfaction, engagement, and product understanding.


  
  
• Bad Scale, on the other hand, is the trap of pursuing more at any cost. It's when the effort to scale your education program leads to increased complexity, higher demands on your team, and more challenges, without a corresponding increase in efficiency or effectiveness.
  
  This type of scale might result in more content, more courses, and more enrollments, but it also brings more headaches, more support tickets, and a dilution of the quality that made your program successful to begin with.
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To help frame up what you’ll need to achieve “Good Scale” consider the following questions...

1. What are you scaling?

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There are so many parts to a customer education program. So, you've got to identify "what you're scaling."

• There’s “scaling the ideation/origination of programs.” 

  This means there are more people who can ideate or determine “what goes in the academy.” 

  
  
• There’s “scaling the creation of content.” 

  This might involve simply more videos, tutorials, or guides across all of the digital sites and academies. Or it may introduce new forms of content entirely.

  
  
• There’s “scaling the reach” or the enrollments.
  This often requires more marketing and sales efforts. It also often requires more customer support as enrollments increase.
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2. How does scaling advance our business objectives?

Is having “more of the thing” really what’s needed to help achieve the goal?

Often there’s the 80/20 at work (Pareto Principle).
Instead of creating “more things” we need to look at the few things that are really working, and make sure we’re maximizing those. 

This requires us to have a strategic, data-driven approach to determine “what we need more of.” Pull data from your systems - LMS, CRM, Website, Socials, & Community - to help inform the areas for scale.

This work ensures that our scaling efforts are not just about expansion for its own sake but about intelligently growing our customer education program in ways that truly matter to our users and our business objectives. 

If you’re interested in simplifying the goal setting process with leadership, we’ve outlined some really practical ideas for goal setting with related content formats in our article, Aligning Customer Education to Business Goals.

3. If scale happens, what breaks?

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Even though we love more enrollments, more courses, more customers - it can easily create “more headaches, more support requests, or more work” without the many advantages that customer education provides. 

(If our backend operations, technology, and systems haven’t been optimized to handle “more”... )

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But, it's worth it to scale customer education.

Growing a customer education program is an incredibly rewarding process, and one that can drive tremendous success, revenue, and relationships with customers.

Mapping all of this energy back to your business goals, and identifying what will make “good scale” possible (before you start) ensures that the process is enjoyable and the plan you’re executing routes toward success. 

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