In every business, it’s someone’s job to train the team and customers how to use your product.
For high-growth businesses, this job can be downright daunting. Your product changes every day. Because you’re growing fast, new use cases, bugs, and questions flood your inbox.
Customer Success teams aren’t usually as well staffed as other functions, either.
How in the world are you supposed to stay up to date on everything new and good about your product, train your team and customers, and their feedback into product improvements… while keeping all this documented to create great training to grow your company?
And if you don’t, customers churn. Accounts don’t grow. Sales lets you know – often – that they don’t have the best knowledge. Worst of all, the amazing growth you’re experiencing could slow down.
What’s needed is a nimble solution.
Knowledge Management Has a Dirty Secret
Your company spends a lot of money paying smart people to do great work. Lessons are learned whenever you interact with a product, team member, or customer.
The best companies do a good job of turning those lessons learned into durable knowledge everyone can learn from, right when needed.
Not a great job; just a good job.
That’s the dirty secret of knowledge management: Everyone knows that no one is doing a great job.
A lot of lessons learned become lessons lost. Then repeated. Or recreated, incorrectly. Then shared in Word documents or out-of-date knowledge bases or just asked in a public Slack channel again… and again… and again. That’s expensive.
So expensive that the KMS segment is exploding from $25 billion in 2021 to $72 billion by 2030.
If the world’s best companies are having a hard time, what can possibly be done?
Consistently Great Training Fuels Growth
Global industry growth is interesting, but you have a real problem today: Teaching your team and customers the latest and greatest about your product. That’s Sam’s challenge.
Sam’s company doubled its headcount last year and will double again this year. Revenue’s growing just as fast. But it’s just Sam and 2 team members tasked with teaching everyone about their B2B product, and losing customers will harm growth.
What does Sam need to solve?
- How to make great product education quickly
- How to share the education so everyone can find what they need
- How to know that his team and customers are really learning
At the end of the quarter, Sam will be evaluated based on consistently well his company and customers understand the product.
Making Great Product Education Quickly
Sam doesn’t have time to host countless webinars training people about their product. Schedules are erratic. Webinars need a lot of preparation time. And let’s be honest – they’re no fun to sit through.
Sam knows he needs to create great training documents.
But that’s its own challenge. The traditional method – copying/pasting screenshots into a Word document, meticulously typing out steps, and formatting the document – is too slow. Plus, the documents expire fast as the product evolves.
Video training can be an upgrade, except that teaching on-screen processes in fast-moving videos frustrates many people. Making and editing great videos is time-consuming. Videos are a bad format for looking up a few quick steps.
Sam needs a tool that lets him turn every interaction into a training guide. With Extelli, Sam just turns on the free extension, points and clicks through his process, and has a beautiful, structured Guide in 30 seconds, not 20 minutes.
Every Extelli Guide has screenshots with highlighted clicks and step titles auto-magically named from his clicks. That’s fast.
Organize Effortlessly
But making the document is just the beginning. Now it has to live somewhere that people can find it in the right context and without having to ask Sam’s busy team.
Traditionally, this document would live in a shared drive, like Google Drive or Dropbox. This forces Sam to assign the document to a single folder within a folder within a folder within… you get the idea.
More modern solutions use smart knowledge bases, wikis, and other tools. They’re much easier to navigate but reduce contextual information to out-of-order chunks. The learner is forced to put the whole story together.
Sam’s looking for a solution that smartly organizes his new Guide so that it can be found quickly when needed, found in the right context, saves every Guide from getting lost in a complex structure, and turns it into building blocks for all the situations it might be useful for.
Extelli Libraries make it easy to find Guides for quick questions and to create Collections that act like toolboxes for complex problems. Instead of disappearing into a Collection, a Guide can be assigned like a bookmark to infinite Collections.
One tool. Many toolboxes for many problems.
Ensuring Your Team Is Actually Learning
Sam’s team is on a roll. They’re documenting every product update and customer question into Guides. The Library is full of answers to any question. They’re even creating Collections to answer specific, complex questions without losing their Guides in a file structure.
But how does Sam know his team and customers are learning?
He can’t track them all down, test them, and update a database. And even if he could, he can’t do that every time the product is updated.
We’ve reached Sam’s real challenge: Consistently great training.
Historically, Sam would turn to a Learning Management System (LMS). But they’re complex to set up and manage, have lots of hidden costs, and are yet another system to manage. He’s not excited about exporting and reformatting all his content.
Extelli’s Learning Modules save all that effort. Sam’s team can make an assignable learning path for any question. Progress is easy to review. Sam can even invite customers to a Learning Module without bringing them into his Library.
New team member onboarding? Easy.
How to configure your account? Easy.
Product pushed a gigantic update? Easy.
That’s nimble.
Nimble Knowledge Management Creates Consistently Great Training
Sam and his small team face a tough challenge: Keeping his team and customers educated on their fast-changing product.
Making documents. Organizing libraries for self-service. Guaranteeing learning outcomes. These are the core activities for knowledge management.
Using Extelli, Sam and his team drastically reduce the time they spend making, organizing, and delivering education.
Their teams start working from the best knowledge available, selling more and learning faster.
Their customers have the best knowledge at their fingertips, becoming more loyal to Sam’s product and even spending more as the product serves their needs.
All because Sam invested in consistently great training that took him less time than ever to manage.
Be like Sam. Try Extelli for free for 14 days, no credit card required. Then you can join Sam to create great training to grow your company.
If Extelli doesn’t become your team’s go-to knowledge manager in 30 days, your next month is on us.
Join the Conversation
Today we discussed how Extelli helps the busy Customer Success Manager for a fast-growing B2B eCommerce platform help his company keep growing fast while slashing his team’s time and effort.
Extelli lives in the world we’re discussing here… and we would love for you to join the conversation. Check out our post about this topic on LinkedIn.