Speaker 1: You're talking today about micro learning for customer education, right? That's that's the topic for this one.

Speaker 2: Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah, sure. All right. Well then without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to you because we are right on time. And then, you know, when you see me back with no camera, you know, that's me kind of going, Hey, and Gideon is coming back up with me on the next one. So everybody stick around. We're going to hear some great content. We're going to do some fun magic and we will be back on the other side. I will see you, Kate. Back to you.

Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. Thank you. So Hey everyone. Once again, if you're watching me because you are interested in micro learning for customer education. Thank you. If you're watching me because you're waiting for another magic trick for the first one, actually in this series and some Oculus giveaway, you're welcome. I'm glad that you're all here and I'm really excited to be back at micro learning comp stage. So today we're going to discuss what's good in using micro learning for customer education. And before we dive into some strategies, I'd really love to know what field you are coming from, like whether you identify yourself as a person close to the learning and development field, or if you feel like you're coming from marketing side, I'm really curious to learn because customer education is often the space where these two fields collide. Please send me some reactions. Please send me some reactions. If you can relate to that. Well, okay. And I'll start by explaining really briefly what micro learning is. And no, it's not a tiny classroom with little teachers and students. Micro learning illustrates the delivery of educational content in very quick and very, very, very, very targeted nuggets. Did I say that enough time? All right. One more time for good luck. Very targeted nuggets. You know, there are heated debates about the optimal of micro learning experiences. I I'm sure, you know and my take on it is that less is more. There is no particular length you should be really caring about. Like, first of all, you should consider what your customer really needs to learn. Like what's the need for the customer success. And if you understand that they probably do not need to know all the bells and whistles, so that's great. Get rid of that content. But if you feel that it's something really important, it should stay in place. Like there is there is no such a big deal in just turning everything into micro learning. Don't be obsessed about time. Think of value first. And before we dive into some strategies to implement micro learning for customer education, let me share with you something very important. It's here, so please don't do that. That's that's not what micro learning actually is like designing micro learning must be intentional. Just a funny illustration, like imagine that you have a 100 bucks bill and for some reason, I don't know why you decided to tear it into, say, 10 pieces. So what you can get as a result? Well, maybe 10 equal pieces of a banknote if you are careful in tearing. I don't know. But in terms of value, you actually get nothing just because you will have to glue it together or you will have to go to bank and probably to change it for a normal banknote. I don't know if that works, but sounds optimistic. And when you think of building some intentional micro learning, in this case, you probably should change your 100 bucks bill into, say, five 20 bucks bills. And in this case, they are standalone. I mean, those 20 bucks bills, you can buy something, they are self-sufficient. But if you put them together, they still can can work as a sum of money. Right, and if I were to use some kind of a learning and development technology here, I'd say that when you cut your online lesson into pieces. All the learning objectives of your initial lesson are still in place, whereas a true piece of micro learning has only one outcome per activity. Your elephant is still in the room if you're just cutting it down. So I'm really hoping that this funny illustration will help you retain this idea better. And we go next. There are loads of formats and loads of software and loads of ways you can utilize to deliver micro learning experiences to your customers. You can go with something traditional and very simple, like a short help article or some on demand e-learning videos. And I'm pretty sure that you're all doing that. And for that, you can use either an expensive software or probably you have even great production studio in-house with some great equipment, with some professionals. Or you may just go and use something like cheap screencast recording software or even kind of an iMovie app. For example, I also utilize that from time to time. It doesn't really matter. You can also create some virtual reality experiences. They can also work as micro learning experience very well. But I'm just afraid that not many organizations can afford that. The choice is huge, and it's really up to you to decide what to use to go micro. And there is only one thing I'd love to comment on here. That's true for any company, regardless of the department headcount and regardless of the number of clients you have. Just whatever format you choose for micro learning, when you think of providing your customers with something quick and pleasing, think of yourself, too. Like, get a bit of selfish. Why should you be selfish? Why should you be doing something that is not for your customers? Like, get a bit of selfish. Why should you spend so much time and effort on designing something that your learners, that your customers will just click through or watch in a couple of minutes? I have a marketing background and I am a founder of a software company where we also educate our customers. And I firmly believe that effective micro learning for customer education is not only about the speed of consumption. It's also about the speed of creation. And I'm personally a huge fan of speedy content creation approach. That's my title, like I used to call myself like a speedy person. And actually, that's why I built seven tabs. It helps you create content in minutes. It helps you to deliver it in a click to any device. You can update content anytime and your customers will always have the latest version. I can talk a lot about it and that's probably the topic for another presentation. I just wanted to share my strategy when it comes to fast content creation. Just for the record, I'm Kate, I'm a recovering perfectionist. Anyone here like me, please send me some reactions. Let's normalize that. So if I have to create something in seven tabs for our customers, I set myself a time frame, a time limit, and I aim to get my course ready within that time frame. Like I start with filling in some cards with high level ideas and it feels like a mind mapping. Then I gradually expand on those ideas and I add some flash on the bottom. On the bones. And if I have some time left, I can improve the copywriting, I can play around with some inclusive jeeps or I can record a selfie video and I can upload it to my course. It depends on my mood. It depends on my energy. But generally, this strategy really helps me to move things quickly. And even if some mistakes happen, if I see some imperfections, I can easily fix them, really fast. Then, say, I will have to invest into fixing some problems or some imperfections with other types of content. Microlearning helps you just be very flexible with that. Thus, we are gradually moving to the benefits of going micro. And I'm going to share that information with some inspiring examples. I'm hoping that they will be inspiring for you, at least. So why go micro? Firstly, let me share something you may not expect to hear from a founder of a microlearning company at the Microlearning Conference. Don't trust anyone who says that microlearning is the new black or is the answer to everything. No, please, no. You just cannot replace everything you are doing right now with microlearning and you should not even try to. Like you produce some heavy machinery and you have to bring together your customer representatives to run, say, a three day long on-site training. You can't give it up. You can't. Or if your company sells some complicated software and you have to train your customers how to use some complicated features that are crucial for customer success. And I believe that those features may be not complicated because your software is not user friendly. I'm sure it is. That's because the problem your software helped to solve is complicated. So that's absolutely all right if your customer education requires some time investment, requires some longer materials. You just can't replace everything with microlearning assets and hoping that everyone will get excited about it. It doesn't work that way. While some space microlearning assets that you use to reinforce your existing customer education cycles is definitely a smart choice. Why? Because it helps your customers to retain knowledge better and thus you increase return on investment. You must have probably heard that without follow ups and reminders, people forget almost everything you delivered after some training activity, like even if it was the most engaging training activity in their life. Just accept it as it is about as far as I remember, 80% of the information just get blurred. And that's where microlearning can help you think of drip feeding your customers with some small chunks of information to reinforce the activity that you already lead by your department, like webinars, conferences, product tours, live labs, instructor led training, you name it. And by reinforcing, I don't mean just follow ups and some reminders that you send afterwards. You can benefit from enticing your audience before the event as well. And recently I ran a kind of experiment with enhancing one of the microlearning confronts with microlearning assets. Some of you probably even took part in that and got some nice 7 Taps socks. Send me some reactions if you're wearing them right now or at least if you have some nearby. I'm hoping you do. So that's funny because we receive almost thousands of socks requests and at a certain point we even thought like probably we should open our own production. So it was really engaging. And if you're interested in some special stuff like how we set things up, how we used warm ups and follow ups and some other engaging microactivities to reenergize our online event and you can use it for even on site training as well. Scan this QR code on the slide and you will dive into my article. I will walk you through the process of setting everything up and I hope you'll find it inspiring. So the next reason to go micro. Don't get mad at me for saying that, but most probably your customers dislike having training. Just I know it sounds painful, but that's true. Even if the training is entirely self-paced, even if it's simple and form and super duper interactive. Just because your customers have millions of other things to do, just like you. So thanks again for joining my session today. And in contrast to employee training, we have almost no methods of influence and customers can leave anytime. So we just have to engage them in the smoothest way ever. I'd really love you to share some life hacks or some nice strategies you are currently using to engage with your customers. Let's share some insights in the chat. And while you're answering, I'd like to quote 7TAP's customer who is a VP marketing at a software company. What they do, they actually use 7TAPs to deliver release notes to their customers and prospects. And I asked Kurt, when did you realize you needed something like 7TAPs? And his response was pretty simple, like people weren't absorbing the content. We just needed a better medium to deliver it. And I assume that MSP360 and other great companies that utilize microlearning still have their core training activities in place. But like we've discussed, that's the best option, but they enhance them with microlearning, with something quick, with something snackable, with something fun and creative and accessible in a click. And if you're looking for some examples, for some inspiration, just think of delivering some snackable what, why, how's to your first time customers. Then you can deliver some troubleshooting tips or some user success stories or release notes, just whatever you can think of. Or you can even re-energize some routine Q&A, like no one actually wants to open a link that starts with kind of a mysoftware.helpdesk.howto, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes we don't even open those links because we assume they're useless. Have you ever tried to solve any issue on LinkedIn? Lucky you are if you haven't. So, first of all, think of the experience of your customers, think about their pain. Then consider the fact that they are living in the world of TikTok and they may even experience some attention deficit disorder. And let all of that drive your customer training decisions. Last but not least, microlearning helps to be more flexible. Since customer education is definitely not a program you build, launch and never touch again, you should be open to experimenting. You have to. And microlearning empowers you to do those experiments very well. You spend less time on development. You can iterate your content quickly. And here I'd love to address one great approach, module-based training approach that actually HubSpot Academy uses. We were very lucky to have Courtney Sembler, who is a senior team manager at HubSpot Academy, last time at Microlearning Conference. And she shared a really nice framework for modular content creation and even spilled some tea on some HubSpot best practices. I don't want just to tell everything that she delivered. You can scan the code. It's microlearningconf.com. You have to scroll a bit and you'll find the recordings. And I see that I'm running out of time. So just I'm hoping that I sparked some enthusiasm in you for microlearning, some interest. If I haven't, this is my last attempt with this nice, inspiring picture. And just Christopher, let me wrap it up a bit. First of all, a pinch of good humor never hurt nobody. So I'm hoping you enjoyed all the memes I used in my presentation. And secondly, customer education doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be helpful. And it's wonderful when it resonates with your customers. So think about delivering some content the way they are already receiving it in their daily life. I mean, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, they're all bite-sized chunks of information. So why not leverage these to achieve high engagement and high completion rates? And when designing microlearning, also think of making your content accessible, not only in terms of inclusivity, but also just physically accessible, because it doesn't make much sense when your learner has to go through some complicated onboarding or even to download an app. And I'd be really excited to see you in seven tabs. It's free, it's fun, it's speedy, and I bet you'll enjoy the experience. And if any questions or ideas come up, feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or via my email, Kate, at 7tabs.com. I'm happy to discuss anything that's about microlearning or just happy to meet you and chat over virtual coffee. So, yeah, I think that's pretty much it, Christopher. We can indulge ourselves at Magic Tricks.

Speaker 1: Well, we can, but I mean, I think the thing that you brought up and I think one of the things I've always really appreciated about you and the 7tabs team is that, well, one, you created a product that makes it easy to create digestible content and rapidly develop content. You've always been very outspoken about the fact that this isn't for everything. Like if all you're trying to do is take everything you have and shove it in here, it's not going to be effective. You can't just do that. It really is about intentional design and figuring out how do we think about what we're trying to accomplish and how does this fit in? And I love that you hit on the customer education. One of the most valuable experiences of my career was running a customer education group and carrying a P&L and the level of accountability you have when you're accountable for generating revenue and whether you're there or not depends on your revenue generation. It really does force you to think differently. And I think that's some of the highlights that you really hit on. So as always, I appreciate hearing where you guys are at and what you're doing and how you're helping change the portfolio of products as we think about the entire learner experience versus just one facet of it. So I think we should all give Kate as many emojis as we can hammer on in our chat here.