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The Customer Success Playbook
The Customer Success Playbook
Customer Success Playbook Season 2 Episode 32 - Kristine Kukich - AI and Customer Education
AI Revolutionizing Customer Education: Insights from Kristine Kukich
In this enlightening episode of the Customer Success Playbook podcast, hosts Roman Trebon and Kevin Metzger dive deep into the transformative impact of AI on customer education with guest expert Kristine Kukich, principal owner of The Training Sherpa.
Kristine shares her extensive experience in implementing effective training programs and reveals how AI is making customer education more efficient, scalable, and personalized than ever before. The discussion covers five key areas where AI is making significant strides:
- Personalization of learning experiences
- Gamification for enhanced engagement
- Streamlined content development
- Improved assessment and certification processes
- Advanced data analytics for actionable insights
Listeners will gain valuable insights into:
- How AI is democratizing data analysis and content creation
- The future of customer education, including the role of digital assistants and avatars
- Practical AI tools for enhancing customer education initiatives
- The balance between automated learning and premium, in-person training experiences
Whether you're a customer success professional, a training specialist, or a business leader interested in leveraging AI for educational purposes, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge and forward-thinking strategies.
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You can also find the CS Playbook Podcast:
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You can find Kevin at:
Metzgerbusiness.com - Kevin's person web site
Kevin Metzger on Linked In.
You can find Roman at:
Roman Trebon on Linked In.
Hi everyone, welcome back to the customer success playbook podcast. I'm Roman Trebon and with me always is my co host Kevin Metzger. Please do us a huge favor and give our show a rating, subscribe, and like it so we can continue to grow our audience. Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin Metzger:I'm doing great. I'm super excited for the college football season to be back and I'm looking forward to today's discussion. I
Roman Trebon:am as well for both, both college football and our discussion. So it's, it's the best of all worlds. today we have the pleasure of speaking with Kristine Kukic, the principal owner of the training Sherpa, which is just the best name for a company. I love that name. Kristine is a seasoned expert in customer education and spent years helping organizations of all sizes. implement effective training programs. With her vast experience, she understands the challenges companies face in prioritizing customer education and how resource intensive it can be. Today, she's here to share her insights on how AI is revolutionizing customer education, making it more efficient, scalable and personalized than ever before. So I know your ears are perking up Kev on AI. And today in this episode, we'll explore how AI can help with customer education specifically. Kristine's going to walk us through how AI is transforming the landscape of customer education. By personalizing learning experiences, speeding up content creation, improving data analysis, and much more. You know, Kev, historically customer education has been a challenging and resource intensive task, often falling lower on the priority list for many organizations. But with AI, that is rapidly changing. Kristine, welcome to the show.
Kristine Kukich:Well, thank you so much. my college football team has been downgraded. I was part of the Pac 10. I'm no longer part of the Pac 10 because the Pac 10 pretty much is dying. So I'm not as excited about the fact that football is kicking back up, but I'm open for that. The AI discussion passion of mine has been for probably about five years now, and as we've been really focusing on the business of doing business, AI has, that's where AI shines, It gives us a real opportunity to pretend we're bigger than we are, because customer education teams in general are usually One, two, three people, maybe five, if you're lucky, unless you're big. And even if you are big, some of those organizations still only have maybe 10 people for a global organization that services a hundred thousand clients. So that's a big business to be run from a customer education group of 10 and we see the need to be able to leverage our time better. we just don't have a lot of them. We don't have people who are video experts. We don't have people who are sound experts. We may not have people who are product experts even. And we may not have customer education experts. It's a practice. It's been around for a long time, but when you're scaling your success team, you may not have anybody who's knowledgeable in that. So, as we started talking about how to use AI to help us do these things, we really divided it up into five categories. The first is the one that Roman, you've been talking about, and that's personalization, It's the ability to create a learning path specific to the things you need to learn as my customer. It gives us a real opportunity to focus on onboarding for those people who are brand new. New feature training for the consistent and constant releases that we have about our product. It gives us an opportunity to quiz you and see where you are in your knowledge journey and then push you in the direction to help you be better at the tasks, whatever those happen to be for the role that you play. So we're talking personas, which is something we all understand, If we've been supporting customers, we know the personas that are involved. So personalization goes along with personas may tie up with locations. Right? So that we can make sure we're giving the right information to you based on the way you use the tool in the country in which you use the tool, Or the industry in which you use the tool. So we're doing all of those persona divisions and allowing personalization to really shine. The second is gamification, which Duolingo, right? if you're learning a new language, the best guys at this are those guys at Duolingo.
Roman Trebon:2000 days, Kristine. I have a 2000 day do lingo streak and it's all because like, I do not want to lose my streak, right?
Kristine Kukich:competing against yourself and those seven other people who were in the top 10 with you and, you're, we're all about it. Right. day 367.
Roman Trebon:In
Kristine Kukich:language number one and 47 in language number two. that's what it's all about, right? It's that competition that you can get. So AI can then combine, as we start to focus on how all of these things can talk to each other. If we're using gamification, we can then also personalize the learning journey based on the results of the gamification. which of course gives us the assessments, because at some point, we have to say, did we get you the information you needed? How do we validate that you actually learned from the content? And that's where assessments come in different ways that that happens If you take your favorite online tool, you're going to see that they, quiz you periodically. They'll ask you a question did this work for you? Did this give you the information you needed? Were you able to do your job Assessments fall into that certification category So if you are trying to become the best marketer and you're at HubSpot, there's a certification for that, The guys at Gainsight have four certifications right now. That they work with for CS and all the associated products that Nick's adding every year, those types of exams are challenging to build. They just they take a lot of time. They just are resource heavy and AI is amazing at helping with the distractors. My least favorite part of building certifications is the answers that are wrong. That sound like they're Right. They have to be good. Every once in a while, a nice little Easter eggy one is great. Like, you know, blue or which favorite bands or star Trek themes, It changes with the fads. the truth is, it's really hard to build exams that are comprehensive that are constantly being updated. Because again, products are constantly being updated and AI is a huge tool that can help us with the question banks. It can help with some of the delivery of the content so that we can manage. In high stakes certifications where we have to have proctors right? AI is something that can help us with with proctor these days. And you'll see that with a lot of the vendors that sell those types of products. The Pearson's and those guys, Content development. Of course, is our bread and butter from a Customer education perspective, but the content itself, we may get some outlines using AI. Most of my colleagues in this business would say, I'm not going to go there to help really build the content, but it can help with all of the auxiliary pieces to the content that we need. It can help us summarize our conversations with SMEs. Much in the same way that customer success can use AI to summarize customer conversations, to find consistent themes in their delivery. We can do the same thing with our sme conversations so that we can build better content more quickly. I can run through and say based on this. 45 minute conversation. Here were the three things that this me thought were the most important because they came back to them again and again in the conversation. we can do the summaries that way. Course descriptions, we're seeing a lot of content distributed in multichannel environments. We may have some YouTube content. We may push some information out through LinkedIn. We may have an academy, right? A university or an academy software that houses, A course catalog of content, all of those need course descriptions. they may need different kinds of course descriptions, because the one in YouTube is a little bit more marketing oriented than the one in the Academy, which is really about learning the product, which is different from the LinkedIn, which is about grabbing people's attention to get a more of a marketing tool in a lot of cases, and those descriptions aren't the same, but with a prompt to my favorite generative AI tool, boom. I've got descriptions that I can leverage in all of those ways that I need to use them. So that's the huge benefit that we see there. And then a fifth category that we talk about a lot is data analytics. And I think this is the new horizon. In AI, Gen AI with ChatGPT coming to the forefront in 2023, that just pushed out the concept of generative AI, of asking prompts, asking questions, and having whatever tools you're using push it back to you. everybody's now putting some kind of generative AI engine in with their tools. So, we're seeing it in all of the places where we need summaries. Or we want to be able to create outlines and those kinds of things, and they may be using the chat GPT open AI model. They could be using the meta model with llama. There's a lot of different places where you could get that information without having to build your own. Or if you have the bandwidth internally, you're building your own, Challenging for sure. But in high tech, we have developers, we have those people, We know these, or if we don't have them, we know them. the structure for all of that has been pretty constant. the first four are really about generative AI and some combinations, but it's really about generative AI in some way, shape or form. Data analytics in leveraging. The constructs of data analysis in combination with generative AI, we are truly taking some of those heavy duty analysis options that you needed to study statistics, and you needed to be a data analyst. You have to have a particular mindset to really enjoy crunching numbers and I have several friends who do it. That's how I got my start. That was my area of expertise in the very beginning. And so the process there is pretty solid. But if you don't know the tools, you don't know the visualization options, How do you know what kind of chart is going to be best to show off your data? You're going to pick the one you like because it looks good to you, but it may not be the best way to show your data, or it may not be the best way to hide your data, Sometimes you show a particular chart style because you want to emphasize something and the benefits we get now with analytics are we can ask the questions, right? Create a prompt and say make it look pretty for me. now we have these nice dashboards that used to take hours and hours and hours and spreadsheets and API calls to 17 different applications and not anymore. Right now we can leverage this and build it with a generative AI. front end in combination with all of the, the AI analysis that has always been there well, or at least has been there for a long time. It was just hard for those of us who are not data analysts to work with. And that's going to change, right? It's going to democratize data, which I think is absolutely fabulous because we all need it, right? Everybody's trying to make data driven decisions about their business, And we can't do that if we don't have any data. it's really been challenging because not everybody has an Ops person or an Ops team or a data analyst on call. it's a resource issue. We just don't have the capability or the bandwidth to hire one person. And that's all they do is data analysis. If I'm really lucky, I get one CS person and one person from my RevOps team that talked to each other and go to lunch once a week. they talk through, how to get my data for me. And of course I buy them Starbucks cards.
Roman Trebon:Yeah.
Kristine Kukich:So they will answer my calls and DMs when I ask them questions. Right? and that's what we get here. We get the benefit of being able to take all of these categories and kind of put a generative AI and it's now easier for us to do all of those things. It's not going to replace anyone's job what it does is it gives us time back to do other things or more things or focus in ways that we couldn't before because we were 17 hours a month working on that report.
Roman Trebon:Yeah, I think it's, you know, I know you want to get in here, but we just got a new AI training solution that our marketing team is using. I just got my first glance at it the other day, my mind was blown, it was like our entire, Training which used to be a live training is now all built, We just fed it the script and they weren't like roman. Do you want to you know, do you want to be the avatar? I'm, like, no get someone better looking than me to be the avatar But they're like, do you want a british accent? the person can pop on this took a resource every single time and now this training is so sharp. It's so easy to build. And then they were telling me it's like. Fixed the changes, the change management, which is, which is just amazing.
Kristine Kukich:You go through and the button was in the upper right hand corner and it was gold up until last week and they moved it into the lower right hand corner and now it's blue and now I have to go and replace every single screen capture in my documentation. Now with the tools that you're talking about, most of them have a basic find and replace tool that says, okay, just go do it. and again, saving me time. Right?
Kevin Metzger:yeah, one of the cool things I was using Coursera last week and did a training there they now have an agent in Coursera based off of the topic that you're learning and you can say, hey, I want to understand the topic better and it's interesting. Looking at the assessment versus the content assessment, I was giving very high level questions. Pretty easy to answer, but the content was much more in depth. The training is actually for future certification with the tool itself. I need to understand a lot more of the details that you're teaching. the course is teaching at a level where right now, because I went through it quickly, I can understand that I can pass the assessment you gave me, but I don't think I'm going to pass the certification based off of this level of knowledge I really need to go in study in depth and it was asking me questions related to the content that were detailed questions. it wasn't the assessment questions, but when I asked it to help me understand it better, it will give an example. And then it will ask me. Detailed question. I really found that fantastic. I mean, for me, as a for my learning styles, it worked fantastic and trying to understand the detail at a level that I actually needed to understand it versus the high level that you generally can absorb from just watching videos once and trying to go through that. All that said, I saw that as a fundamental shift in how training is working. Do you see that coming across all training?
Kristine Kukich:I think that what we're starting to see across the entire customer experience is the concept of white glove treatment and the structure that we see in education aligned with that the higher up the white glove treatment Structure you go, the more in person training is because it's perceived as more exclusive. I think that what we're going to see is a lot more of the automated structures that AI brings us. That on demand content brings us through academies or our learning portal and that content is still going to be available, but we'll still see that in person again, either virtually or live in a conference room or in a training facility at a client site, we'll still see those kinds of opportunities, but they are going to be considered premium. Opportunities instead. And I think that's the big change that we're starting to see now is the growth of customer education. And in general, the whole customer experience. This isn't just related to customer education. I'm seeing it with support. I'm seeing it with success as well with dedicated opportunities to work with success people and whether or not they're doing digital success. Kinds of opportunities, which are more of a one to many situation than a one to one. And so all of that I think is going to play out in the structure. we're going to start to see generative AI and the personalized learning path thing. That's going to be so built in if they're not already using it. It's because they're not using the right tools. every learning management system now has some version of a learning path that is personalized based on criteria that gives you branching opportunities, right? if you get an answer wrong, it's going to recommend you do something again we'll see that kind of thing. I think we'll also start to see the concept of the avatar, I did a blog post a couple of months ago that talked about the digital assistant and how you could get a learning assistant to guide you through and and kick you back to places and answer questions, Because we've got the structure for a dynamic chat bot. using a really solid avatar, like what we see in the video tools on the education side, not the cartoony robots that everybody uses for their chatbot. Right. Everybody remembers the benefits of Clippy. Clippy was, just before his time and he was,
Roman Trebon:30 years,
Kristine Kukich:but that idea, right, where we can build a digital assistant who will be able to guide you in all of the aspects, right? Whether it's just in time knowledge, I'm filling out an expense form. I need to know how to put in my expenses based on the rules that I have to deal with for mileage. And I don't know how to calculate that or what to do with it. And just in time, digital tools will pop up in product, right? And give you the answer to that question. if we really have to manage through the change management part of new software or changes, then that requires a different level of instruction. And we can do all of that, right? we can. Leverage those digital assistance to create that personalized experience based on the standards we already know about you as a user, right? Your your role within the product, right? How are you using our tools? Where do you live? And what industry are you in? Those three things right there can can completely alter the learning experience for people.
Roman Trebon:Yeah, I love the industry too. that's such a game changer. But going on the class TA, first of all, or the assistants. First, I think this is such an exciting time as a learner and someone like, you know, Kevin, I know you're the same way, just who loves taking classes, continuous learning. I'm a big master class person as well, right? So I take master class. And so I was taking a master class last week and this must be new. They have a new class TA AI that pops up as you're taking the class. I took a class last week on how to make this amazing hamburger. some renowned chef in New York. I'm like, Oh, I want to watch it. Yeah, I'm coming over, man. I'm coming
Kevin Metzger:over. When
Roman Trebon:you let me know, this burger is no joke, man. This had like four different types of meats. If I make it, I need the bites of people, but the class TA pops up. It's like, Hey, Roman, you know, have you thought about sides for the meat? I'm like, no, I thought about sides. Like if you thought it was just amazing. It was so like, it was like having someone by my side, guiding me through this training,
Kristine Kukich:asking you additional questions that don't come as part of The presentation of the content, to do follow ups with you and to delve a little bit more deeply into a particular instruction point, all of that is going to be usable through, I don't know who's going to win, right? Is it going to be the series and Google assistants of the world I'm a Bixby person. I have a Samsung phone. So Bixby is my voice or is it going to be the chat bot idea that we already have seen? Because it's been around for a long time. It's just, incredibly limited for most of the places that use it right now, just to get you through the basic how to's of tier one tech support. but those things are changing. And I think that the challenges we face in the technologies will be. Being where our people are in education. That rule is solid across the customer experience, right? We need to be where our customers are. We need to understand them. We need to do the things that are going to make their job easier using our tools and that happens when we can give them all of those hooks so that they can get the information they need when they need it.
Kevin Metzger:I have a couple of thoughts that I want to share and get your thoughts on them. You know, 1 of the things that I think is really, there's a couple of pieces that come together and I've talked about this from a development perspective, but it's true from a course development perspective to the cost of building the stuff. Is effectively going down close to zero because you have the tools to make it happen much more quickly whether it's an education platform that you're building out with with content or whether it's. You know working your backlog of code and getting your code piece down. You're driving costs down to build out your tools in a way that's incredible. So that factor comes into play. And then the factor for this. There's a TED speech from Sol Khan from the Khan Academy. And he's talking about
Kristine Kukich:the master at this.
Kevin Metzger:He's talking about how you can use education for kids, and educating. really he's talking about everybody and how you can develop training on a personalized basis Every individual now has a personalized tutor, he's talking about math and science, but you can do this on your on your products to
Kristine Kukich:exactly.
Kevin Metzger:where we're driving to
Kristine Kukich:We are this close. Like I can reach out and touch it
Kevin Metzger:It's fascinating.
Kristine Kukich:And there it's just going to be. a game changer for us in the business of customer education because of the resource allocation issues that we will always have. there's never going to be enough people for us to do the things everyone wants us to do And that's a given. that part of it means that I feel like I have some tools in my toolkit that will help me get there.
Kevin Metzger:what are the best tools that you're using right now?
Kristine Kukich:you know I'm a synthesia person. I'm really big on synthesia, which is a video tool like Roman was talking about. it's really helpful to take the script and either let it help you build the script or focus on the avatar. the language changes, the fact that I can, it's not super cool yet. to be honest, some of the voices are pretty bad. They're South African English is way better than Australian English, for example and I don't know why. that's true across the board. There's a whole series of tools that fit into that category. But that one happens to be my personal favorite right now. the guys at Descript are doing a pretty solid job with it as well, I'm a Claude AI person for my generative AI tool, just because out of the box, it actually. Is more like my voice. I don't have to do the tone conversation with it and remind it that This is the way that I speak. It comes out of the gate a lot more like what I would write and discuss. So as I build content, I tend to leverage that content more, but I do leverage all of the most popular generative AI tools because I test all the time. I'm in there looking and seeing which ones are doing things better or worse than others. I use chat GPT and Gemini I'm doing a lot of work with those tools, for my podcast, right? When we do our big cast, it summarizes our script. It generates our YouTube descriptions, the titles for our YouTube information. I go in, it generates the LinkedIn posts that we do with it. It generates I do a little 10 slack channel posts. about the episodes it builds all of that for me I still do the editing and clean things up a little bit. It doesn't always do it. It's never perfect, but.
Roman Trebon:Yeah.
Kristine Kukich:For me, the writing part is always the challenge. So I'm looking at my crystal ball,
Roman Trebon:Kristine, I see Kevin reaching out to you about AI podcast tools in the near future.
Kristine Kukich:using it to generate the thumbnails.
Roman Trebon:Yeah,
Kristine Kukich:for my video I've got to get several different initiatives where I'm using Gemini actually is coming out ahead in that game. Just FYI, but I'm there and mid journey just went free this this week.
Kevin Metzger:It was a day or something like that.
Kristine Kukich:Yeah. It's limited, but they still generate pretty awesome content. The guys at training magazine just did a big presentation with it last week. That talked about generating pictures and that kind of thing. anytime I'm doing presentations, I've had an opportunity now if I'm using it for analytics. The guys at Vizier do people analytics right now, and they have the best AI interface I love it.
Kevin Metzger:Oh, nice.
Kristine Kukich:So, it's right now still pretty targeted to people analytics. They're expanding, but, if you're not in the people analytics space, I don't know that there would be much benefit, but it's an HR tool for sure. those are probably my favorites in my toolkit right now, constantly changing. There's a website called fastpedia. io. it's a filtering tool that allows you to find tools, kind of like There's an AI for that dot com it's just a bunch of filters. And every time somebody creates a new tool, it gets listed in there with some tags and and you could go in and find tools that help like cast app, which is a video is a good one. Kevin cast app does a great job with helping you with video. It helps you grab snippets. of the full podcast or vidcast, you can use cast app and it'll grab 90, TikTok seconds of content.
Roman Trebon:this is great because it's like a little behind the scenes here when Kevin and I meet, like to be talking about the podcast. Like Kevin always has a new AI, it's my favorite, part of the meeting each week. now I know, Kristine, because of this conversation, I'm going to have a bunch more coming up, Cap, I think we're getting to the part of the podcast where we hit Kristine with the rapid fire questions. any last question before we segue?
Kevin Metzger:I think I'm good. let's go ahead and get to the rapid fire.
Kristine Kukich:Okay.
Kevin Metzger:Kristine, you ready for this?
Kristine Kukich:Okay, I think so. Let me I got no way I
Roman Trebon:can help out with this. All right. Early bird or night out early bird
Kevin Metzger:early bird. My day starts at 5
Roman Trebon:am
Kevin Metzger:what's your favorite book?
Kristine Kukich:favorite book. it would be any of the plays by Moliere.
Roman Trebon:Okay.
Kristine Kukich:My degree's in French. There's all of the plays, the screenplays from Moliere.
Roman Trebon:We've not gotten that on the podcast before. I love it. So, Kristine, you're in Portland, right? Keep me honest.
Kristine Kukich:If we,
Roman Trebon:if we visit Portland, what's the one thing we have to see and where are we eating?
Kristine Kukich:Oh my gosh, any dive bar will give you good food for cheap almost every dive bar. if you're really looking for something good, I would say I'm a big fan of Higgins, which is a French bistro place downtown. Portland is full of greenery. I'm going to send you out 84 and go see Multnomah Falls. it's one of the most spectacular views in all of Oregon.
Kevin Metzger:Oh, great. I love it. What's the one place that you'd like to go visit
Kristine Kukich:if I could go anywhere in the world that I haven't already been? I would love to take a cruise to Australia.
Roman Trebon:Nice. That would be a fun long cruise, but I think that'd be awesome.
Kristine Kukich:I just had a friend that came in from New Zealand they went on holiday for six weeks and did a cruise from New Zealand through Bali. to Vancouver, British Columbia. then they drove up to Alaska and down to visit us in Portland. They went to see Mount Rushmore. They stopped off in Nashville and they still managed to catch their ship. Oh no, they took a plane from LA to to Kyoto, Japan. And there's in Japan for another week. And then they're, they're back to New Zealand, next week.
Roman Trebon:I need some of that New Zealand PTO benefit. That sounds like an amazing trip.
Kristine Kukich:They have, a passive income household. They can pretty much do whatever they want.
Roman Trebon:perfect.
Kristine Kukich:All right, Christina, I would love to go on a cruise to Australia. I love it.
Roman Trebon:Where can our audience find more about the training shirt by you? where can they learn more?
Kristine Kukich:Kristinecookage. com will get me in. If you look for Kristine Cookage on LinkedIn, you'll find me. I'm the only one. And it's K U K I C H. Mixology is the name of our podcast, our vidcast on YouTube. if you do a search on YouTube for Mixology and KUKICH, up will come the, 15, 20 episodes that talk about customer education and customer marketing as the scale engines to customer success.
Roman Trebon:Well, Kristine, thank you so much for joining the show. It's been amazing and definitely check out the podcast, check out the training Sherpa in our audience. As always, thanks for listening. We really appreciate it. give us a like, give us a subscribe. Connect with us. We're on LinkedIn at Roman Trebon at Kevin Metzger. Check out our customer success playbook page on LinkedIn as well. And as always, thanks for listening and Kev, Keep on playing.
