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In this edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Daniel Quick from Asana to share his insights and tips about training customers!

What are your responsibilities at Asana?

Asana helps teams coordinate and manage their work. It’s not only a tool, but also a framework for collaboration and productivity. Like most SaaS businesses, user adoption is paramount, and critical to adoption is education.

The mission of User Education at Asana is to deliver learning experiences across the customer journey that enable users to realize value and achieve mastery. It’s easy to show someone how to use a tool; the real challenge is in getting teams to change the way they work. Obviously, we believe using Asana can help any team become more effective. Our job is to make sure we’re telling users how and why, and make adoption drop-dead easy.

Thankfully, User Education at Asana is truly “all hands on board.” Everyone — from product to marketing to sales — is thinking about how we can make our customers more successful. Our User Education committee — comprised of people across the company — meets monthly to discuss our initiatives. My job is to oversee the educational landscape and ensure we’re aligned.

What principles are important to you when considering a customer education strategy?

The first that comes to mind is: Engagement. Motivation plays a big role in learning, and this is especially true for customer education, where users usually “opt-in” to resources. I come from the world of “edutainment,” and so I’m interested in game theory, flow, and feedback loops as learning strategies. User Experience plays a huge role, too. The more we can “turn up the delight,” the more we can make learning more profound and lasting.

Another principle that’s important to me is: Efficiency. It’s important to remind myself that our customers are busy people with important jobs to do. How can we increase the impact of learning experiences while minimizing the time and effort it takes to discover and complete them? What do users really need to know NOW, and what can we teach them later?

Finally, a principle that underlies it all: Effectiveness. How do we know if our programs are actually enabling our users to realize value and achieve mastery? What is the relationship between our engagement with our programs and metrics we care about, like adoption, NPS, and renewals. At Asana, data plays an integral role in shaping the direction of our strategy.

What advice do you have for other training professionals?

Practice empathy with your customers. It’s easy to get distracted by our own expertise or the needs the business, but I believe in always bringing the focus back to the customer. Gain the best possible understanding of them: their needs, their desires, and their problems. Then, use that knowledge as the underlying blueprint for your customer education program.

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In our Training Tips series, we asked Training, Marketing, and Customer Success Managers what some of their best practices are to get the most out of a customer training program. Stay tuned for new Q&As each month!