Beyond Customer Education: The Next Chapter is Customer Everything

Content everywhere? Reporting structures shifting? Pressure to prove value mounting? That’s what we’re hearing. And no, we won’t tell you AI is the (only) solution.

100+ post-sale teams surveyed. Five clear insights.

In this report:

One thing has become clear about the customer education (CE) acronym—it’s too limiting. That’s why the next chapter is starting to look a lot more like customer everything (CE). 

We can see the field has evolved from ‘just education’ for product onboarding—it’s spanning the entire customer journey. You guessed it, all about driving retention, product adoption, and revenue. And with that, CE has outgrown the classroom and is on its way to getting a seat in the boardroom. 

While that sounds big-picture inspiring, what does that mean for you day-to-day? What do you need to adjust and adapt to? Yes, we’re talking about the ever-present juggle between strategy and execution. 

What we’ve learned? Learning exists just about everywhere, so your learners may feel scattered (and so do you). Yes, that was a lot of ‘learning’ in one sentence—because we get the overwhelm. But the good news? That means your roles are more important than ever. But that doesn’t mean navigating this new, blurry reality isn’t tricky. 

Enter our data report. Here to give you some of those answers you’re looking for.

After surveying over 100 of your peers from companies like Airtable, Autodesk, SurveyMonkey, Handshake, and the like, we found some stark trends:

  • Learners don’t just ‘learn’ in one place anymore. Between in-app, help centers, communities, academies…learners are quite literally, all over the place.  We call this ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’—and we know it is a tricky web to untangle. Plus, it's hard to know what content is working. 
  • You sit across multiple teams. CE often lives inside Customer Success, Marketing, Enablement, and beyond—so that fragmentation makes it harder to build influence. Plus, there’s growing proof that all ‘post-sale’ roles are evolving into a broader team of ‘customer experience’. If you’re wondering what that means for your own role and career growth, you’re not alone. 
  • You’re expected to do more with less. Content demands are rising, but budgets and headcount aren’t mounting at the same rate. 
  • You’re expected to prove your impact despite blurred roles and platforms. Engagement metrics won’t cut it—leadership wants to see CE’s effect on real business outcomes. .
  • And AI? It’s not replacing CE anytime soon. If anything, the hype cycle is leading to burnout, not breakthroughs. But used wisely, it can help you get out of content chaos and into tighter operations.

And don’t worry—we know no one wants a hundred pages of advice-free stats, so we’ve taken our very own ‘new playbook’ to this trends report. That means you can expect real facts, real advice, and of course real voices.

Bonus: Get the data in slide format

We know you might want to make some of the data your own or share it in a presentation,
so we created a deck just for that.

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The Learning Blur: Where Do They Go?

Education isn't confined to a single platform anymore. Instead, it's an omnipresent, always-on experience that meets learners wherever they are.

From in-app guides to self-paced academies, knowledge bases, and community discussions—customer education now spans countless channels, formats, and touchpoints. The days of the LMS being the sole home for learning are long gone.

Beyond just creating courses, where are educators contributing?
‍

 contribute to help centers, bridging the gap between product support and education.
 design onboarding programs, working alongside customer success to ensure users hit the ground running.
manage communities, fostering peer-to-peer learning and advocacy.
Effective product training delivers information at the moment of need. In-app training offers immediate, task-based learning, while an academy explores use cases, best practices, and workflows focused on the ‘what’s in it for me.’ The help center aids in troubleshooting and how-to guidance. Success comes from a seamless experience where customers access the right content, in the right place, exactly when they need it.
Roberto Aiello
Sr. Learning Experience Designer, Personio

And when you are creating courses, let's get clear on where the asks come from.

While managing different platforms, with requests from different teams, what's in store?

Learners navigate multiple touchpoints daily. Whether it’s in-product guidance, video tutorials, interactive demos, or peer-to-peer community engagement, the learning journey is rarely linear.

Tracking impact is harder than ever. With so many learning formats in play, it’s challenging to pinpoint which ones drive real adoption and retention.

Educators are curating, not just creating. The shift toward omnichannel learning means CE leaders are no longer just content producers—they're orchestrators of knowledge, ensuring the right content reaches the right learner at the right time.

So then the question becomes—how do you measure success when learning happens everywhere? The best teams aren’t just tracking completions—they’re analyzing learner behavior across multiple channels and tying education back to business impact through a central hub. Now, connecting all of the dots takes work, and that's why we'll be bringing you templates and stories to unwind the maze of the new learning experience. Not to mention building the case for your leadership team around why each of these platforms plays an integral role.

The Hybrid CE Team: Where to Sit in Class?

Where Does Customer Education Sit? Everywhere.

Since the idea of learning on just one platform has changed, so has the nature of the team that creates education. The siloed idea of CE—an academy, a set of training videos, a dedicated team—no longer reflects reality. CE is embedded across functions, influencing the entire customer journey.While that’s great to know, what can you do with it? Where should you sit, how do you shape your future?
30%
report to Customer Success
15%
sit in Customer Enablement
13%
are in standalone CE teams
9%
are part of Support
8%
live in Marketing, Product, or Professional Services
But job titles don’t tell the whole story. Education pros aren’t just “educators” anymore. They’re product experts, community builders, content strategists, and revenue enablers. That means you're focused not just on what team you sit on, what what outcomes your business needs to drive.

At once stage, it may be faster onboarding, at another, it may be deeper expansion. The result? You may move teams to enable those outcomes, and your focus in the future may no longer be on a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all title, but a host of responsibilities that fuel a more hybrid team.
Regardless of where you sit in an organization or how large your team is, finding natural partnerships is what drives Customer Education programs further and with more value for customers. Partnering with your customer-facing teams to leverage the resources they're creating enables CE teams to extend their reach and bolster their influence.
Mandy Patterson
Manager, Customer Education, Sprout Social
We’re prioritizing intentional alignment with Product, Marketing, Success, and Support teams more than ever before, to seamlessly integrate learning throughout the customer journey. At Handshake, 'setting the pace and tone' is a core principle, and we strive for agility… but we recognize that building trust requires a commitment to continuous feedback and iteration, so we appreciate being able to sit with different teams and carry their perspectives into our work.
Lohana Richmond Clancy
Senior Customer Education Specialist, Handshake

Content Chaos: Are You Stuck in the CE Hamster Wheel?

More Courses ≠ More Value

Now that you’ve seen just how common team and resource lines are blurring, it probably comes as no shock that CE teams are still drowning in content requests (and mostly from customer success). What does this show up as? A proverbial content hamster wheel—creating 'more' courses, but still having limited view into impact.

More Content, Fewer People, Higher Expectations, Confusing Impact

of CE teams have just 2–5 members.
are solo practitioners.
average production of courses per year

And here’s the kicker: Even when creating nearly 20 courses per year on average, 20+% of teams don't know the impact. And over 30% of teams think that only 11-20% of their courses are driving the most impact.

A skilled team with the right tools and time to use them well can produce outsized results. Between AI author-assistance and automation platforms like Zapier, a small team can cover a lot of ground.
Eric Mistry
Strategy & Shared Services Operations Manager, Contentsquare
The stat around course creation hit me hard, especially past me! We used to think 'more is more'. We were thoroughly on the content creation hamster wheel. 2024 was the year where we really zoomed in on the type of courses that have the biggest impact, and I'm never turning back.
Blair Mishleau
Principal Customer Education Program Manager, Clever

Breaking the Cycle

If you’ve found yourself on a content hamster wheel—you’re not alone, and here are a few insights to get started breaking the cycle.

‍Audit your content. Which courses actually move the needle? What’s just noise? Start by isolating key areas of drop-off between courses.

Prioritize like a sprint-master. Not every content request should get a green light—filter ideas through impact-first criteria. We give you full permission to embrace 'no' as an answer to haphazard requests!

‍Use AI selectively. AI can assist with formatting, voiceovers, and script drafting—but it won’t replace instructional design. We'll certainly get to this, but more content isn't always 'better'.

At Handshake we also embody the principle of 'Moved to Act,' recognizing that perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good. We focus on iterative improvements, continuously refining our approach based on data and feedback. This includes integrating our LMS with our CRM to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and actively soliciting both internal/external feedback through various channels—course surveys, focus groups, post-event surveys, 1:1 user research—and it uncovers what content is actually important.
Lohana Richmond Clancy
Senior Customer Education Specialist, Handshake
Check yourself:

👉 If you could only create three new learning assets this year, what would they be? Why?‍

‍👉 If you had to delete half your courses today, which ones would you fight to keep? That’s where your real value lies.

From Classroom to Boardroom: The Metrics That Matter Now

What the C-Suite Wants vs. What CE Teams Report


You’ve heard it time and time again—what you can’t measure, you can’t fix. And that’s even more true for getting funding and C-suite support.

The disconnect between what the C-suite wants, and what CE can deliver still needs some TLC.

We found that the three metrics that matter most to the C-Suite are:
prioritize Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
focus on Product Adoption
look at Time-to-Value (TTV)

Despite NRR, Product Adoption, and TTV mattering most to the C-suite—only 10.4% of respondents can tie their programs to all three. But, there is some positive progress:

  • 24.5% connect to two
  • 59% can tie to one
  • 10.5% can’t connect to any

The Problem? Most CE teams still track engagement-level metrics (course completions, NPS, CSAT)—which only 14% of executives prioritize.

What's more? Pressure is mounting.
‍

The insight around teams showing impact are 4x more likely to secure budget increases/promotions felt like a shot to the arm. We've done a lot of work to show impact historically, but have lagged a bit the last few quarters due to capacity constraints from our data team. I'm saying it here to hold myself accountable: in 2025 we're going to show the impact of our work even more than ever!
Blair Mishleau
Principal Customer Education Program Manager,
Clever

The pressure is up.

So what can you do?

The Cost of Misalignment

  • With 60%+ of CE professionals reporting increased pressure from leadership to prove their business impact, what does that mean?
  • Teams that can’t prove value are 5.7x more likely to face budget cuts.
  • Teams that align to leadership priorities are 4x more likely to secure more resources and promotions.

How to Secure CE’s Seat at the Table

  • Drop vanity metrics. Shift from “course completions” to “impact on revenue, expansion, and retention.”
  • Integrate with CRM & BI tools. Your data is useless if it lives in a spreadsheet executives never open.
  • Define success beyond training. What does an educated customer look like in your business? How does that influence their behavior?
We still struggle to tie training consumption to revenue, but in the last year, we've made some big strides using other data. We identify key drop-off points in our customer learning journey and design interventions to push them past those tricky learning moments. We also measure the adoption of training for our various products and are working on training users on the entire platform, not only the products they might currently be using. While working on better business outcome metrics, we focus on what we can control and measure.
Senior Customer Education Manager, Safe Software
Check yourself:

👉 If your CE program stopped existing tomorrow, what measurable business outcome would suffer? If you don’t know, neither does your leadership team.

AI in CE: Over or Under-Hyped?

AI’s Role in Customer Education

A common sentiment we've heard? "I feel like we’re all a little burnt out from the AI talk. It’s everywhere, but what’s actually working?"

While 85% of CE teams report a productivity boost from AI, but the benefits are highly specific:

AI excels at automating transcription, localization, and repetitive admin tasks.

AI struggles with depth. Most teams report that AI-generated content lacks the nuance, clarity, or accuracy customers need.

AI-driven personalization is overhyped. AI recommendations often feel too generic to deliver real value.

The use and usefulness of AI is constantly evolving, and we're only going to see it more. Smart use of AI will allow us to provide relevant, customized education in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago.

A skilled team with the right tools and time to use them well can produce outsized results. Between AI author-assistance and automation platforms like Zapier, a small team can cover a lot of ground.
Eric Mistry
Strategy & Shared Services Operations Manager, Contentsquare

Where AI Fits (and Where It Fails)

  • AI isn’t a strategy—it’s a tool. If your entire AI plan is just “we use AI,” that’s not a plan. It’s a checkbox. AI should fit into your workflows, not define them.
  • Automation is great—until it isn’t. AI can speed up transcriptions, localization, and content tagging. But instructional design? Customer insights? Strategy? That still needs people.
  • AI-driven personalization is mostly hype (for now). Generic recommendations don’t equal meaningful learning. Until AI can actually understand intent (not just surface-level behavior), don’t over-rely on it.
  • Not great for: More content isn’t the answer—better content is. AI can generate endless material, but if it’s not grounded in customer needs, it’s just adding noise. Quality > Quantity.eep instructional design, strategic content prioritization, or customer insights.
  • Slapping “AI-powered” on something doesn't mean it's helpful. Saying you use AI is like saying you use Wi-Fi. The real question is: does it actually improve customer experience? If not, it’s just marketing fluff.
  • AI won’t replace CE teams, but it will reshape them. The best teams aren’t asking “How do we use AI?” They’re asking “How do we work smarter?” AI is just one piece of that puzzle.
AI is most powerful when it enhances, not replaces, our creativity. I’ve used AI to draft initial content, allowing subject matter experts to focus on adding depth and context instead of starting from scratch. This approach frees up time for strategic work like content distribution and innovation. The key is using AI to amplify human insight, not bypass it.
Roberto Aiello
Sr. Learning Experience Designer, Personio

That’s a Wrap—Onto the Next Chapter of ‘Customer Everything’

With that, it's clear you need to:

  • Continue to invest in education that drives real C-suite outcomes, not just 'course creation'
  • Embrace the future of CE spans multiple platforms and multiple teams—meaning more influence, but more complexity
  • Ruthlessly prioritize what content you invest in, knowing 'more' is not always more impactful
  • Use AI wisely—but don’t give it too much credit on any report card, it still has a long way to go. 

If you were worried this is the end of your data journey with us—it's just beginning. 2025 will be chock-full of Skilljar insights and real stories to help you drive these new learnings forward. So, here's to our next chapter together—let's get started.

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