Undercurrents surfaces insights from leaders driving capacity-building
By Mark Britz
and performance improvement beyond traditional L&D
to explore where learning happens and where it’s headed.
When people talk about customer education, the conversation often sounds familiar: courses, content libraries, certifications. But in speaking with Debbie Smith, president of the Customer Education Management Association (CEdMA), it becomes clear that this framing is too small. Customer education, as she practices it, isn’t about building learning assets. It’s about driving business outcomes—and proving it.
That distinction shows up immediately in how she talks about her work.
“I don’t teach people so they learn anymore,” she says. “I teach people to drive outcomes.”
That mindset didn’t come from theory. It came from a career that zigzagged through business, education, and SaaS—each step sharpening her ability to connect learning to measurable impact.
From Learning to Revenue
Smith didn’t start in learning. She started in business, working alongside CFOs before moving into teaching and instructional design. That early exposure to financial thinking shaped how she evaluates learning today.
By the time she entered SaaS, she had both the instinct and the tools to connect learning data with business metrics. The results were hard to ignore.
At one organization, customers who engaged in eLearning showed an 11% increase in ARR (annual recurring revenue, a measure of ongoing contracts and subscription renewals). Instructor-led participants saw a 25% increase. Customers with certified builders—learners who have earned specific certifications—drove a 69% increase.
Those numbers changed the conversation.
Learning wasn’t just a support function anymore—it was a lever for growth.
But Smith is careful about how that story gets told. One of the most common mistakes she sees is in the language learning teams use to describe impact. If you are talking about reducing customer churn, that’s an outcome, not ROI.
“ROI is actually a calculation for a CFO,” she explains. You actually have to look at how much money you spent on customer education, and then do the calculation to determine what the return was on that investment.
Calling something “ROI” when it’s really just an outcome may seem minor, but at senior levels, it signals whether you understand how the business actually works.
The Question Most Teams Skip
For Smith, one of the most overlooked questions in both L&D and customer education is also the simplest:
“One of the mistakes that people make is not asking why their function exists.”
Customer education can serve many roles. In some companies, it generates revenue. In others, it reduces churn, lowers support costs, drives adoption, or fuels expansion. The problem is not choosing the wrong role—it’s never asking the question in the first place.
Too often, teams default to producing courses without tying their work to a clearly defined business problem. That’s where credibility breaks down.
Smith experienced this shift firsthand. Early in her career, she believed her role was to create courses. Only later did she realize the real goal was operational: onboarding faster, reducing inefficiencies, helping people do their jobs better.
That reframing changes everything.
Stop Teaching Topics
If there’s one idea Smith returns to repeatedly, it’s this: “You need to stop thinking about topics. Just stop. It has to be about what the customer’s trying to do, what the employee’s trying to do.”
In fast-moving SaaS environments, products change constantly. Features evolve. Interfaces shift. Training built around topics—or worse, navigation details—becomes obsolete almost immediately.
“If you’re doing any technical training, don’t talk about the color and the size of the button; talk about the functionality of it. What does it actually do?”
Debbie Smith
Smith points to a simple but telling example: teams that describe “the blue button in the top- right corner.” When that button changes color or location, the training breaks—and in some cases, so does customer trust.
The alternative is designing around jobs to be done.
Customers aren’t trying to learn features. They’re trying to accomplish something. When content is structured around tasks:
- It becomes modular
- It’s easier to update
- It can be reused across formats (courses, in-product guidance, community posts)
- And most importantly, it stays relevant
This isn’t just a content strategy shift. It’s a shift in how teams think about work itself.
Community Is the Multiplier
Another area Smith sees underutilized is community—but not in the way most organizations define it.
Community isn’t a platform. It’s the network of people learning from each other.
“When you see someone using a product and getting better results than you do,” she says, “You develop FOMO.”
That social dynamic can help you get to the next level, she explains. ” in SAS, we tend to think about community as the community platform… just a piece of software,” she continues. The users, the practitioners are the real community, she concludes.
Professional curiosity mixed with a desire to improve is powerful. Customer education can amplify it by:
- Showcasing real use cases
- Creating visible recognition (like certifications)
- Encouraging peer interaction
Smith shared an example of a certification program where participants celebrated with a cap-and-gown moment. It sounds small, but it created a sense of identity—and drove others to pursue certification just to be part of it.
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, these human connections may become even more important.
The AI Trap
Smith is pragmatic about AI. She uses it. She sees its value. But she’s also clear about its risks.
“If you take data and put it into AI and ask it to analyze, and there’s blanks, it will fill in the missing data for you,” she says. “That’s skewing your data.”
The bigger issue isn’t the tool—it’s how people use it.
AI can accelerate analysis and content creation. It can also accelerate bad thinking.
The skill that matters now isn’t prompting. It’s critical thinking and systems thinking.
Smith encourages a simple but demanding habit: Read sentence by sentence, assume it might be wrong, and interrogate it.
That discipline is what separates thoughtful practitioners from those simply producing more output.
Letting Go of Old Models
For learning professionals moving into customer education, the shift is not just technical—it’s philosophical.
It requires letting go of some familiar instincts:
- Drop academic writing in favor of clear, concise writing.
- Understand learning theory, “but be willing to break the rules and go outside of the learning theories.”
- Balance perfectionism the need to produce results, quickly.
“We have to produce things much faster than people do traditionally in the L&D space,” Smith said. “Because our products change much more frequently.”
She cites a company that produces daily updates. “Think about how you are creating content when your software is changing on a daily basis. It’s just craziness…”
Keeping up with that pace doesn’t mean abandoning rigor. It means redefining it—around alignment, adaptability, and impact.
What Maturity Looks Like
So what does a mature customer education function actually look like?
Not a massive course catalog. Instead, you’d see:
- Learning data connected to CRM and business metrics
- Content structured around real-world tasks
- Community integrated into the learning experience
- Clear links between education and outcomes like revenue, retention, or adoption
Most importantly, you’d see a shift in mindset: Learning isn’t the goal. Changed behavior is. And beyond that—business impact.
The Undercurrent
The deeper thread running through Smith’s perspective is simple but demanding:
Learning is judged by consequence.
In fast-moving, AI-augmented organizations, customer education sits at the intersection of revenue, retention, and reputation. It can be a cost center—or it can be a growth lever.
The difference isn’t the content you create.
It’s whether you can connect what people learn to what the business values—and prove that connection clearly enough that no one questions your seat at the table.
