Mark Oehlert, Director of Customer Education at Qualtrics, has worked across internal L&D, government training, and customer-facing education. In this interview, he discusses what changes, and what remains the same, when your learners are customers, why customer education metrics can provide a sharper view of impact, and how organizations can move beyond quick answers to create learning experiences that drive deeper engagement and value. He also previews his DevLearn 2026 session on what internal L&D teams can learn from customer education, and vice versa.
Q: How did you get your start in learning and development?
A: Yeah, you know, pretty much the same as everybody else, got advanced degrees in anthropology and history, and then left grad school to go to work in the Office of Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. Totally backed into it, in other words, and happened to find myself working in the Office of Readiness and Training, which was basically the strategy shop across DOD for how we were going to do everything that we call non-kinetic training, which is everything that’s not about pulling a trigger or dropping a bomb. So 90% of what DOD does is corporate in a sense, right? And so all the training on that side is what we had oversight on in terms of policy. So back into it on that side, you know, I was kind of the emerging technology guy, always looking at the newest thing and then getting schooled by my new bosses on, well, we actually need to have a requirement for what we do with it.
Q: What does your current role look like?
A: Yes, so right now I lead the learning strategy and innovation efforts for a combined team within Qualtrics that covers not just Qualtrics Learn, which is our customer education site, but our customer advocacy program and some little piece of our community program. So my role is figuring out strategy for how all those pieces kind of work together, both on the front end for the customer experience and on the back end in terms of how can we unify the data so that we provide a really personalized experience for the learner. And so also on the innovation side, trying to figure out how we explore all the new technology. AI is a big one right now, and figuring out how to provide value to the customer in the best, most efficient kind of way. I mean, one of the things that’s a good challenge is that Qualtrics has a really powerful platform, but there’s also a, that means there’s a lot to learn. And so we have a really big remit to make sure that we figure out the best ways to get the information to the customers when they need it, in the way they need it, so that they get the best value from the platform and I’m on the strategy and innovation side of that.
Q: What surprised you most when moving between the worlds of internal L&D and customer education?
A: I don’t know if it was a surprise, but the biggest difference is that on the customer education side, the metrics are so clean. I spent a long time on internal L&D trying to figure out how to, you know, put those slides together for the QBR that showed how effective we are the impact we’re making on people’s performance within the organization. On the customer education side, and I can just look at retention, churn reduction, ticket deflection, maturity, platform usage, all those metrics are right there and they’re tied directly to the dollar value that the leadership recognizes. And so that’s kind of the, you know, we all use the same tools. We all, you know, use the same kind of design principles. But for me, that biggest difference is, man, do we have a sharp edge in terms of our metrics, right? I think the other piece is that with internal L&D you don’t really have any competition internal to your team. You’re providing the employee training. That’s it, right? But when I was at, say, AWS training and certification, one of our biggest competitors was a group of people who have a company that was training people on our platform better than we were. And so that other sharp edge of the metrics is that for customer education, people will vote with their feet and take their traffic elsewhere. So we have to stay really focused on the value we’re providing to the customer. But in return, we get really sharp metrics back from it.
Q: Why would you say customer education is becoming such an important conversation right now?
A: So for Qualtrics, it’s important because like I said, we have a really powerful platform that has a lot that you can do within it. And the trick though is it’s got a really simple front end. Like when people ask me who I work for, I say Qualtrics and they’re like, “Who’s that?” and I said, “Have you ever taken an online survey?” and chances are that’s us, right? The challenge for customers is to see past that, right? What’s the next, like, why do, I’m doing my survey, why do I care about synthetic data panels? Right? So we need to be able to show them the value of that so that they can deepen their usage and get more value from the platform that they’ve already bought, right? And so I think when you have a really powerful platform like Qualtrics, customer education becomes really important at deepening maturity, increasing usage, you know, making retention really sticky. And so I think those are the kinds of dynamics that have pulled customer education to the fore. I think one of my favorite examples is Excel from Microsoft is probably one of the most powerful programs ever created. And they did such a, you know, I don’t want to say bad job, but they just understood that people would think it’s a spreadsheet and that’s what we’re going to do. And along comes this woman named Kat Norton. She goes by Miss Excel and she started doing really funny TikTok videos on like how to do a pivot table. And all of a sudden, she’s got millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers. And she’s teaching them about Excel, right? Because it’s a really powerful deep program. And so I think that’s the kind of thing that makes customer education so important is you have a chance to really draw the customer in and honestly help them get value from the thing that they’ve already bought.
Q: Can you give a sneak peek into your session at DevLearn 2026?
A: T here’s a compare and contrast kind of portion of the session, right? Like I want to go over like having been in both worlds, internal and customer facing, want to look at some of the things that are, that I’ve seen are the same and what are those things that are different and along the lines of how can we learn from each other? How can we, what does one do better than the other can copy, right? But I also think there’s, I’ll never miss a chance to kind of go wide and say that regardless of if we’re serving an internal or an external customer, we need to be looking at how we do design differently, how we engage our customers, whether or not we’re an internal or external team, we have customers and how we engage them in really compelling learning experiences that can help them do their jobs better. So I want to, and there’s also a little bit in there from the Three Stooges that’s around buying a refrigerator, but I don’t want to spoil that. So that’ll be in there too.
Q: What’s one myth about customer education you’d like to challenge?
A: I think it’s that what customers want is just an FAQ. That they just want a quick answer. And to a degree, that’s true. In some instances, they want a quick answer. Again, if your platform is a complex, powerful platform, customers are also going to want longer form, deeper engagements with how-to’s, and not just how-to’s, but what’s the value of doing the thing. One of the things we are a big user conference every year is called X4. And it used to be that our learn content was on a separate day. So you would come a day early, go through all the training, and then the X4 conference would kick off. And what we got was feedback from strategic leaders who were saying, I actually want to know the operational details of the platform so I don’t look like I’m dumb when I’m talking to my brand admin. And the brand admins are saying, I would love to go to those X4 sessions and see what kind of strategies are being talked about so that I understand what’s coming down the road. And so I think that myth that all customers want is a quick hit, is an FAQ, is a quick answer. Sometimes that’s right. Other times they want to be shown the value of what’s next and have deeper engagement so they can learn to do more powerful things with the platform.
