Establishing Universal Truth—How Quantum Metric Built a Customer Education Program by Capturing Tribal Knowledge

Customer Experience is all about storytelling. You can do product training. You can direct somebody to a help article. You can lay out all of the menu options. All of that is necessary—but you have to wrap it around a story. That is how you build passionate ambassadors of your product.

As the Director of Enablement at Quantum Metric—which supports digital experiences for brands such as Alaska Airlines, Lululemon, and Lenovo—Chauncy Cay Ford builds training content to empower customers to achieve their goals using Quantum Metric’s real-time user experience data platform.

Before joining Colorado’s latest unicorn in 2019, Chauncy had spent more than two decades at Fortune 50 companies, working for over 15 years in IT Services before pivoting to head the Digital Customer Experience program at Dell Technologies. A transition which “made me fall in love with technology again,” reflects Chauncy. 

In the second chapter of her career, Chauncy discovered the impact of capturing an organization’s tribal knowledge—and using the art of storytelling to power customer education. “When I found a path in Digital Customer Experience, it really connected all of the pieces for me. The one thing from my IT days that became the foundation of my career is that telling a story through technology solutions helps people feel confident and excited to uplevel themselves,” says Chauncy. 

Armed with a newfound passion for customer experience, Chauncy reveled at the chance to take on a new challenge, spearheading the development of Quantum Metric University (QMU), Quantum Metric’s academy to train and educate customers and partners. 

Setting the foundation for QMU

Chauncy’s first prototype of QMU existed as a pilot program for 50 Quantum Metric customers, with training programs stored in Google Classrooms. While customers showed an appetite for learning, the program’s UX was flawed, and it quickly became clear that an LMS would be necessary to scale the program for thousands of global learners. 

When Chauncy discovered that Quantum Metric’s Sales Enablement team was adopting an LMS, she had a lightbulb moment. She realized that having all learning information for internal and external stakeholders within one platform made sense—not only from an investment standpoint, but also from a knowledge-sharing standpoint. 

As Chauncy began building out content for v.2 of QMU, she leaned into the expertise and experience of her organization, immediately framing product training as an exercise in storytelling. “As you build engaging content, getting tribal knowledge from your field teams is critical,” she says. “Stories and quotes from the field create peer-to-peer learning moments that are invaluable.” 

Launching with a [Quantum] leap

After generating 50+ training modules, featuring knowledge from subject-matter experts across the organization—in a variety of formats to accommodate any learning style—Chauncy was ready to launch QMU. To generate excitement and early adopters, QMU debuted at Quantum Metric’s first user conference, Quantum Leap. 

The majority of Quantum Leap attendees—more than 150 Quantum Metric partners, customers, and prospects—arrived for the San Diego conference a day early to partake in product training. The crowd was the first to complete a Quantum Metric Fundamentals course, participating in four hours of QMU certification training. 

With momentum from the February 2020 conference, QMU’s user base quickly grew far beyond the list of Quantum Leap attendees. By mid-2020, 1,020 partners and customers were members of Quantum Metric University—today, QMU has amassed nearly 2,000 users. Most important to Chauncy, 74% of Quantum Metric’s total customer base have completed their Quantum Metric Fundamentals certification. “To me, those are my ambassadors,” says Chauncy.  

Transforming prospects into brand evangelists

While QMU was developed to support partners and customers, Chauncy was surprised by the amount of Quantum Metric prospects who engaged in the fundamentals certification at Quantum Leap. In a lot of ways, QMU has inadvertently become a vehicle for turning prospects into enthusiastic customers.

“We gave prospects access to the demo environment and Quantum Metric University. They evangelized their peers, then their peers requested access and got certified themselves—all before purchasing the product,” says Chauncy. “It just goes to show you that real stories, real narratives, make a difference. It’s not just your average ‘click here, click there’ training; with QMU we’ve created a narrative that makes people excited about using our product.”

Leaning into Continuous Product Design

Many of the principles that made QMU a success were adopted from Quantum Metric’s signature platform for customers, Continuous Product Design. Continuous Product Design enables Quantum Metric customers to be agile in quickly iterating on their products, by making real-time data about customer experience available across an organization. As Chauncy built out her customer education strategy, she made her mission to “grow, develop, and iterate on—essentially apply Continuous Product Design—to QMU.” 

“Continuous Product Design is all about ramping faster—and you can only do that with a single version of the truth,” says Chauncy. With a bit of engineering magic, QMU is integrated directly within the Quantum Metric platform, so at any point that a customer needs help or guidance while using the platform, they can access QMU’s learnings. 

Chauncy realizes that for many new customers, the visibility provided by the Continuous Product Design platform could feel intimidating. “It’s something you’ve never seen before. You’ve never had this visibility,” says Chauncy. She sees QMU as providing a source of understanding in the Continuous Product Design ecosystem. “We’re really in the middle, bringing everyone together,” she explains. 

Uniting employees through shared understanding

Though QMU certifications were originally built for partners and customers, they have become crucial to the company’s continuous learning program and onboarding process—especially during a 2020 initiative that involved onboarding 90 new hires in 90 days. The ways in which QMU has evolved into a knowledge-sharing platform across the entire organization was exactly what Chauncy had envisioned when collaborating with the sales team to adopt an end-to-end LMS.

Tapping into QMU for internal onboarding

Repurposing product training for internal teams not only saves time and resources, but also helps create a universal understanding of Quantum Metric’s product and values among customers, partners, and employees. “You have to build product and company knowledge internally. You have to be sure that everybody understands why they’re at the company. Everyone from your finance people to your legal team—they have to know and love your product to some extent,” says Chauncy. 

Everyone at our company takes the fundamentals training, because if you don’t know the product and believe in the goodness that it brings to customers, then why are you here?

Empowering professional growth

Scaling all training resources across the organization creates a center of learning excellence, which Chauncey believes serves as a catalyst for professional growth. “We actually encourage employees to tap into training for different roles at the company and take in the opportunity to spend a day in someone else’s shoes. We’re all about building and sharing tribal knowledge, and growing together,” says Chauncy.

Embracing the evolution of QMU

QMU is not done. This is version two of… I have no idea how many. Our product changes iteratively, constantly, and continuously. We’re focused on curating better learnings for our users. We’re focused on what we need to prioritize for the most people and the most impact, to provide true value for our customers.

Taking a page from the Continuous Product Design playbook, Chauncy is continually iterating on Quantum Metric University to ensure that it delivers the best possible experience for customers, partners, and employees. As Quantum Metric grows, so too does the tribal knowledge of the organization—making for a more informed and enhanced customer education program.

“If I can get one customer to achieve success using our products—I’ve been helpful,” says Chauncy. “I’ve not only enabled them to use the product but empowered them to deliver with confidence and share their story. It’s all about the story.”

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Thanks to Chauncy Cay Ford for sharing Quantum Metric’s customer education strategy with us. 

Catch her full webinar on our YouTube channel and visit our customer testimonials page to see why Chauncy and her team chose to partner with WorkRamp.