3 CX lessons from the CEO of Nelson
Steve Brown hadn’t been working in education for very long before he looked at the sector’s plethora of digital platforms and issued a report card of sorts – and none of them were getting a passing grade.
This was 2016, when Brown had been approached to become the next CEO of Nelson, a company best known for publishing textbooks used in K-12 schools across Canada. One of his first self-appointed tasks was to look at the tools available to empower teachers and students beyond the printed page.
CEO, Nelson
“They were all awful,” Brown told 360 Magazine. “They had taken the pedagogy of the textbook and tried to transplant it in a platform, and basically that made it way too difficult to navigate. It didn’t make it a very immersive experience, and the technology behind it was built by people in the publishing industry, not technologists.”
Since then Brown has led Nelson to develop its own digital learning platform, Edwin. The result has been teachers surveyed in 2024 reporting saving almost one hour per week in lesson planning, finding resources and creating assessments. That’s an equivalent of one prep period per week or one full week a year.
Recent updates to Edwin include changes to its “browse by curriculum” feature where by teachers can easily access the latest curriculum-linked content for their subjects with the click of a button.
Brown’s success at Edwin offers a number of potential lessons for customer experience (CX) professional sin many other sectors, such as:
1. Capture the voice of the customer early on
Brown didn’t just spend his early days at Nelson looking at digital platforms. He estimates he visited thousands of classrooms to get a better sense of the experiences students found engaging in other areas of their life outside of school. Not one of them, he concluded, was about to get excited at the prospect of being handed a new textbook.
“The first thing to do was create relevance in how we were supporting various learning styles, and to create enjoyment and experiential learning, because then it would be students who are immersing themselves in the material, rather than being forced to do it,” he said. “Print and bind is only a delivery mechanism. Why can’t it be in bite sized pieces instead of a table of contents at the beginning? Why can’t it be discoverable via keyword or subject or image? What we needed to do was to go and amass world class technologies and convince them that the platform is agnostic to the content. We would across text, audio and video.”
2. Apply consumer expectations across customer segments
Like business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) companies, Nelson has more than one kind of customer to serve. Besides students and teachers, for instance, there is often someone at a school level (like an administrator) or a board-level decision maker involved in deploying something like Edwin. That could make for a complex set of CX decisions, but Brown kept things simple.
“I focused on the consumer experience, because in every other sector, if the consumer experience isn’t good, companies die,” he said. “Eventually you get everybody.”
That said, there are aspects to CX that are more important to certain groups than others. While Edwin needs to be engaging for students, Brown said the goal for teachers was to save time.
Many teachers today are tasked with a number of duties beyond working directly with children in a classroom, he pointed out, so giving them more hours to actually teach was an important goal.
3. Go beyond meeting needs to illustrating the art of the possible
Edwin was designed to be intuitive, but that didn’t necessarily mean teachers would immediately grasp its full potential. That’s why Nelson has developed a Classroom Success Team, which is made up entirely of educators, to support for teachers and students throughout the school year.
“There are some teachers who don’t really like technology, and actually, they’re the first ones to flip (and change their outlook),” he said. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, my God, if this was available 20 years ago, I would have been a more successful teacher. Showing them the art of the possible really allows teachers to soar.”
Despite Nelson’s success under his leadership, Brown admitted that CX overhauls don’t always adhere to the intended timeline.
“I got the direction right, but the speed wrong. I didn’t realize how slowly the education sector moved,” he said, suggesting CX leaders in other industries should be bold in confronting long-established ways of working.
“If you ask consumers what they want from whatever it is you do, you’ll end up with pretty much what they’ve already got, because they don’t know what true greatness, what true differentiation is. So just be fearless and boundaryless and go beyond existing paradigms.”
