Customer Education: What It Is and Why It Matters for Your Business is your guide to what it is and why it matters to your company.
Customer education is the process of instructing customers on how to utilise and appreciate items. It helps clients at various phases of their journey as a business function.
Customer Education educates buyers and influencers about the industry and the goods prior to a sale. Customer Education follows the sale and instructs customers on how to use the goods. This allows them to obtain the greatest amount of value over time.
Customer education isn’t about the acts you do to educate customers; it’s not about hosting webinars, offering training, or producing articles. Yes, it frequently entails all of them. However, the role that a Customer Education programme performs in your company is what distinguishes it.
Customer education does not refer to the actions you do to educate customers, such as conducting webinars, providing training, or writing articles. Yes, it frequently includes them all. What sets a Customer Education programme apart from others is the position it plays in your organisation.
This description is intentionally vague about which programmers are part of your portfolio. To attain the final aim, Customer Education departments might employ a variety of programmes and tactics, and no two are similar. Later in this book, we’ll look at various popular formats and applications.
Let’s look carefully at the definition we offered to see why Customer Education is vital.
Customer education is a role rather than an activity.
Customer education is a crucial company role, as we previously discussed. It’s more than a pastime. These are actions, not a Customer Education plan, if you offer training or write articles. Customers are usually educated organically by most companies at first. Everyone contributes to customer training, writing support articles, and creating webinars and videos. That is very understandable. Customer Education must, however, be formalised at some point.
There are several reasons why Customer Education should be considered a role rather than an activity. To begin with, you will not have a Customer Education plan if no one owns it. Everyone will continue to contribute, but the results may vary. You’ll begin to waste time and effort by duplicating activities. Worse still, your customer’s journey will not be simple.
A Customer Education approach also aids in your long-term development. You’ll eventually develop a programme portfolio. An online school, a support centre, a public training or webinar programme, in-product education, certificates or badging, and paid learning services are all possibilities. This type of programme necessitates strict adherence to the rules. They’ll have to be administered as a department eventually. Consider them a portfolio of your work.
Both accounts and individual users are served by Customer Education.
Buyers, product owners, champions, admins, developers, end-users – you name it! Customer Education affects a wide range of user personas. People engaged in the purchasing decision are frequently educated by us. We also provide training for people who will be using the product.
You may have numerous levels of education depending on whether your product is B2B (business-to-business) or B2B (business-to-consumer). On the one hand, you must educate individual users and assist them in discovering the value of your product. It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2C or B2B company: a product is only as good as the people who use it. However, when it comes to B2B goods, you’re usually training consumers inside the framework of an account. This might imply that they’ll all begin utilising your stuff at the same moment. It might also imply that they tailored specific components of your product to their needs. These kinds of choices can alter how you approach customer education.
Customer education boosts development all the way through the customer journey.
A comprehensive Customer Education plan considers not only what material is provided and in what format but also how customers’ maturity will be increased along their journey. We must understand their goals and show them how to accomplish them.
Different sorts of education will be included along the customer journey based on your account and user persona mapping.
Pre-sales evaluation, purchase, launch, adoption, growth and maturity, and expansion are just a few of the steps that an account will go through. Further releases, adoption, growth, and maturity can all result from this expansion. It’s a virtuous loop in the best instance. Have you developed any launch-specific instructional programmes? Have you considered what you’ll provide clients in the future to help them develop and mature?
A journey is also experienced by a single user. They, too, will begin by assessing the product. They’ll begin acquiring more fundamental skills once they understand how it benefits them. If people continue to perceive value, their knowledge and advanced abilities will grow. They may even become a product evangelist, encouraging others to use it. Do you have any education initiatives in place for advanced users and champions, or only for your basic users? Is your basic user programme incentivizing people to use your product to its full potential? These are major issues to think about.
Customer education enhances the way people operate by changing behaviour, removing barriers, and lowering costs.
If you ask a typical employee in your company what the aim of education is, they would most likely respond “knowledge.” They may also mention “skills” if they have a training background.
True, Customer Education develops skills and knowledge, but for what purpose? Customer education must be focused on assisting consumers in discovering value. Each member of the team must have the appropriate abilities in order to build an account. They must overcome impediments to value. They should also, and probably most significantly, improve at what they do. What could possibly be more valuable?
You’re altering people’s behaviour if your Customer Education campaign is blazing on all cylinders. This might entail providing them with:
- The knowledge that gives them power
- Skills that allow people to get the most out of your product
- Inspiration to utilise your goods in a variety of ways.
You should be able to compare how individuals utilise a product before and after training or before and after instruction.
Focusing on behaviour modification also makes it easier to figure out what is and isn’t necessary to educate. “Awesome” features that don’t add value to the customer’s experience? Please don’t waste your time trying to teach them. Customers who “simply get it” because of features that are so basic? Don’t spend your time once again.
So, what are your options?
Rather, focus on training clients on how to overcome obstacles or improve their performance. In the end, greater value with less friction is what most customers want. Let’s imagine your product has hundreds of features, but just five of them will allow your consumer to get up and running quickly. Please don’t waste time giving them a tour of the whole user interface; instead, focus on those five features. Create documentation or in-product education if you know there’s a common mistake or support issue. Your efforts will assist the client in avoiding or resolving the issue.
So, what alternatives do you have?
Instead, concentrate on teaching them how to overcome challenges and increase their performance. The majority of customers want more value with less friction in the end. Consider the following scenario: your product contains hundreds of features, but just five of them will enable your customer to get up and running quickly. Instead of giving them a tour of the whole user interface, concentrate on those five features. If you know there’s a common error or support issue, create documentation or in-product education. Your efforts will help the customer avoid or resolve the problem.
Finally, because Customer Knowledge is typically about assisting customers in doing a better job, it is often much more than just product education. Customers in new or emerging sectors (for example, Hubspot for inbound marketing or Gainsight for Customer Success) would frequently need to be educated on the industry and how to conduct their jobs successfully. This opens up a lot of possibilities for expanding Customer Education’s reach through industry-specific education.
What is the value of customer education for a business?
Executives typically experience an “a-ha” moment after investing in a real Customer Education strategy: Customer Education is a secret weapon for the organisation. It’s often done on the go, with different employees from different parts of the company conducting different trainings. When you invest in it, though, it becomes rocket fuel for the success of your clients.
Customer education that is effective will result in genuine business outcomes, especially if it supports consumers throughout their journey. Customer Education, for example, may affect a variety of critical KPIs, including marketing leads, product adoption, and support contact rate, among others. Customer Education accomplishes a number of tasks at a high level, such as:
- Gives your customers a pathway to obtaining more value over time.
- Boosts the market worth of your company’s brand
- Allows your Character types and support representatives to focus on higher-value interactions by reducing the support burden.
Client Education, when done correctly, boosts customer lifetime value and maturity, establishes your company as a category leader, and improves self-service efficiency. Here’s how Customer Education affects the KPIs that matter most to SaaS companies.
Customer Lifetime Value is increased
- Customer Education has a big impact on two of the most critical KPIs in a subscription business: revenue and retention.
- LTV (Lifetime Value): the value you earn while they’re successful CAC (Customer Acquisition Expense): the cost of acquiring a customer
Because customers are costly to acquire, your company must maintain them — and keep them expanding — in order to make a profit. This is why, according to ProfitWell’s blog, the Customer Acquisition Cost to Customer Lifetime Value ratio is the “god statistic” for SaaS businesses.
Customer education may help you expand and support your sales and marketing initiatives. But it’s perhaps even better at maximising your customers’ lifetime value, ensuring that they stick with you and develop with you over time.
CAC and LTV Definition:
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the cost of acquiring a new customer:-This is the sum of your sales and marketing expenses. It includes the people your business recruits, the tools it buys, the campaigns it runs, and so on. Because this is a costly item, any efficiency would assist. Customer education might help your salespeople answer fewer inquiries over and over again. It also aids in the conversion of free trials to paid programmes. Unrestricted knowledge about your product and industry is recommended. This material educates buyers and provides resources for your sales team to utilise throughout their transaction cycles.
LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer):-The more value you generate from an account, the longer it stays with you and the more they buy from you over time. Client education builds trust and accelerates value, which helps to instil customer loyalty. Customers discover new ways to utilise your product as you teach them. They’ll be aware of which characteristics to employ and how to do so. They’ll pick up ideas, methods, and best practices that will help them add more value to their work. And these consumers are more inclined to renew or grow their subscriptions rather than a downgrade. Informed clients are more likely to perceive the benefit of sticking with you.
Customer Knowledge and Satisfaction Have Increased
While we’re talking about Customer Lifetime Value… Customer education is beneficial to your business because it encourages consumers to remain longer, but it is also beneficial to your customers since it provides them with the skills they need to succeed.
Customer Maturity: Each company has its own definition of maturity. However, this is usually a stage of consumer development after basic acceptance. It’s when you start to notice people using your product in increasingly complex ways. Customers that are more mature can recognise the road to long-term value. Many businesses employ maturity models to assess a customer’s present condition and chart a course to a desired future state.
Loyalty or Customer Sentiment:-Customers that are strong supporters of your product are more likely to renew and expand over time, which is typically quantified by Net Promoter Score (NPS), those 0-10 “Would you recommend this product?” questionnaires. By empowering consumers and linking them with others, Customer Education helps them become committed advocates.
Product Implementation: Getting a product to be used in a meaningful way is analogous to developing a habit. Brushing your teeth is a good analogy. Customer education explains why users should do something and then helps them develop a habit around it. Over time, you’ll be able to drive more complex usage. User sophistication is a term used to describe how well individual users perform in a product. Customer Maturity, on the other hand, is a measurement of an account’s maturity.
Increased marketing and brand effect
New clients are difficult to obtain, as we have stated. As a result, Customer Education may help make things go more smoothly. For years, common wisdom held that providing too much public instruction or documentation was a bad idea. Why? Because it would give the competitors too much information.
The benefits of investing in public-facing Customer Education now exceed the dangers. Both in terms of brand value and lead creation, this is true. Because customers and prospects frequently seek knowledge before speaking with a representative (up to 70% in some surveys! ), you want to be the first to educate them when they do.
Your salespeople’s lives are made easier by customer education. Your business will be seen as an authority in your field if you provide an excellent education.
Differentiation of brands:-Your brand will be recognised as an authority if you are the “education champion” in your sector. This facilitates purchasing decisions while also increasing client loyalty. It’s more difficult to win in your category if you can’t show that you know more about the subject than everyone else.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Marketing Identification: Assume you create instructive content that customers may access before making a purchase. This will help your business produce more leads. Before speaking with a salesperson, today’s buyers frequently conduct self-service research. What exactly are they looking for? Not only in official brochures and marketing materials. They want to see articles in the help centre, product videos, and other educational tools.
Support deflection and more efficient self-service
Customers dislike having to phone in for help. Your CSMs and support reps, on the other hand, are unlikely to enjoy addressing the same queries over and over. It’s a lose-lose situation in such a case.
Self-service Customer education not only lowers support expenses but also reduces customer annoyance.
The average number of support tickets sent per customer or per 100 customers may be calculated. For knowledgeable clients, this number should be far smaller.
Revenue augmentation
By offering Education Services, many Customer Education initiatives create cash. Larger Education Services groups, at the very least, have a profit and loss statement. As a result, they should be able to recoup their operational expenses.
You’ll gain the right to charge for your instructional materials as you produce more valuable material. Customers will also pay for your courses to be delivered in a more private or personalised manner.
For your business, a Scale Engine
By recruiting enough people and throwing them at the problem, you can accomplish practically any of the KPIs listed above. A squadron of support agents can answer all of your customers’ inquiries; a company of CSMs can provide live training on-demand, and a whirlwind of marketers can create a tornado of content. However, for most firms, this is neither practical nor efficient. It’s frequently a waste of such people’s abilities and capabilities.
You won’t be able to grow and service hundreds or thousands more customers without hiring additional costly people if you utilise expensive humans to conduct recurring education duties, such as answering the same support queries or giving the same training. This is especially true when you service consumers from all over the world, necessitating the hiring of additional local employees.
You’ll design a plan that scales with the expansion of your organisation using Customer Education. Help materials and in-product education address common support questions. Virtual courses and online academies evolve from repeatable training. You’re now creating a more consistent learning environment. Then your customer-facing staff may become more strategic. Instead of being the sole source of success or failure, they will now fill in gaps and give additional assistance.
We’re coming to a close…
As you can see, Customer Education has a lot of advantages, but you won’t be able to perform all of these tasks right once. All of these KPIs aren’t prioritised by even the most advanced customer education training. Starting with a Customer Education plan that is aligned with your broader company and product is critical.
Identify which metrics are most critical to driving with your executives. Consider the following three stages of a business:
You could be more focused on marketing and product adoption KPIs if you’re in hypergrowth mode.
Companies that are maturing: you may be more concerned with maturity and scalability, as well as client retention.
Well-established businesses: income may be expected, and your department may operate on a profit and loss statement.
As you develop your Client Education course, it’s critical to have a strategy. This should be done before you start developing material or choosing an Institution.
Check out our first episode on launching a Customer Education programme if you’re just getting started. Then, to establish a successful customer education strategy, read our Customer Education Manifesto and Six Guidelines.