The Customer Education 101 Guide: To Kickstart Your Program
Are your clients hitting the wall in their ability to maximize the potential of your product? Or, are you losing customers at annual renewal time since they're not getting any value?
According to the CallMiner website, U.S. businesses lose $136.8 billion each year due to avoidable consumer switching.
If your customers aren't getting the full benefit in the product or service you offer and have decided to leave because of it, it's probably time to start thinking about a customer education program.
Not entirely sure what that signifies?
Let's see what it is.
What exactly is customer education?
At , we see customer education as the act to increase your customer's awareness of your service or product so that they can gain value faster and better scale customer growth.
The customer education process begins before they buy your product and continues throughout the customer journey. For example:
- Stage 1 Potential customers could require information on the ways your product can help other customers solve a problem
- Stage 2. : New customers could require education about the basics of how to use your product
- Stage 3 : Long-term customers could require training on how to maximize their usage of the product to maximize its value
In the end, it is about providing your customers with the data they need to experience value from your service and desire to keep using the product. Actually, whenever the customer engages in educational material and their affinity for your brand grows over time according to Conductor.
Education for customers can be provided through a variety of content formats, depending on your businesses' specific needs, goals, and audience. As an example:
- Customer Case Study: Demonstrate to potential customers how other customers have found success using your product or service.
- Blogs and Articles Perfect to share step-by-step instructions and specific instructions for using products and services.
- Video and recorded screen-captures: Are a great tool for sharing step-by-step tutorials, guides, as well as tutorials to teach novice users the basic skills needed to make use of your product or service.
- Webinars Allows businesses to dive deeper into more advanced topics regarding your product or service and answer customers' concerns, and communicate with them more intimately
The benefits of a customer education program
You've made the decision to develop a customer-education program to scale your enterprise and cut down on customers' churn rapidly. It's a good initial step!
Before taking any other action, it is critical to be aware of the benefits that customer education brings to your business.
Let's take a look.
More flexibility and scalability
In today's environment, there is a heightened requirement for flexibility in every aspect of business. It includes customer education.
On-demand education courses let customers deepen their knowledge at their own pace. Digital courses are also easy to update when content needs to be refreshed.
Then, as your business increases, so does the customer education program. If you have the proper tools, you won't have to compromise the reliability of your program in order to accommodate your growing business.
Boosts customer interaction and service
Does your customer service department noticed that they get repeated questions over again? It could be an indication that your education for customers isn't up to par.
Slack's Chief of Staff, Customer Experience, once said "I consider CE [customer educationas jet fuel for CSMs. Everything we can do to help you build connections better and faster. ."
Solid customer education programs deliver need-to-know details to customers in order to understand the true value of the item - and it begins by answering the most frequently requested questions.
If an educational program addresses the common questions upfront, your customer service team can devote more time to having quality interactions with customers and tackling their more in-depth requirements .
Faster adoption and onboarding
Like everyone else, your customers are awed by their time. You've likely spent a lot of time and effort researching before they decide to purchase your product. This means they'll would like to be started in a short time.
Through an existing, online-on-demand education service, your customers can progress through onboarding process at their own pace. It increases confidence of the customer using your service as well as speeds up the acceptance process.
Related: Want to improve the customer experience? Take a look at the recorded sessions from Activate Summit.
Improves customer retention
The customers won't buy the product only to look at reasons why they should leave. But they will not be able to access all the details they require to utilize the software they've spent time, energy and money for.
That's why it's critical to develop a user education program that is able to meet the requirements of your users. Customers will remain loyal when they are confident in your product, are confident about using it and can quickly see value from it.
Create a strategic education plan using customer segmentation
If you are creating a customer education plan for your company It is important to segment your clients. This will aid in the development of a curriculum and learning materials that cater to the needs of each individual.
The process of segmenting customers is of splitting your clients into groups according to particular facts and features about their characteristics and facts. Businesses tend to analyze their customers and develop "segments" to maximize marketing strategies for each segment as well as improve the overall customer experience by individualization.
The ability to divide customers into groups also allows users to interact to each group in a more efficient manner and to learn more about their habits and preferences throughout time, through the process of data observation and observations.
There are numerous options to "segment" your customers depending on your business goals including demographics, geography customer behavior, buying histories, and much other.
Consider the Customer Education Segmentation Model below to help you creating your customer education Program:
Make sure you educate your customers at every stage on their path. If it's prior to when they purchase your product or service, after they purchase after they purchase, or when they get activated, you must educate your customers throughout the process to ensure that the customer understand your product better and receive the most worth.
Separating your clients into groups according to which "stage" of the process they're in while developing your customer education program will help you deliver education in the appropriate way through your content and also address your customers' specific questions, needs and goals when they interact with your company over time.
Five of the best practices for developing a customer education programme
Once you've figured out the benefits a positive educational program for customers can bring on your business It's the time to begin building your program.
Here are some of our suggestions for starting your very first program for customer education beginning from the ground up.
1. Find the appropriate educational platform
Customer education programs can contain a mix of verticals. For example:
- Traditional in-person training
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Success stories of customers
- Guides that you can download and whitepapers
Instead of using a piecemeal approach is the best way to combine all of the media channels and formats into one simple platform to offer your clients that is a learning management software (LMS) that allows you to quickly and effortlessly create on-demand classes.
Customer Education Platform Checklist
Here's 5 things that you need to be aware of when choosing a platform for the Customer Education Program you're planning to run:
- Easy-to-use: In order to keep your clients engaged and motivated to continue your education, you'll want create an environment that is as easy as is possible for them to use the education programs and to complete the educational materials and lessons. Look for a platform designed with users in mind with a robust, yet user-friendly features.
- The ability to scale:As your business scales, so will your customer base as well as the needs of customer education. When you increase the number of clients who are part of your customer base and increase in your services, you will want to choose an option that will scale as you grow and meet the needs of your business with no limitations.
- Insights and Progress Tracking:Having an understanding of how your customers interact through your program for education allows you to pinpoint potential areas for improvement as well as areas for improvement for the coming years. To provide a quality education experience to your clients in your program and continue to improve your educational material to provide worth, you'll want to search for a platform that lets you track your customer's learning progress, and can provide insights on the experience they have as "students".
- Flexibility: Search for a platform that has everything you need to create, launch and grow the customer education and classes. With a platform that allows to be flexible and doesn't have programming required, you'll be able to create courses with ease and quickly and effectively provide educational information to your customers whenever they need they need it.
2. Define success
Just like starting any new business procedure from scratch it's crucial to determine how successful you are from the start. Take the time to define the program's vision, future and near-term goals and key performance indicators to gauge efficiency.
Possible goals could be:
- Reducing customer onboarding time
- Decreases the amount of time customer team members are spending training
- Expanding product utilization
- In helping customers to adopt preferred behaviors
3. Start with the biggest issues
If it's time to think about your strategy Start with the simple victories: the customers face the biggest issues.
You can ask yourself some questions like:
- Which are your most frequent queries from customers during the first three months of onboarding?
- Are they able to grasp the basic concepts? Or, are they making it to the next level of use?
- Where are my customers losing their use?
- Do they take proper actions?
- Do you know of any under-used features?
Once you have a grasp of the education gap, you can start working on the development of content.
Pro tip: Take advantage of customer feedback. See if customers regularly suggest more information/materials following their onboarding, and then integrate those concepts into your program.
4. Keep content new and engaging
Content is King. Making sure you have the best content available on the appropriate platform can make you successful in the launch of your own customer education programs. What do you do to start?
It is recommended to keep the following 3 things in mind when developing web content:
- Interactive The ability to make your educational content interactive by using questions, discussions, or surveys is an excellent option to keep your audience active throughout their learning.
- Intense: With everybody doing more nowadays, the average customer rarely has a ton of time to spend learning a new system or product. Maintain their interest by crafting small-sized classes.
- Informative: Make sure that your material is informative and contains easy-to-understand information. Videos, presentations tutorials, and other types of content are excellent sources of content that are a hit with clients who need to get up-to-speed on a new process or system.
5. Optimize, optimize, optimize
When you have your first customer education program off the ground It's time to be proud!
Then, remember to make a plan for integrating ongoing optimizations to the program based on:
- Feedback from customers and interactions
- Course metrics and course data
- Updates to material already in use
- Customers want to have more materials
Remember that the more you can help users gain experience through the best training and educational programs more quickly they'll appreciate the value your products provide and are more likely to register to renew or expand their subscriptions.