30 Customer Education Statistics and Trends to Watch for in 2024

73% of customers say customer experience is a deciding factor when making purchasing decisions, making customer-facing teams more crucial than ever. Building a customer education system is one of the best ways to help these teams, be it customer support, customer success, or even a dedicated customer education team. Companies have realized this in the past five years and are moving towards providing a better customer experience.

The shift is evident as companies prioritize and invest more in customer education in 2024. If you’re someone wishing to open the customer education window for your organization, these statistics will let you know about what’s happening in the customer education world. You can use these statistics to figure out what you need to do.

The 25+ statistics presented here are referred from Customer Education Benchmarks and Trends From Forrester and Intellum Report 2024. Check them out for the full report!

We’ve classified the stats into different sections to make it easy to understand what these numbers mean. The sections cover these topics:

• How is customer education looking in 2024?
• What do companies think about customer education?
• Is investing in customer education worth it?
• Challenges in customer education
• Do you need a customer education team?
• What is an ideal customer education software?
• What’s the future of customer education looking like?

Rise in Popularity of Customer Education

Reduction of In-house Teams

64% of the organizations are still focusing on dedicated customer training teams to enable their customer education initiatives. This is a 17% drop since 2019.  While we don’t suggest not having a customer education team, there’s more to this story. Let the upcoming statistics show us what’s up.

Use of AI for Content Creation

In 2019, the use of AI in content creation for customer education was at a whopping 0%. In 2024, 36% of organizations use AI to create content.

Third-party Vendors Are Still Popular

Organizations still prefer to use third-party vendors to support their customer education activities. In fact, the number has increased by 1%, from 54% in 2019 to 55% in 2024. It’s nothing too crazy, but a 0% decline is a clear indicator of how much third-party vendors are still relied on.

What does it mean?

One of the biggest problems with customer education is the time-consuming content creation process, which can demand a dedicated team to make it feasible.

The rise of AI could mean that companies have now made the content creation process so efficient that they can do without a dedicated team. While it is awesome that content creation is now easier than ever, we still recommend having a customer education team as it encompasses more than just creating content.

Third-party vendors also benefit from AI which helps them support companies carrying out customer education initiatives way better.

How do you capitalize on it?

If you’re someone who thinks content creation is a pain, you’re right. It is, without the proper tools. Not being sales-y here, but Trainn can help you automate your content creation process. We’re not the only ones either, you can check out Scribehow, Camtasia, Tango, ClipChamp, and more.

Customer education has come a long way, and capitalizing on AI-based software can put you ahead of your competition.

Forward-thinking Organizations

While AI has taken charge of carrying out time and cost-efficient customer education activities, here’s what organizations are doing for their part

Priorities Are Looking Good

The top priority for 54% of organizations for their customer education programs is to provide better customer experiences.

It is good that half of the organizations know why customer education is practiced in the first place. This knowledge will help them create strategies that enable customers to have a positive experience with them, which will later help make their customer and product metrics shine.

Increased Investment in Customer Education

Organizations are investing more…..a lot more now in customer education. The annual average spending on customer education has increased by 174.3%, from $401k in 2019 to $1.1M in 2024.

Rise of Prebuilt Courseware

Prebuilt courseware or a LMS is on the rise in popularity, from 31% in 2019 to 53% in 2024.

What does it mean?

These statistics are an extension of the previous ones, showing us that organizations are prioritizing and investing in creating a customer education engine. These investments could be in hiring third-party vendors such as an LMS provider, subscribing to a customer education software, and a content creation software.

How do you capitalize on it?

Sit with your customer-facing teams to understand gaps in customer education. Find out how many of these gaps can you solve with customer education software (content creation + LMS + knowledge base). If the answer comes down to “yeah, we’ll be more efficient with one”, then ask your team to let you know what kind of software they’d need to achieve this efficiency.

As previously mentioned, content creation is much easier with AI-based software. Let your team use the free trial on multiple products to see which tool works best for you. Refer people on LinkedIn who use the tool and ask how their experience was with it. Finalize the tools you wanna use and invest in them.

Benefits of Investing in Customer Education

While it’s great news that companies are investing and moving towards providing better customer experiences, the hot question is what are the returns you can expect from it?

Return on Investment

372%. That’s the reported average ROI that companies looked at over three years with an average payback period of seven months. Even if we consider this with a generous mindset, we can see about 370% ROI in a year.

Now, let's look at how your customer metrics are doing with the table below.

What does it mean?

Focusing on good customer education practices helps customers be masters of your product. This causes a snowball effect that leads to better customer metrics as shown above.

Satisfied and engaged customers adopt your product. As more customers adopt your product, your retention rate increases. Parallel to this, as your customers become masters, and have access to training material, they raise support tickets for complex issues, reducing your support ticket rate for common queries.

How do you capitalize on it?

Proper customer education strategies are what you’re looking for. Planning, implementation, and measuring the performance of your strategies are key factors that keep your customer education engine running.

Maintain a single Customer Education sheet to collect your KPI metrics from different customer-facing software like CRM, CS software, Customer training tools, Survey feedback, etc. Track these metrics every couple of months to collectively see how your engine is running.

Challenges Faced in Customer Education

Not all can afford to run and maintain a proper customer education engine. Here are some challenges that companies face

Lack of Tools/Skills

Two of the biggest developmental challenges companies face boil down to:

• Not having the right tools to build training content - 52%
• Not having the technical skill to build the content - 50%

Poor Customer Experience

While looking at the customer experience point of view, these are some challenges companies face:

• 55% of companies see poor satisfaction rates from their customer training efforts.
• 37% of companies feel the lack of personalized and localized training content.

What does this mean?

These challenges are valid, especially if you’re just starting with customer education. You might know what tools to go for or what kind of features you’d want. On the other hand, your team might not be technically skilled enough to create detailed training content.

Going ahead with customer education at this level can yield negative results. Customers are left with a bad aftertaste of your service. Moreover, If you serve a global audience with no localized content in their language.

How do you capitalize on it?

Understand who you’re customers are, where they come from, and what kind of training they need. For example, if you’re selling an HRMS, your customers could be HR generalists, HR onboarding specialists, HR operation specialists, etc.

For a generalist, you might just go over the onboarding features in your tool, while for the onboarding specialist, you might go a bit more in-depth and give them tips and tricks to use the features better.

It also matters what language your customers are comfortable with. English might not be the strong suit for some people. Find customer education tools that let you create multilingual content and make it available to anyone who needs it.

Vicky Kennedy’s (Customer Education Expert) approach to understanding three core things about your audience before building a customer education program can be great reference material. If you love listening to podcasts, then here is the recording where she covers the key customer insights that might make or break your customer education program.

Do You Need a Customer Education Team?

Earlier we looked at how in-house teams are being replaced by third-party vendors. But what’s the difference between them?

Organizations That Do It with Internal Teams

• 78% of the organizations with highly successful customer education practices have dedicated in-house teams.
• 45% of the organizations with a low success rate with their customer education practice have their marketing team take up this role along with marketing activities.

Organizations that hire third-party vendors

• 78% of the organizations with a highly successful customer education practice use third-party vendors in a formalized way.
• 80% of the organizations use third-party vendors since it's faster to do so, while 51% do it since it’s cost-efficient. These companies have a low success rate with their customer education practice.

What does this mean?

Organizations that had highly successful customer education programs were dedicated to providing the best customer experience. Meanwhile, organizations that had a low success rate with their customer education programs did not make it their priority to produce the best training content.

How do you capitalize on it?

Whether you use internal teams or third-party vendors, the sincerity of the role defines whether your initiatives are going to be successful. While third-party vendors might be faster and more cost-efficient, these shouldn’t be the only reason for you to go with them.

Prioritize on giving the best customer experience and watch your efforts harvest profits for you. (in-house if enterprise and vendors for scaling companies )

What Companies Look For In The Software?

These are some of the factors that companies deem important in customer training software:

• 80% of the companies want access to multiple types of data
• 70% of the companies want their training software vendor to provide guidance
• 63% of the companies want support with training content creation
• 57% of the companies want to provide personalized training content and learning paths to their customers.

What does this mean?

More than half of the companies are on the right page when it comes to asking for the right features on their customer training software. Going for software that allows you to create/share personalized content, and provides good analytics and support should be non-negotiable when choosing a tool for your company.

How do you capitalize on it?

I know I’ve said it a bazillion times already, but I cannot emphasize how efficient it is to get software that simplifies your training content creation process. This is evident with more than half of the organizations wanting support with it. While looking for this software, make sure you’re able to create different user segments and track the content made for them.

Moving Forward

This section contains statistics that tell us what the near future will look like in the customer education industry:

• 49% of organizations want to implement a dedicated customer education platform to improve their strategies.
• 51% of organizations already use AI in their customer education initiatives while an astounding 99.6% of them plan to use AI after 18 months from now.

Ways companies are planning to use AI in the future:

• 73% want to accelerate their content creation process.
• 61% want to create personalized learning experiences.
• 60% want data analysis and visualization
• 52% want help with transcription and translation
• 58% want to create assessments

What does it mean?

Similar to Thanos, AI is going to be inevitable. I think that’s pretty safe to say with 99.6% of companies planning to use it 18 months from now. It’s also clear where companies might be struggling the most with customer education strategies. I will avoid talking about content creation since I’ve talked about it enough.

I lied. Content creation is where most teams struggle and they’re looking at AI-based customer education platforms for assistance. Along with that, teams are also looking to create personalized content for a global audience, conduct assessments, and analyze the performance of the engine.

How do you capitalize on it?
Start immediately but don’t treat it like a race. Take your time to consult your teams, understand your customer needs,  and proceed with a proper plan to build your customer education system. Before researching customer education platforms, ask your teams what they’d need help with the most, and look for solutions with AI features that help you tackle it in the best way possible.

Trainn - Your Customer Education Platform

I’m not going to get sales-y. Book a demo with Trainn immediately. I lied…again. Okay, jokes aside, the problems addressed in this blog can be solved with Trainn.

Do you want a simple-to-use video creation suite? - Trainn is here

Do you want to convert these videos into interactive guides? - Trainn is here

Do you wish you had a self-service knowledge base? - Trainn is here

Do you create structured content with an LMS? - Again, Trainn is here

This is not a lie. One of our customers, Sabina from BuildOps, agrees with us:

BuildOps launched their learning center with Trainn in just 45 days - including the creation of 100 videos to publishing them on the center. Check out the BuildOps journey with Trainn to see how they leveraged our platform.

Want to see this in action? Book a demo with us!