How to Build a Successful Customer Education Strategy?

Customer education is a powerful tool that equips users with the knowledge and skills they need to maximize the value of your product. By providing effective training and resources, businesses can enhance user understanding, reduce friction during onboarding, and boost overall satisfaction.

This is crucial as customers who are educated and satisfied tend to stay longer and become your advocates than ones who aren’t. That’s why there has been a 174.3% increase in investments by companies in customer education.

What You Can Expect From This Blog:

• Understand how different customer-facing teams view customer education.
• How customer education benefits your business and how you can realize it.
• A detailed step-by-step guide on how to strategize your customer education program: From segmenting customers, determining your success criteria, figuring out what you need for the strategy, and how to develop and launch content.
• Understand how to measure success.
• Know what aspects make up a successful customer education program.

Let’s learn how to draw a top-notch customer education strategy program.

What Is a Successful Customer Education Strategy?

Customer education strategies flow through different customer-facing teams like - customer success, customer support, and customer education. Let’s not forget the organizational monitoring by the higher-ups as well. Everyone I had just mentioned might have common key performance indicators (KPIs) they look for, but the priorities are different.

The customer support team might want to see if tickets are being resolved faster before seeing if the product adoption rate is increasing - which is a priority for the customer success teams. The higher-ups might want to see if the strategies are bringing in revenue before seeing how the LMS is doing - a priority for the customer education team.

A successful customer education strategy knows its purpose, outcome, and the target it wants to achieve. Note down the most pressing issues in different teams and determine the main goals and secondary goals:

• If customer education is the best way to fix it - that’s one of your main goals and customer education is your painkiller. For example, if onboarding time is super high and there is no personalized training.
• If customer education can help with it - that’s a secondary goal and customer education is a vitamin. For example, up-selling rates are not declining alarmingly, but would still like the boost.

Defining the “why” for your customer education strategy is an important step, especially if you’re building a customer education engine from the ground up. It can get confusing to choose the right metrics to track to get insights.

What are the “Why” for different teams?

Benefits of A Well-Planned Customer Education Strategy

Increase in Customer Satisfaction

Customer education paves the way for a consistent customer experience right from when they’re just a prospect and lasts even when they become a loyal advocate of the product.

Customer satisfaction determines the performance of your customer education activities in different touch points. It’ll also help CSMs understand what customers need more of and let the customer education team know. For example, customers want more video content, more personalization, etc.

Customer satisfaction is calculated using a Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT. Customers are sent a feedback survey and are asked to rate their satisfaction with the product. The scale goes like this:

Customers who vote for 4 or 5 are considered your Satisfied Respondents.

Calculate the percentage of satisfied customers:

(No. of Satisfied Respondents/ Total No. of Respondents) X 100

Reduced Support Tickets

Here are a few reasons why customers raise support tickets:

• Have hiccups during onboarding
• Encounter technical bugs
• Have account or billing-related issues
• Product usage queries

These queries can occur frequently and in some cases, you can even predict them before. While smaller companies with a smaller customer base can handle these through tickets, it’s not a scalable solution.

A well-implemented customer education strategy can automate and lead customers to the right resources to help with their queries. Not only does it help them with self-service, but it also improves their knowledge of the product, making support tickets less frequent.

To realize if this changes:

• Take a time frame and look for positive impacts of your customer education initiatives - increase in knowledge base visits, LMS course completions, product adoption rates
• In the same time frame, see if the no. of support tickets received has reduced and continue to monitor this change.

You can go even deeper:

• Learn what your most common ticket query was - let's say it’s a feature bug.
• Check the solution page visits in your knowledge base.
• See if the increase in page visits correlates with the reduction of this particular query.

Free Up CSMs For Strategic Initiatives

Companies spend a lot of money and time training customers. Typically they rely on the most expensive approach: Customer Success Managers (CSMs).

SaaS companies in the USA report that their CSMs spend 30% of their time manually training customers. If your team has 10 CSMs and each spends 30% of their time training customers, then your training expense is at least $270k annually.

Replacing your manual training with Digital Customer Education drastically lowers your expenses. And the most significant gain is freeing your talented CSMs for important activities.

Instead of answering constant “how-to” questions in their training, they can focus on building strategies to:

• Reduce churn rates
• Increase feature adoption rates
• Foster customer loyalty
• Increase expansion revenue
• Analyze customer feedback and sentiments
• Offer more personalized interactions

Further reading: Customer Success Strategies: From Key to Advanced Tactics

Improved Product Adoption

Product adoption is when customers start using your product more and integrate it into their workflow and don’t think about switching.

For a customer to adopt your product, they need hard convincing that your product is THE ONE they need. So, convincing them needs to happen right from the start of their journey with you.

The product adoption journey has 6 stages and here’s how your customer education helps at every stage:

Increased Renewals and Up-sells

According to Invespcro, you’re 60-70% more likely to sell to an existing customer than a new customer.

I mean, it only makes sense that would be the case if you think about it. Happy customers who’ve adopted your product, and know well about your education strategies will be more willing to buy from you again.

The best way to build a happy customer base is to:

• Increase customer satisfaction
• Increase product adoption
• Provide personalized experiences
• Provide a 24/7 resource base they can refer to

I wonder what the ideal method to achieve these is. Oh wait, it's CUSTOMER EDUCATION!

I think it’s high time we build a well-planned customer education strategy. But how? Well, let me walk you through a step-by-step guide in the next section.

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Sustainable Customer Education Strategy

Understand Customer Segments

The purpose of education is to make people understand topics. But different people want to gain knowledge on different topics. So, providing a standardized learning path can end up doing more harm than good. That’s why customer segments play such a crucial role in creating educational content. It helps you personalize and deliver knowledge to everyone.

Here’s a skeleton to segment customers in different lifecycle stages for an HRMS called Humann:

Setup Your Success Criteria For Customer Education

While understanding what a successful customer education strategy looks like, we said knowing the “why” is important to build a strategic plan and looked at what the “why” looks like for different teams.

Expanding on that, the “why” is also necessary to draw your key objectives for the company. This helps you understand what goals you need to set for your customer education programs, how they’ll benefit the company in the long run, and how to measure the benefits.

Let’s take some examples of such key objectives so that you can draw your own set of objectives and drive your customer education vehicle with a long-term mindset:

Figure Out The Fundamentals

Your customer education strategy needs the help of a few necessary elements to work effectively. These include the customer education tech stack, the educational resources, and a customer education team.

Customer Education Tech Stack:

A big reminder: Customer education is more than just Learning Management Software (LMS).

Customer education is concerned with educating customers in different touch points and LMS is just one element that helps you achieve it.

Here’s a tech stack compilation to help you understand how customer education works:

This set of tools helps you from creating educational content to analyzing its impact on your business.

The Educational Content:

This refers to the different contents that will be shared with customers, like videos, how-to guides, and help articles. While your segmentation should help you with the content’s topics, you might be wondering what could be the best form of content to go for.

Your product can help you with this. If your product has a difficult learning curve or needs technical know-how, then trying to incorporate all forms of content is the best approach. If your product is simple to use and master, then simple videos and how-to guides would be enough.

Customer Education Team:

While team structures differ from company to company, there are key roles that every customer education team needs. Let’s go over them and see what responsibilities they take up.

Customer Education Manager: They create and oversee the entire customer education strategy and its operations.

Responsibilities include:

• Creating strategies that align with the company's goals.
• Managing the budget for the operations.
• Collaborating with other teams to ensure alignment.
• Reporting and analyzing the KPIs of customer education.

Instructional Designers: They design the curriculum and the learning path to drive the strategies.

Responsibilities include:

• Analyzing learner needs and creating personalized learning paths.
• Launching the different educational programs.
• Evaluating the performance of these programs.

Content Creators: They create all the necessary content in collaboration with the respective subject experts.

Responsibilities include:

• Creating content in different formats (documents, guides, and videos).
• Collaborating with subject matter experts to ensure the content is accurate.
• Ensuring the content is user-friendly and tailored.
• Adapting content to different platforms, eg: LMS and knowledge base.

LMS Administrator: They oversee the LMS platform - the content and its performance.

Responsibilities include:

• Setting up and maintaining an organized course structure in the LMS.
• Making sure it is easy to navigate.
• Analyzing and reporting on the performance of the LMS.

Instructors: They facilitate live training and webinar sessions for customers.

Responsibilities include:

• Conducting webinars and getting the recording of the session.
• Conducting instructor-led training sessions.
• Gathering customer feedback during these sessions and passing on the knowledge to the necessary teams.

A Small Recap of The Steps:

So far in this strategy guide, we looked at:

Segmenting your customers based on their lifecycle stage: Onboarding, growth, and Mastery.

Framing customer education objectives that align with company goals

Figuring out the tech stack we need, the types of content, and structuring a customer education team.

Awesome, now all there’s left to do is to develop the content, launch your program, and measure its performance.

Develop Content and Launch Your Program

Once your groundwork is set (Segmentation, framing objectives, finalizing the tech stack, content types, and the team), the next step is to determine what kind of content goes where and launch them.

Knowledge Base:

A knowledge base is a self-serving portal where customers can get answers to “how-to” questions. The resources in the portal can also be used by the support team to help customers and deflect support tickets.

Contents inside a knowledge base are searchable and categorized, for eg: Getting Started, Feature Overview, etc. Contents are mostly in the form of:

• Text-based help articles
• Video tutorials
• How-to guides and interactive guides

Example: Slack’s Help Center

Academy:

An academy is a place where customers can have structured learning. Its process is similar to other online learning platforms, where you have a course, and structured lessons with quizzes and an exam. You have the option to provide certificates for these courses, gate-keep them for your customers, and monetize them.

The courses in your academy can be based on your product or role upskilling, like how WebEngage Academy does:

Webinars

Webinars allow you to engage with customers in real time, providing a platform to walk them through product features, and share best practices, and industry trends. Viewers are offered Q&A sessions where customers can directly address their concerns during the session.

Webinars can be recorded and reused as on-demand content. They are ideal for onboarding sessions, product updates, or even for hosting industry thought leaders to share insights.

A webinar page looks something like this from Heap:

Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT)

Consider VILTs as a more learning-oriented and highly interactive version of webinars. These virtual training sessions help companies educate customers from anywhere, making it essential for companies with a customer base that’s scattered around the world.

Since VILT is learner-centric, it encourages learners to be interactive and ask for clarifications wherever necessary. These sessions can be customized based on the learner’s knowledge level and educate them in a way that’d be easy for them to understand.

Here’s an example of our Virtual Instructor-Led Training:

Podcast

A podcast’s main goal is not to showcase the product like other content above, but rather to share news, information, fun facts, and innovations in the industry. The nature of the content makes it easy for customers to gain insight into the industry. Podcasts can be hosted as a video, audio, or both.

Example: Trainn’s Customer Educated Podcast

Blogs

Blogs are a touch point that grows along with your audience, as long as you have content that scales with their knowledge. If you have content covering all the funnels, blogs help you reach audiences who -

• Are not aware of the problem they have.
• Are aware of the problem.
• Are aware of possible solutions and how they can benefit them.
• Are aware of your tool’s effectiveness and capabilities.
• Use your tool, but want to increase efficiency.

Example: This very blog you’re reading. You know customer education is a viable solution to your problem, and we’re trying to help you understand why and how to implement it.

In-app Guidance Pathway

In-app guidance provides contextual help as users navigate your product. This helps users learn the basics of the product without ever having to leave the tool, increasing product engagement and adoption.

In-app guidance can be in the form of:

Guided Walkthrough: This triggers when you open the tool for the first time. This guide walks you through the different UI elements and helps you get started with using the product.

Tooltips: The “?” that appears next to buttons that when hovered over gives you a basic description of what that button does.

Checklist: A checklist appears alongside the guided walkthrough and lets you know of any unfinished walkthroughs or interactions.

Update Pop-ups: When there is an update that customers need to know about, companies use a “what’s new” pop-up, updating them on the new changes.

Measure, Iterate, and Update

The last step in the process is to regularly monitor the performance of your customer education program, and update the content as and when it’s necessary. This circles back to the metrics we discussed while understanding the success criteria. Let’s see how to calculate some of them:

Objective 1:

To enhance the usage of key features in your product.

We Need These Metrics: Feature adoption rate, and retention rate.

Feature Adoption Rate: Tells you the percentage of your customers who have started to use a particular feature in your product

Formula: ( No. of active feature users / No. of active users ) X 100

Retention Rate: Tells you how many customers are still using your product and don’t churn.

To calculate the retention rate for a specific time frame, we need 3 things:

The number of Customers At the Start of the time period (CAS)

The number of Customers At the End of the time period (CAE)

The number of Customers you Gained in this period (CG)

Now, apply this formula:

( (CAE - CG) / CAS ) X 100

Objective 2:

To reduce the load on the support team

We Need These Metrics: Support ticket volume, average ticket resolution time, and first-contact resolution rate.

Support Ticket Volume: You can track the no. of tickets you receive during a period on your customer support software. The goal is to reduce this number.

Average Ticket Resolution Time: Tells you the average time taken to resolve a ticket.

Formula: Average resolution time for all tickets / Total tickets resolved

First-contact Resolution Rate: Tells you the number of tickets solved on the first contact.

Formula: ( No. of tickets solved on the first interaction / total no. of tickets ) X 100

Objective 3:

To increase self-service by customers

We Need These Metrics: Knowledge base visits, article page visits of common queries, and ticket deflection rate.

Knowledge Base Visits: Tells you how many users have visited your knowledge base.

Article Page Visits of Common Queries: Tells you visits for specific resource pages inside your knowledge base.

You can track both these metrics on your knowledge base software or your analytics tool like Google Analytics.

Ticket Deflection Rate: No. of knowledge base visits / no. of tickets

Objective 4:

To increase the no. of LMS course-certified customers

We Need These Metrics: Academy enrollment rate, course completion rate, product engagement rate, and retention rate.

Academy Enrollment Rate: Tells you how many users sign up for your academy. This can be tracked through your LMS software. The goal is to increase enrollment.

Course Completion Rate: Tells you how many users completed a course in your academy. This is also available in your LMS software.

Product Engagement Rate: Tells you how users interact with your product

Formula: Product (Adoption + Stickiness + Growth) / 3

Adoption: The average number of key actions taken (core events) by all active users or accounts.

Stickiness: The average percentage of active users who consistently return. This can be calculated as:

Daily active users (DAU) divided by weekly active users (WAU)

Daily active users (DAU) divided by monthly active users (MAU)

Weekly active users (WAU) divided by monthly active users (MAU)

Growth: The ratio of new and re-engaged users or accounts compared to the number of lost users or accounts (churned).

Objective 5:

To nudge customers into getting your full tech stack.

We Need These Metrics: Expansion revenue, up-sell and cross-sellrates, CLTV

Expansion Revenue: Tells you how many customers make additional purchases after making the initial purchase.

Formula: Revenue from Up-sells + Cross-sells + Add ons

Up-sell and Cross-sell Rates: Tells you the percentage of existing customers who either upgraded or bought additional products from you.

Formula for Up-sell Rate: ( No. of up-sells / No. of up-sell attempts ) X 100

Formula for Cross-sell Rate: ( No. of customers who made additional purchases / No. of cross-sell attempts ) X 100

Customer Lifetime Value: Tells you the revenue value you can expect from a customer.

Formula: Average Revenue per user / Customer Churn rate

Key Aspects of a Successful Customer Education Strategy

A customer education strategy needs to have certain aspects to make it’s success rate shoot up the sky. These are:

Having a Proactive Approach

A good customer education strategy anticipates challenges and addresses them beforehand rather than waiting for customers to submit support tickets. A proactive education helps you provide resources that help customers navigate your product without any major friction.

This approach does not just support the customer’s current use of your product but prepares them for future growth. It helps customers get ahead of the learning curve and empowers them to fully maximize your product’s evolving features.

How Customer Education Does It:

1. Identify Future Roadblocks: Sit with your product team to understand future updates or planned features. Use this knowledge to pre-create educational content for your programs that can be released when the feature launches.
   
2. Early-stage feedback: Leverage early feedback from beta users of new features to build educational materials that address any confusion or questions they have. Launch these resources when the feature goes live for all customers.

Creating Customer Personas

Creating your initial segments is an important step before starting to create content paths for your program. Even more important is to keep your segments dynamic, so that when a customer moves from one segment to the next, it should be reflected in the educational materials they receive.

How Customer Education Does It:

1. Persona Evolution Mapping: Even if not accurate, build a rough pathway evolution of your customers, and create bridging content as they move between segments. Use product analytics and customer feedback to identify when users shift from beginners to intermediate or advanced users.
   
2. Evolve Your Mapping: As time passes and you have more data to work with, you’ll be fairly accurate in determining the best segment-bridging content and refining it.

Integrated Across The Customer Journey

When you follow customers for your customer education, you’re only bound to have a solid educational program throughout a customer’s journey. Imagine this as levels in a video game and customers who just onboarded are in level 1. For them to go to level 2, advanced tips, they should have first completed the tasks in level 1.

How Customer Education Does It:

1. In-app Guidance Checklist: This is great for the onboarding stage, where users are prompted to complete certain actions with a checklist. This helps them complete the onboarding process effectively and you can use your bridging content here to take them to the next stage.
   
2. Milestone-based Content: Create specific educational content for different milestones in the customer journey, like after 30 days of usage, when they reach a certain number of tasks completed, or when they integrate your product with another tool. These milestones provide a natural moment to introduce more advanced or specialized learning, which keeps the user progressing steadily.

Has a High-Level Planning:

A huge time-consuming process of creating an effective customer education strategy is creating the content itself. Post-launch, updating and changing your content can become a hurdle as well.

How Customer Education Does It:

1. Automate Your Content: Invest in a content creation software that has in-built AI that helps you create and edit content faster and when it’s needed.
   
2. Automate Your Metric Tracking: Tracking your metrics can become a headache since they’re scattered across different apps. Use an automation tool to fetch these different metrics and feed it to a single source of truth. In our podcast with Eric Mistry, he recommends using a no-code automation tool like Zapier to build your automation system.

Empower Your Customers to Succeed and Drive Business Growth with Trainn

Trainn can be your customer education partner to help you fulfill your customer education strategies as it’s built for B2B SaaS companies to onboard, train, and educate customers at scale.

Trainn is an AI-based no-code platform, where you can:

1. Automate Content Creation - Create stunning product videos, interactive guides, and articles within minutes and without the need for editing expertise
2. Launch a Knowledge Base - A self-service portal that you can also embed within your app
3. Create your own LMS Academy - Personalize the courses based on who logs in.
4. Get Learner-level Analytics - Get insights and enhance your customer education strategies.