Published on: 30 Sep , 2024

How to Build a Successful Customer Education Strategy?

O

Omar Sheriff

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Educating customers enables them to maximize your product's value through knowledge and skills. By offering clear training and resources, businesses improve user understanding, streamline onboarding, and increase satisfaction. According to a customer education statistic, educated and satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal and advocate for your brand, driving a 174.3% rise in corporate investments in customer education.

Key Takeaways:

  • Explore how customer-facing teams perceive customer education and its impact on your business.
  • Learn how customer education drives business success and actionable steps to achieve it.
  • Follow a step-by-step guide to strategize your program, from segmenting customers to setting success metrics, gathering resources, creating, and launching content.
  • Understand how to measure outcomes and identify key elements of a successful program.

Let’s build a top-tier customer education strategy.

What Is a Successful Customer Education Strategy?

Customer education strategies integrate with customer education, success and support teams while being overseen by organizational leadership. Although these groups may share common key performance indicators (KPIs), their priorities often differ based on their roles and objectives.

The customer support team prioritizes faster ticket resolution, while the customer success team focuses on increasing product adoption rates. Organizational leadership evaluates revenue impact first, whereas the customer education team emphasizes the performance of the LMS.

A successful customer education strategy defines its purpose, desired outcomes, and target objectives. Identify pressing issues across teams, prioritize the main goals, and establish secondary goals to ensure alignment and effectiveness.

For example,

  • If customer education addresses the issue effectively, it becomes a primary goal and acts as a solution. For instance, it can reduce high onboarding times and resolve the lack of personalized training.
  • If customer education supports improvement, it becomes a secondary goal and serves as an enhancement. For example, while up-selling rates are stable, education can still provide a valuable boost.

Defining the “why” of your customer education strategy is crucial, especially when creating a customer education program from scratch. Choosing the right metrics to track insights can often be challenging.

What are the “Why” for different teams?

Team Why Customer Education?
Customer Education Focus on increasing retention and course completion rates, improving learning platform utilization, and reducing onboarding time.
Customer Support Aim to reduce support tickets and ticket escalation rates while increasing first contact resolution and decreasing average resolution time.
Customer Success Focus on driving product adoption, reducing churn and time-to-value, and creating opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling.
Organizational Level (CEO, CFO, CMO, etc) Focus on increasing monthly recurring revenue and customer growth rate while reducing acquisition costs.

Benefits of A Well-Planned Customer Education Strategy

Benefits of a Customer Education Strategy

1. Increase in Customer Satisfaction

Customer education ensures a consistent experience from the prospect stage to when customers become loyal advocates. This continuity strengthens engagement and trust over time.

Customer satisfaction evaluates the effectiveness of education across various touchpoints. It also helps customer success managers (CSMs) identify customer needs and communicate them to the education team. For instance, customers may request more video content or personalized learning options.

Customer satisfaction is measured using a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Businesses collect feedback through surveys where customers rate their satisfaction with the product. The scale typically ranges from low to high satisfaction levels.

Customer Satisfaction Score Survey

Customers rating 4 or 5 are classified as Satisfied Respondents.

Calculate the percentage of satisfied customers:
(No. of Satisfied Respondents/ Total No. of Respondents) X 100

2. Reduced Support Tickets

Customers raise support tickets for several reasons, including:

  • Onboarding challenges
  • Technical bugs
  • Account or billing issues
  • Product Usage Queries.

These queries often occur frequently and, in some cases, can be anticipated. While smaller companies with limited customer bases can address them through tickets, this approach is not scalable for growth.

A well-executed customer education strategy automates support by guiding customers to the right resources. It promotes self-service, enhances product knowledge, and reduces the frequency of support tickets.

To realize if this changes:

  • Analyze a specific time frame to assess the positive impacts of customer education initiatives, such as increased knowledge base visits, higher LMS course completions, and improved product adoption rates.
  • During the same time frame, check if the number of support tickets has decreased and continue monitoring this trend.

You can go even deeper:

  • Identify your most common ticket query, such as a feature bug.
  • Review solution page visits in your knowledge base and check if the increase in visits correlates with the reduction of this specific query.

3. Free Up CSMs For Strategic Initiatives

Companies invest heavily in customer training, often using the costly approach of Customer Success Managers (CSMs). SaaS companies in the USA report that CSMs spend 30% of their time on manual training.

For a team of 10 CSMs, this equates to a training cost of at least $270k annually. Replacing manual training with Digital Customer Education significantly reduces expenses and frees CSMs to focus on high-value activities.

Instead of repeatedly answering “how-to” questions, CSMs can focus on developing 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

4. Improved Product Adoption

Product adoption occurs when customers integrate your product into their workflow and no longer consider switching. To achieve complete product adoption, customers must be convinced early in their journey that your product is the ideal solution for their needs.

The product adoption journey consists of 6 stages, with customer education playing a critical role at each stage.

Stage How does Customer Education help The Idea
Awareness - people are aware of your product and what problem it solves Create educational materials like blogs, social media posts, and videos. To explain the benefits of your product and how it can help solve their problems.
Interest - potential customers are interested in your product Create product-specific resources like how-to-videos, product demos, and interactive feature demos. To showcase value through use-case-based examples.
Evaluation - customers compare your product with competitors Create comparison resources, case studies, and host webinars. To compare your product’s value over competitors, and provide live walkthroughs.
Trial - customers try out your product’s core features Create onboarding resources like tutorials, how-to videos and guides, and in-app guidance. To provide a seamless onboarding experience as it is an important touch point.
Activation - customers find value and invest in your product Create an in-app knowledge base widget, and provide role-based training materials. To provide a personalized self-service portal within the app.
Adoption - customers continue using your product Create an LMS and keep updating your knowledge base materials. To encourage upskilling and be quick in providing updates.

5. Increased Renewals and Up-sells

According to Invespcro, businesses are 60-70% more likely to sell to existing customers than new ones. This makes sense, as satisfied customers who have adopted your product and understand your education strategies are more inclined to purchase again.

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

The ideal method to achieve these goals is customer education. It’s time to create a well-planned customer education strategy. Wondering how? The next section provides a step-by-step guide.

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

Customer Education Strategy Steps

1. Understand Customer Segments

Education aims to help people understand topics, but individuals seek knowledge on different subjects. A standardized learning path may fail to meet diverse needs, potentially causing more harm than good.

This is why customer segmentation is vital for creating effective educational content. Segments enable personalized knowledge delivery tailored to individual preferences.

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

Lifecycle Stage How to Segment? Segmented Content Example
Onboarding Stage: In this stage, the foundation for the segments is formed. Based on their industry A complete guide on using Humann for different industries with industry-specific examples.
Based on their core purpose feature Video tutorials on “Payroll Management” feature
Based on their role Guide on Applicant Tracking System (For recruiters) Analytics 101 (for HR managers)
Based on their expertise in using similar products Quick start for those who’re familiar with the basic features of an HRMS
Based on their preferred language Starter Guide for Humann (English)Guía de inicio para Humann (Spanish)Guide de démarrage pour Humann (French)
Growth Stage: In this stage, segments are created based on customer interactions with your product Based on feature adoption: Low and high feature adoption A step-by-step guide to using Humann’s advanced features (For low feature adoption). Advanced tips to use “Analytics” for better reporting (For high feature adoption)
Based on engagement level: Low and high engagement Features you might be missing (For low engagement)Optimizing your recruitments: Best practices. (For high engagement)
Based on their learning preferences: On-demand and webinars “How to use Humann” resources in the knowledge base (On-demand content) Live: Setting up Humann (webinar)
Based on certification: People who’ve not explored your LMS courses The Humann Academy: Become a Certified Humann Expert
Mastery Stage: In this stage, segments are created to provide a more personalized value for long-term users and nudge them to try your other apps. Based on product expertise Mastering Humann: Advanced tips and tricks for experts
Based on the expansion potential Unlock your HR tech stack with Humann Engage and Humann Retain.

2. Setup Your Success Criteria For Customer Education

Understanding the “why” behind a customer education strategy is crucial for building a strategic plan. It not only clarifies the purpose for different teams but also defines the key objectives for the company. Knowing your objectives helps set measurable goals for customer education programs, identify long-term benefits, and track their impact.

Here are examples of key objectives to inspire your own, enabling you to drive your customer education efforts with a long-term perspective:

What’s Your Objective? Customer Education Goal Business Impact Metrics to Measure
To enhance the usage of key features in your product Increase product adoption Customers will find better value in your product which will lead to a stable customer base Feature adoption rate, and retention rate.
To reduce the load on the support team Reduce the no. of support tickets raised and reduce the time taken to resolve them Fewer support tickets require fewer support members, reducing the cost Support ticket volume, average ticket resolution time, and first-contact resolution rate
To increase self-service by customers Increase knowledge base visits Self-service portals increase customer satisfaction and deflect common ticket queries Knowledge base visits, article page visits of common queries, and ticket deflection rate.
To increase the no. of LMS course-certified customers Increase enrollment and completion of the LMS course LMS courses make customers more engaged and competent in using the product Academy enrollment rate, course completion rate, product engagement rate, and retention rate
To nudge customers into exploring your complete suite. Increase expansion and upselling Expansions and upselling increase Expansion revenue, and customer lifetime value. Expansion revenue, up-sell and cross-sell rates, CLTV

3. Figure Out The Fundamentals

An effective customer education strategy requires key elements, including a robust tech stack, comprehensive educational resources, and a dedicated customer education team.

A. Customer Education Tech Stack:

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

Customer education involves educating customers at various touchpoints, with the LMS serving as one element to support this goal.

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

Tool How does it help?
Customer Education Software Customer education software enables you to create on-demand content, launch a knowledge base and LMS, and analyze their performance.
In-app guidance tool Create in-app step-by-step tutorials for new users and when new features are released
Customer Success Software Conduct NPS, CSAT surveys, and monitor customer metrics like customer health scores, and track user journey
Product Analytics Software Monitor the overall product usage and user paths in the app

This toolset supports you in creating educational content and analyzing its business impact.

B. The Educational Content:

This includes various types of content shared with customers, such as videos, how-to guides, and help articles. While segmentation helps determine the topics, selecting the most effective content format is equally important.

Your product can guide your content strategy. For products with a steep learning curve or technical complexity, incorporating diverse content formats is ideal. For user-friendly products, simple videos and how-to guides suffice.

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.

C. Customer Education Team:

Team structures may vary between companies, but every customer education team requires certain key roles. Let’s review these roles and their responsibilities.

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:

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

2. Framing customer education objectives that align with company goals

3. 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.

4. Develop Content and Launch Your Program

After setting the groundwork—segmentation, objectives, tech stack, content types, and team—the next step is to decide on content placement and launch it.

A. Knowledge Base

knowledge base serves as a self-help portal where customers can find answers to “how-to” questions. Support teams can also use its resources to assist customers and reduce support tickets.

The content is searchable and categorized, such as "Getting Started" or "Feature Overview," and typically presented in formats like:

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

Example: Slack’s Help Center

B. Academy

An academy provides customers with structured learning, similar to other online platforms. It includes courses with structured lessons, quizzes, and exams. You can offer certificates, restrict access to customers, and monetize the courses.

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

C. Webinars

Webinars enable real-time customer engagement, offering a platform to showcase product features, share best practices, and discuss industry trends. They include Q&A sessions, allowing customers to address concerns directly.

Recorded webinars can be repurposed as on-demand content, making them ideal for onboarding, product updates, or hosting industry thought leaders.

A webinar page looks something like this from Heap:

D. Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT)

VILTs are a more learning-focused and interactive version of webinars. These virtual training sessions enable companies to educate customers globally, making them essential for businesses with a geographically dispersed customer base.

VILTs are learner-centric, encouraging interaction and allowing participants to seek clarifications as needed. These sessions can be tailored to the learner's knowledge level, providing education in an accessible and understandable way.Here’s an example of our Virtual Instructor-Led Training:

E. Podcast

A podcast's primary goal is to share news, information, fun facts, and industry innovations rather than showcasing a product. Its content allows customers to gain valuable insights into the industry. Podcasts can be delivered as audio, video, or both formats.

Example: Trainn’s Customer Educated Podcast

Trainn's Customer Educated Podcast

F. Blogs

Blogs serve as a scalable touchpoint, growing alongside your audience when the content aligns with their evolving knowledge. With content addressing all stages of the funnel, blogs can reach audiences who:

  • Are unaware of their problem.
  • Recognize their problem.
  • Understand possible solutions and their benefits.
  • Know your tool's capabilities.
  • Use your tool but seek greater efficiency.

Example: This very blog that you are reading helps you see customer education as a solution to your problem while guiding you on its implementation.

G. In-app Guidance Pathway

In-app guidance offers contextual help as users navigate your product, enabling them to learn its basics without leaving the tool. This approach boosts product engagement and adoption.

In-app guidance can be in the form of:

Guided Walkthrough: This guide activates when you open the tool for the first time. It introduces the UI elements and helps you begin using the product effectively.

Tooltips: The “?” icon next to buttons provides a basic description of their function when hovered over.

Checklist: A checklist accompanies the guided walkthrough, tracking unfinished walkthroughs or interactions.

Update Pop-ups: Companies use a “what’s new” pop-up to inform customers about updates and changes.

5. Measure, Iterate, and Update

The final step is to regularly monitor your customer education program's performance and update content as needed. This connects back to the metrics discussed for determining success criteria. Let’s explore how to calculate some of these metrics.

A. 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: Indicates the percentage of customers who have started using a specific feature in your product.

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

Retention Rate: Tracks the number of customers still using your product without churning.

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

B. 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: Measures the average time taken to resolve a ticket.

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

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

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

C. 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)

D. 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).

E. 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: Gives you the number of customers who make additional purchases after their initial purchase.

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

Up-sell and Cross-sell Rates: Measures 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 must include specific aspects to significantly boost its success rate. These include:

Key Aspects of a Customer Education Strategy

1. Having a Proactive Approach

An effective customer education strategy anticipates challenges and resolves them proactively, avoiding reliance on support tickets. By providing resources upfront, this proactive approach enables customers to navigate your product smoothly and without significant friction.

This approach not only supports the customer’s current product use but also prepares them for future growth. This customer education strategy enables customers to stay ahead of the learning curve and fully utilize your product’s evolving features.

How Customer Education Does It:

Identify Future Roadblocks
Collaborate with your product team to understand upcoming updates or planned features. Use this insight to pre-create educational content that can be launched alongside the new features.

Early-stage feedback
Use early feedback from beta users of new features to create educational materials that address their questions or confusion. Release these resources when the feature becomes available to all customers.

2. Creating Customer Personas

Creating initial segments is a crucial step before designing content paths for your program. Equally important is ensuring segments remain dynamic, allowing educational materials to adapt as customers transition between segments.

How Customer Education Does It:

Persona Evolution Mapping
Create a rough pathway outlining customer evolution and develop bridging content to support transitions between segments. Leverage product analytics and customer feedback to identify when users progress from beginners to intermediate or advanced levels.

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.

3. Integrated Across The Customer Journey

Following customers through their educational journey ensures a strong program across all stages. Think of it like levels in a video game—newly onboarded customers start at level 1. To advance to level 2, which offers advanced tips, they must first complete the tasks in level 1.

How Customer Education Does It:

In-app Guidance Checklist
This approach works well during onboarding, where users are guided by a checklist to complete specific actions. It ensures an effective onboarding process and allows you to utilize bridging content to transition them to the next stage.

Milestone-based Content
Develop tailored educational content for key milestones in the customer journey, such as after 30 days of use, completing a specific number of tasks, or integrating your product with another tool. These milestones create natural opportunities to introduce advanced or specialized learning, ensuring steady user progression.

4. Has a High-Level Planning

Creating content is a significant, time-intensive part of building an effective customer education strategy. Post-launch, updating, and revising content can also pose challenges.

How Customer Education Does It:

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.

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.

Customer Educated Podcast Ft. Eric Mistry

Empower Your Customers to Succeed and Drive Business Growth with Trainn

Trainn serves as a customer education partner, designed for B2B SaaS companies to onboard, train, and educate customers at scale and fulfil your customer education strategies.

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.

Ready to Trainn your customers?

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  • Setup Knowledge Base
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