Customer Education: Your Secret Weapon to Retain More Customers and Increase Revenue

Imagine a laptop brand called Banana running its unique BacOS(very creative, I know). Enticed by promotional videos, you visit a Banana outlet to buy one. When you seek advice on choosing the best model, the staff evade you with expert hiding skills. After hours, you finally find the perfect laptop on your own

A month later, Banana released an update that drastically altered BacOS’s interface and features, rendering it almost unusable. They did not update user manuals or create help documents for guidance. Customer support remains unresponsive to calls and emails.

Your friend Hailey suggests checking out another brand, Peach, and its PacOS. (I created this unique name after hours of thinking).

A few weeks later, you realize Peach consistently updated you on new features and provided training materials to help you master PacOS. And so, you and Peach lived happily ever after.

The story’s moral is: Avoid Banana’s focus on flashy marketing and elusive support. Follow Peach’s example by prioritizing customer education and support to build loyalty and satisfaction.

What is Customer Education?

Customer education is the process of teaching your customers how to use your product or service effectively. It includes creating resources like tutorials, webinars, and guides that help users maximize product value, understand features, and resolve issues independently.

Customer education helps learners achieve their goals by teaching industry and product skills, promoting product credibility and value.

- Vicky Kennedy,
Founder, Echtus

Why Customer Education Matters?

Revisiting the story, Peach won over Banana because it provided better customer education and support. You chose Peach on Hailey's recommendation, reflecting her positive experience and trust in the brand. This demonstrates how satisfied customers become brand advocates, influencing others’ decisions within their network.

Consider these three factors to deliver effective customer education:

1. The Product Experience

Would you rather choose a popular product with no customer education and support, or a less popular one that offers extensive learning resources in multiple formats?

You’ll likely choose the second option. Even if the popular product has top features, without time to learn it through trial and error, a product with clear guidance and self-service resources offers a better experience for understanding features and troubleshooting

Product experience depends not only on feature quality but also on how well it educates you to use it effectively for your specific needs and time constraints.

2. Increasing Competition

When promoting your product’s advantages, competitors will likely emphasize theirs as well. This competition underscores the importance of delivering excellent product experiences and a smooth customer journey to gain a competitive edge.

In fact, 66 %  of consumers want brands to understand and address their needs, which can be achieved through strategic customer education at every stage of their journey.

3. Improving Your Customers’ Skillset

Use this opportunity to go beyond customer education and product adoption. Address customer challenges by guiding them to helpful resources outside your product’s scope. This engagement fosters trust and strengthens customer relationships.

Make sure your solution naturally connects with your product while showing customers they are valued partners, not just entries, but the ultimate goal is to let your customer know “Hey, you’re not just another customer entry for us. We want to help you succeed!”

How Hubspot does it:
Thousands of inbound marketing, sales, and support professionals use HubSpot daily. HubSpot further supports its users by offering HubSpot Academy, providing sought-after business skills. Over 165,000 professionals have advanced their careers through HubSpot Academy certification.

How Customer Education Can Profit You?

1. Eliminate Buyer’s Remorse

Buyer’s remorse arises when customers doubt the value of their new purchase. Effective onboarding reduces this doubt by guiding customers through setup, product features, and usage. This quickens their path to seeing value and reinforces their decision to buy.

Good user onboarding does three things—it educates users on the problem, it showcases the features of your solution, and it signals that the ‘better life’ the user signed up for is right around the corner.

- Samuel Hulick, The Elements Of User Onboarding

2. Meet Customer’s Diverse Learning Needs

Customers now expect immediate, easy access to solutions. A well-designed customer education strategy meets this need by offering personalized, on-demand content tailored to various customer segments.

Provide customer enablement materials in various formats, such as videos, interactive guides, and in-app widgets, to offer flexible learning options tailored to user preferences.

3. Earn Customer Loyalty and Trust

Customer education boosts revenue metrics and fosters a loyal customer base. As metrics grow, these customers become advocates, promoting your product just like Hailey recommended Peach.

Use referral programs to encourage loyal customers to refer friends. Satisfied customers are more likely to share, especially when rewarded for their loyalty. Meeting customer expectations sets you apart, boosts satisfaction, and turns customers into advocates.

4. Offer Scalable Customer Training

As your business grows, scalability in customer training becomes crucial. One-on-one training or live chat support may not suffice due to resource limitations. BuildOps, one of our customers, faced a similar challenge, which we detail further below.

Implementing a robust customer education system effectively addresses scalability. With this system, customers gain 24x7 access to self-service portals, customer success managers, and LMS courses. Your role is to maintain and update it regularly.

5. Reduce Load on Customer support

Establishing a customer education initiative reduces traffic to support teams, allowing them to focus on critical issues instead of redundant tickets.

In one of our podcast episodes, Monica Sindwani suggested these steps to help you get started on a solution:

Step 1: Review current or past support tickets over a specific period.

Step 2: Sort tickets into case categories, such as onboarding issues, feature “X” issues, and bugs

Step 3: Develop a customer education program with articles, videos, and guides targeting each category to address common issues.

Step 4: Distribute content through support requests, email replies, and your knowledge base.

After resolving common issues, focus on niche support requests and host live webinars.

6. Gain Insights on Customer Pain Points

Customer education activities help you understand how your customers interact with your product. For example, you can get insights on:

• Where customers struggle the most during onboarding processes.
• Whether customers can meet their goals without hassle.
• The features that customers find difficult to use,
• and as an extension where customers need upskilling within the product.

Use these insights to better understand customers, improve customer education materials, and share findings with teams like sales and marketing.

Customer struggles and expectation mismatches help the sales team refine their pitch. The product team uses these insights to enhance the product experience, add features, and fix bugs. Insights on customer goals or frequently viewed content can guide effective marketing campaigns.

7. Increase Up-selling and Cross-selling Opportunities

Well-educated customers who find ongoing value in your product are more likely to upgrade. Pitching relevant offerings further enhances retention. Invespcro reports that 60-70% of existing customers will repurchase, so implement a strategic customer education program to boost time-to-value and retention.

What Are the KPIs to Measure Customer Education Initiatives

1. Product Adoption Rate

The product adoption rate shows the proportion of customers actively using your product relative to total users.

An increase in product adoption rate shows that onboarding helps new customers achieve quick time-to-value and that existing customers are gaining more awareness and value from your product’s capabilities.

To Calculate Product Adoption Rate:

( New Active Users / Total Signups ) X 100

2. Customer Satisfaction Rate

Customer satisfaction rate is a direct measure to tell if customers are satisfied with the product experience you provide.

A higher satisfaction rate is usually associated with good and active customer education strategies along with good customer support.

Calculating Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT):

Step 1: Survey your customers and ask them to rate their experience with your product on a scale of 1-5 or from “very dissatisfied to very satisfied”.

Step 2: Note down the number of people who’ve voted for “4 or 5” / “Satisfied or very satisfied”. These are your Satisfied Respondents

Step 3: Use this formula to get your CSAT -

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

For example, in a survey with 50 customers, let’s say 12 of them vote “very satisfied” and 15 of them vote “Satisfied”, the CSAT would be -

( (12+15) ) / 50 ) X 100 = ( 27 / 50 ) X 100 = 54%

3. Customer Growth Metrics

Measure customer base growth and value using metrics like customer retention, churn rate, and lifetime value.

Customer Retention Rate:

Customer retention rate shows how many customers continue using your product without churning. Satisfied customers who adopt your product are typically less likely to churn

Customer retention rate is a key metric for assessing customer value, highlighting the ease of selling to existing customers.

Calculating Customer Retention Rate:

To calculate the CRR 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 A the End of the time period (CAE)
• The number of Customers you Gained in this period (CG)

Now, let's put this into a formula:

CRR = ( (CAE-CG) / CAS ) X 100

Customer Churn Rate

This is the opposite of customer retention and lets you know how many customers are churning.

Suppose there is no reduction in churn rates even over a generous period of time, you need to revisit your existing customers and re-evaluate your customer education strategies catering to them.

Formula to calculate Churn Rate (CCR) for a time period:

CCR = (No. of customers lost / Total customers at the start of the period) X 100

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value measures the total revenue expected to be generated during the journey with your company.

Effective customer education helps customers get the maximum value from your product. This makes it a no-brainer for them to invest in a higher plan for more benefits or check out your other products.

To calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), you’ll need:

Average Purchase Value - Total revenue / No. of purchases

Average Purchase Frequency - No. of purchases / No. of paying customers

Average Customer Lifespan - Sum of customer lifespans / Total no. of customers

The formula for CLV:

CLV = Average Purchase Value X Average Purchase Frequency X Average Customer Lifespan

4. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) tells you how loyal your customers are by asking them how likely they are to recommend your product to others. This is done through an in-app score survey, where customers can choose from 1-10, where 1 = less likely to recommend and 10 = more likely to recommend.

A positive NPS correlates with good customer satisfaction and can increase the number of high-quality leads you get.

Conducting an NPS survey:

What you need: To reach your customers, you can build your own survey pop-up within your app or you can get a third-party tool

What you need to ask: An NPS typically contains no more than 2 questions (the 2nd one being optional)

Example Question 1: On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [Product Name] to a friend or a colleague?

Example Follow-up Question (Optional): What’s the primary reason for your score?

Interpreting the responses:

People who voted:

• 0 to 6 - are not likely to recommend your product
• 7 or 8 - are satisfied but might not be actively recommending your product
• 9 or 10 - are loyal and more likely to recommend your product.

5. Learning Management System Metrics

Learning Management System metrics provide insights into how learners engage with your courses. For example:

No. of enrolled users: This lets you know how many users have enrolled for your training courses.

Course completion rate: This carries the information on the percentage of users who complete the courses they start.

A high enrollment rate and course completion rate indicate that customers find your courses valuable and engaging enough to complete them.

6. Knowledge Base Software Metrics

Knowledge Base Software metrics help you understand if customers find value in your self-service help center. For example:

No. of visits: This tells you how many users have visited your knowledge base over a period of time.

Article views: Find out which articles are popular among viewers and which ones don’t get too many visits. You can also see the articles that users spend the most time on.

An increase in these metrics means that customers can easily find the portal and successfully use it to resolve issues on their own.

7. Customer Service Metrics

Customer Service metrics help you realize if your customer education initiatives are running effectively. For example:

No. of tickets raised: This tracks the number of tickets your support team receives over a period of time

Average ticket resolution time: This lets you know the average time taken by the support team to resolve a ticket.

If your overall tickets raised reduces, it is a positive sign for the performance of your customer education activities. Similarly, if your customers are more educated on how your product works, it will reduce the number of tickets on common queries.

Your Customer Education Success Blueprint

When customers effectively use your product, solve problems easily, and confidently share their experiences, they become advocates. Achieve this reality with a robust customer education strategy.

In a constantly evolving digital landscape, keeping customers educated and engaged is essential for success.

Use these best practices in your customer education programs to unlock your product's full potential and ensure customer satisfaction.

1. Understand Your Customers

Customer education isn’t “one size fits all.” Understanding your audience and their content goals is essential to keeping learners motivated.

Segment your customers: Identify key customer groups to determine your target audience. Start by surveying customers, analyzing user data, and creating personas for each segment. With this information, proceed to:

• Figure out customer motivation: Customers have varied motivations for joining your education program. Since lengthy training sessions are less appealing, understanding their motivations allows you to tailor the program accordingly.

For example, If a customer group seeks to learn your product to secure their job, position the education program as a tool to help them achieve their career goals, like earning a promotion.

Further reading: 3 Things You Must Know About Your Audience Before Building a Customer Education Program

2. Use Multi-format Content

Use a multi-format approach with documents, interactive guides, and videos for customer education. Offering varied formats makes content easier to consume and understand.

To choose the right content type, consider your product's technical requirements (coding skills) and complexity (learning curve).

For products that are easy to learn and require minimal coding, use short videos and interactive guides. If the product has a steep learning curve or requires coding skills, include detailed documentation.

3. Automate Customer Education Tasks

Creating content in multiple formats is essential but time-consuming, especially for videos and interactive guides. Customer education tools, like Trainn, can automate this process, enabling you to create training videos and interactive guides in minutes rather than hours or days.

Automation helps deliver content to customers who need it. In our podcast, Eric Mistry recommended mapping processes to find bottlenecks and using a no-code tool like Zapier to automate them.

The better you organize and the better you have mapped out your operations, that’s the key to have really good automations

- Eric Mistry
Strategy & Shared Services Operations Manager, Contentsquare

4. Be Proactive During Updates

Maintain communication with the product development team to stay informed on major upcoming features or updates. This allows you to prepare content ahead of time, enabling customers to adopt new features quickly when they go live.

Maintain your customer education engine by updating knowledge base help docs to cover new updates and features. Revisit your LMS course structure to include any new features or significant experience changes.

Send timed emails prompting customers to use updated resources and learn about the latest product changes.

5. Collect Feedback Through Tools

Customer education tools often include in-built feedback surveys, allowing you to collect direct customer feedback. Combined with analytics, this feedback strengthens your customer education program.

6. Use Multi-lingual Customer Education Content

To fully understand your customers, consider their preferred language. If creating multi-language content, ensure your customer education software supports video localization and multilingual options for both voice and captions. Some tools automate translation, significantly reducing content production time

7. Centralize Your Customer Education Initiatives’ KPIs

Collecting metrics from various tools is straightforward, but the main challenge lies in consolidating them to gain a complete view of your customer education initiatives.

Use integration software like Zapier to centralize metrics from tools like your LMS, CRM, knowledge base, and support platform into a single location, such as Google Sheets. This setup helps you correlate customer actions across apps. For example, if customers view a help article but still open tickets on the topic, consider refining the article and personalizing related customer education programs.

Example of Customer Education

The BuildOps Learning Center

BuildOps, an all-in-one cloud-based field service and project management software for commercial contractors, initially used one-on-one training. However, this approach became unsustainable as their customer base rapidly expanded.

BuildOps sought a strong customer education process to continually educate customers on their product and new features via their Learning Center. Their solution was to create a self-service training resource.

BuildOps created videos, reviewed, and launched their Learning Center with Trainn in exactly 45 days as a part of their revamped customer education program.

The impact of the Learning Center was seen across the sales, implementation, support, and success teams. These teams now offer the Learning Center to handle repetitive questions and educate customers on their product.

On top of customers, new employees also use this resource to understand the product better and stay updated.

Educate Your Customers and Increase Retention and Revenue with Trainn

Trainn is a Customer Education platform built for B2B SaaS companies of all sizes to efficiently onboard, train, and educate their customers, at scale.

Using Trainn’s no-code platform, you can:
1. Create product training videos, interactive guides, and articles without design dependency

2. Build a Knowledge Base and offer self-service support

3. Launch a dedicated customer education Academy with personalized courses, quizzes, and certifications

4. Use learner-lever analytics to measure the performance of your customer education activities

Imagine a world where your customers learn to use your product better and realize the better life they have, thanks to your product. Trainn’s goal is to be in service of helping you get there.

📕A Collection of Resources on Customer Education

1. Customer Educated Podcast by Trainn
2. CustomerEducation Slack Community
3. Gainsight’s resource hub on Customer Education
4. Examples of top customer education programs in tech
5. Podcasts, communities, and books on Customer Education
6. CELab Podcast
7. Digital Customer Education