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

Let’s imagine there’s a laptop called Banana with its very own BacOS (very creative, I know). Banana’s promotion videos looked really appealing, so you go to a Banana outlet to buy their laptop. But you’re not sure which one would work best in your case, so you decide to consult a worker there, but they decide to play hide and seek with you, and they’re damn good at hiding. After hours of searching, you finally find the laptop that you need.

After a month, Banana released an update that completely changed the interface and feature set of their BacOS, making it nearly impossible to use. They neither updated their user manuals nor wrote help docs to help users navigate the new update. Their customer support isn’t picking up your calls or responding to your emails.

While talking to your friend Hailey about this issue, she suggests you check out another brand……Peach and their PacOS (I created this unique name after hours of thinking).

A few weeks later, you realize Peach always kept you in the loop during feature updates and gave access to training materials that helped you master the PacOS. They happily lived together ever after.

The story’s moral is: Do not be like Banana, investing only in appealing marketing and hide-and-seek strategies. Be like Peach, and prioritize educating customers along with customer support to keep them happy and loyal to your brand.

What is Customer Education?

Customer education is the set of initiatives an organization takes to educate their customers on their product to help them get the maximum value out of it. Customer education is something that needs to start before a lead even converts and should continue well after they onboard as a new customer.

Customer education is the process of helping the learner achieve their outcomes through teaching a combination of industry and product skills, which promotes both product credibility and value.

- Vicky Kennedy,
Founder, Echtus

Why Customer Education Matters?

Let’s revisit the story from the introduction for a moment. When you look at why Peach won over Banana, the reason might seem pretty obvious, Peach offered better customer education. But you did not magically choose Peach, right? Hailey suggested it, which indicates her good experience with the brand and her trust in them to provide the same to you. That’s loyalty right there.

Breaking it down, we can consider these three factors to provide good customer education:

- The Product Experience

Here’s a would-you-rather question: Would you rather go for the most popular product that does not provide any guidance or education or go for a less popular one that provides learning resources in various formats?

I place my bet that you’d choose the latter. It’s not that the popular product has bad features, it may well even have the best features in the market. The point is if you don’t have the time to trial-and-error your way into learning the product, you might as well go for a product that guides you through it and provides resources to help yourself when stuck.

The experience you get from a product is not just based on the features it boasts or how well it works, it also includes how it educates you to use it effectively for your use cases.

- Increasing Competition

If you’re telling the world why your product is better, then you can probably hear a chorus behind you singing why their product is better than yours. This further increases your need to provide good product experiences to have a competitive edge over others.

In fact, 66% of consumers want brands to understand and address their needs. This can be fulfilled by good customer education throughout their journey with you.

- Improving Your Customers’ Skillset

The above statistic also opens up an opportunity for you to go beyond product education. Customers will have struggles in their respective fields which your product might not be able to solve directly. But, if you can guide them to relevant sources that can help them with it, it’ll greatly increase their trust in you.

It’d be great if your proposed solution naturally links up with your product, 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 and thousands of folks from inbound marketing, sales, and support teams, use HubSpot for their day-to-day tasks. HubSpot went one step ahead and launched the HubSpot academy to empower its customers with the most sought-after business skills. About 165,000+ professionals have grown their careers by getting certified with the HubSpot Academy.

What Are Some Benefits of Customer Education?

1. Eliminate Buyer’s Remorse

Customers face buyer’s remorse when they doubt the value of their newly purchased product. A good onboarding process eliminates this doubt by helping customers quickly set up, and go over the product features, and how to use them. This allows them to start seeing value faster and reinforces their purchase decision.

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 these days expect easy and immediate access to a solution. A well-structured customer education system helps you deliver this expectation with personalized, and on-demand content that caters to different customers.

You can also offer content in different formats like videos, interactive guides, and in-app knowledge base widgets to offer flexible learning options for those with specific preferences.

Providing what customers expect from you makes you stand out from the crowd, increases satisfaction, and eventually, these customers become loyal advocates of your product.

3. Earn Customer Loyalty and Trust

We just saw how customer education positively impacts your metrics. As these metrics continue to grow, you’ll foster a customer base who become loyal advocates for your product. These customers become marketers for you, similar to Hailey who recommended you Peach.

On that note, it might be a good idea to use referral programs to nudge these loyal customers to refer their friends. For one, they’re most likely to do it since they’re already satisfied with your product, and two, they feel rewarded for their loyalty.

4. Offer Scalable Customer Training

As your business picks up pace, scalability becomes a concern when considering training your customers. Simple one-on-one training or live chat support might not cut it with the number of people needed to handle multiple customers won’t be feasible. One of our customers BuildOps faced a similar issue - we’ve explored this in detail further down.

A robust customer education system is one of the best ways to tackle this problem. Once the system is in place, customers have access to 24x7 self-service portals, customer success managers, LMS courses, and more. All you would have to do is maintain this system and update it often.

5. Reduce Load on Customer support

Unless you have a personal grudge against your customer support team, I’d recommend setting up a customer education system. It helps in deflecting the traffic they get to let them focus on more pressing issues. Let’s give them a break from redundant tickets, shall we?

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

Step 1: Look at the support tickets you get or collect previous support tickets from a time period

Step 2: Categorize the tickets into different case reason buckets. For example, onboarding issues, feature “X’ issues, bugs, etc.

Step 3: Create help articles, videos, and guides for these buckets addressing the most common issues in them.

Step 4: Share the content along with support requests, email replies, and to your knowledge base.

Once the common issues are addressed, you can focus on addressing more niche support requests and host live webinar sessions.

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 are struggling the most during onboarding.
• 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.

These insights not only help you understand your customers better and craft better customer education materials, but you can also share your insights with other teams like sales and marketing.

Common customer struggles and expectation mismatches help the sales team to improve their sales pitch. The product team can use this insight to improve the product experience, add new feature requests, and fix bugs. Insights like common customer goals, or content they interact with the most can signal the kind of marketing campaigns that need to be run.

7. Increase Up-selling and Cross-selling Opportunities

Customers who are well-educated on your product and continue to find value in it are more likely to upgrade their current plan. It’s also a good idea to pitch your other offerings that align with their needs. According to Invespcro, 60-70% of existing customers will buy from you again, so make use of customer education ASAP.

What Are the KPIs to Measure Customer Education Initiatives

1. Product Adoption Rate

The product adoption rate tells you how many users use your product actively as compared to your total number of users.

An increase in the product adoption rate indicates that your onboarding practices are helping new customers get value from your product faster. It also means that your existing customers are now more aware of your product’s capabilities and gaining value out of it.

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

Understand the growth of your customer base and its value with these metrics: Customer retention, customer churn, and customer lifetime value.

Customer Retention Rate:

This tells you how many customers continue to use your product and don’t drop off. Generally, satisfied customers who’ve adopted your product are less likely to churn and vice versa.

Customer retention rate is an important metric to look at from a customer value angle as we just saw that it’s easier to sell 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.

Customer Education Best Practices

1. Understand Your Customers

Customer education is never a “one size fits all” channel. So, knowing who your audiences are and why they want to consume your content is key to keeping your learners motivated.

• Segment your customers: Identify key customer groups to see who you’ll cater to. Start by surveying customers, analyzing user data, and creating customer personas for each segment. Once you have this information, the next step is to:
• Figure out customer motivation: Different customers have different motivations to participate in your customer education program. In this day and age, people don’t really fancy sitting through training programs. So, knowing what motivates them, you can position your program based on it.
  
  For example, let’s say a customer group wants to learn your product to keep their job - position the program as a tool that can help them score that promotion they’ve been eyeing.

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

2. Use Multi-format Content

When creating content, consider a multi-format content approach that includes documents, interactive how-to guides, and videos. Providing different formats makes your customer education initiatives easy to consume and to gain knowledge from.

If you’re confused about which content type to go for, have a look at your product’s technicality (coding skill requirements) and complexity (its learning curve).

The easier it is to learn your product and use it with minimal or no coding, your initiatives can make use of short videos and interactive guides. If your product has a proper learning curve and/or needs a good level of coding knowledge to use, consider adding documentation into the mix.

3. Automate Customer Education Tasks

While creating content in different formats is important, it can also be time-consuming, especially with videos and interactive guides. There are tools in the market that can automate this process. Shameless plug here - Trainn can help you create training videos and interactive guides. There are other tools as well, like Scribehow, Camtasia, Tango, ClipChamp, and more.

Automation can also help you deliver this content to customers who need it. In our podcast with Eric Mistry, he suggested mapping out your processes to identify bottlenecks and automate those processes. Eric recommends using a no-code automation tool like Zapier to build your automation system.

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

Stay in touch with the product development team and get insights on any major upcoming feature releases, or updates. This will give you enough time to create content and publish as these updates go live and help customers adopt these updates or features quickly.

Don’t ignore your customer education engine either. Update your knowledge base help docs to talk about the new updates and features. Revisit your LMS course structure to incorporate any new features or experience-changing updates.

Send out timed emails to your customers asking them to use these updated resources to learn about the latest changes in the product.

5. Collect Feedback Through Tools

The tools you use in your customer education strategies most often come with in-built feedback collection surveys. These surveys help you get direct feedback from your customers. Along with analytics, this feedback will improve the health of your customer education engine.

6. Use Multi-lingual Customer Education Content

Understanding your customers also comes with knowing what language they’d prefer. If you’re going to create content in multiple languages, make sure your customer education software supports video localization and multi-lingual content creation (both voice and captions). Some tools automate the translation and process, drastically reducing the time taken to produce content in different languages.

7. Centralize Your Customer Education Initiatives’ KPIs

While getting metrics on different tools might be simple, the biggest challenge is to have it under one roof to get the complete picture of your customer education initiatives.

To centralize metrics from different tools, you can use an integration software like Zapier, to pull metrics from different apps such as your LMS, CRM, knowledge base, and customer support solution into a single destination like a Google Sheet.

This helps you correlate customer actions in different apps, for example: If you see customers viewing a specific help article and still open a ticket under that bucket, you might need to refine your help article.

Example of Customer Education

The BuildOps Learning Center

BuildOps is an all-in-one cloud-based field service and project management software built for commercial contractors. They were practicing one-on-one training for their customers but it wasn’t scalable as their customer base experienced massive growth.

They started looking for a robust ongoing customer education process to help them educate customers on their product and when new features are released. The solution to this problem was creating a self-service training resource for customers.

BuildOps created videos, reviewed, and launched their Learning Center with Trainn in exactly 45 days.

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 train 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 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