How To Create A Customer Education Strategy That Drives Business Results

Are you looking for ways to give your customers a better experience and keep them returning? One answer is to use a plan for educating customers. A customer education plan is a way to teach your customers about your product or service as they use it.

This can be done in several ways, such as through workshops, interactive guides, blogs, or knowledge bases. Here are seven steps for making a successful customer education program that makes it easier for customers to use your products, helps them succeed, and keeps them from leaving.

7 Steps To Create A Customer Education Strategy

Step 1: Collaborate with Different Teams

Start by involving different teams in your company, like the UX design, customer success, sales, and customer support teams. These teams know what customers have the most trouble with, their goals and problems, and how they think your product can help them.

For example, the customer support team may say that many customers are having trouble with a certain feature or process in the product. This information can improve the customer's experience by adding it to teaching tools.

On the other hand, the UX design team may have found a bottleneck in the product flow that is causing users to leave. The answer could be to make the user interface more intuitive or to give better directions.

By working with both teams, you can address your customers' specific pain points and the bigger usability problems in the product. This will lead to a more effective customer education plan that meets their needs.

Step 2: Understand Your Customers

To make a customer education plan that meets your customers' wants, you must define user personas and their jobs to be done (JTBD). User profiles are made-up versions of your ideal customers that help you determine what they are like, how they act, and what they need.

JTBD is a set of rules that helps you focus on what your customers want to do with your product or service. These two tools will help you make better learning items to help them reach their goals.

For example, suppose you know that your user persona is a first-time user who may not be familiar with your product's interface. In that case, you can create an onboarding process that guides them through your product's key features and functionalities to help them get started quickly and easily.

Step 3: Set Conversion Goals

Setting goals for conversions is important if you want to track how well your customer education plan is working. Conversion goals are the steps you want your customers to take during their customer journey. They can be broken down into micro and broad conversion points.

Micro conversions are smaller steps that lead to a larger conversion, like signing up for a free sample. The main goal of your customer education approach is to make big changes, like switching from a free sample to a paid plan.

For example, if your macro conversion goal is to get more customers to switch from a free trial to a paid plan, you can create teaching tools that address common barriers to conversion, such as worries about cost or how the product works.

Step 4: Identify Customer Touchpoints

To give customers the right experience at the right time, knowing where they interact with your business is important. Touchpoints are when customers interact with your product, such as when they sign up, start using it, or use certain features.

Knowing these touchpoints allows you to create content that meets the users' needs at each stage, making your customer education plan more effective.

For instance, a new customer might need a thorough onboarding flow that walks them through the basics of the program. Still, a user who already knows how to use a feature might learn more from advanced lessons or tips on how to use that feature.

Step 5: Develop Resources

Once the connections have been found, the next step is to create learning materials that help users along their customer journey. These tools can be movies, live walkthroughs, help articles, flows, or tooltips, among other things.

To meet the different wants of customers, it's important to offer information in different formats. For example, a full onboarding flow that teaches new users the basics of the product might be helpful for new users while a live lesson might be needed to teach current users how to use a new feature.

Moreover, courses can be created to cater to specific customer needs. Take the example of this Segmentation & Clustering course. This can help users apply clustering models to develop sophisticated segmentation in business contexts.

Step 6: Deliver Relevant Educational Materials

Users can find your teaching materials if you put them in a knowledge base, divide them into groups, and engage them with relevant content when needed. For example, if you have a lot of new users who aren't very engaged and have recently tried to use a feature but didn't get anywhere, set off an engaging flow that shows how to use that feature to get them more involved.

Step 7: Continuously Improve

Test your plan for educating your customers, ask for feedback, and make changes based on what you hear. Use different types of polls to find out what your customers want and need from your product and how you can improve it. You can use tools like Trainn's analytics that will help you measure the ROI of your education strategy.

Once you know exactly what your customers want, you can make better choices and change your training materials to improve the user experience and reach your sales goals. Continuous improvement is the key to making a customer education plan that works and meets your customer's ever-changing needs.

Getting business results and making customers happier depends on having a good customer education plan. Following the seven steps above, you can make a customer education plan that works for your business.

To help your customers reach their goals and get the most out of your product or service, it's important to keep your teaching tools up-to-date, interesting, and useful. So, take the time to invest in a well-executed customer education plan and watch as it helps both your users and your bottom line.