Learn about Customer Education 101 and How to
Are your clients hitting an obstacle in maximizing your product's potential? Or, are you losing customers at annual renewal time since they're not getting the value they should?
According to the CallMiner website, U.S. businesses suffer losses of $136.8 billion each year because of unavoidable shifting.
If your customers aren't getting the full benefit in your product or service and have decided to leave as a result you should think about creating a customer education program.
Uncertain of what this is?
Let's discover.
What exactly is customer education?
At , we view that customer education is the act to increase your customer's understanding of your product or service to help them achieve value faster and better scale user growth.
Education of customers begins long before they purchase your products and is maintained all the way through the customer experience. Example:
- Stage 1. Customers who are interested in purchasing your product could require information on the way your product helped others solve their own problems.
- Stage 2 The new customers may require a bit of education on the fundamentals of how to utilize your product
- Stage 3 3: Customers with a long-term commitment might need education on how they can optimize their use of the software to increase its benefits
In the end, education provides your buyers with the information that will help them get the most from your service and desire to keep using the product. Actually, whenever the customer engages in educational content the brand's affinity grows over time according to Conductor.
Customer education can be delivered in various content formats, depending on the specific needs of your business' goals, audiences and offerings. For example:
- Customer Case Study: Demonstrate to future customers why other customers had success using your product or service
- Blogs and Articles Ideal to provide step-by step guides as well as comprehensive instructions regarding the use of products or services.
- Screen-captures and video recorded: Are a excellent tool to share step-by-step tutorials, guides, and tutorials that teach new customers the basics on how to utilize your product or service
- Webinars Allows businesses to explore more in-depth topics regarding the product or service you offer and answer customers' questions, and connect to them in a more personal way
Benefits of a customer education program
You've made the decision to create a customer education plan to expand your company and decrease customers' churn rapidly. This is an excellent start!
Before taking any other action, it is critical to be aware of the benefits that customer education can bring to your company.
Let's look at HTML0.
Increased flexibility and scalability
In the current business environment it is imperative to meet the need for flexibility across every element of doing business. This includes education for customers.
Education courses on demand let students learn more at their own pace. Digital courses are also easy to update when content needs to be refreshed.
When your company grows, so can your program for customer education. By using the appropriate tools, you won't have to sacrifice your program's reliability in order to accommodate your growing business.
Enhances customer service and interaction
Has your customer service team reported that it receives repeated questions over again? This could indicate that your customer education programs aren't up to par.
Chief of Staff at Slack Customer Experience, once said "I consider CE [customer educationas jet fuel to CSMs. Anything we can do to make it easier for you to build connections better and faster. ."
Effective educational programs for customers provide essential facts to help customers understand the true value of the product . It starts by tackling the most frequently -asked questions.
If an educational program answers the questions that are most commonly asked upfront, your customer service team can devote more time to engaging with your customers in a professional manner and working on their deeper requirements .
More rapid adoption and easier onboarding
Just like anyone other customer, they value their time. They've likely already invested a significant amount of time and energy researching before making a decision on your product. This means they'll would like to be into the game quick.
By establishing an on-demand, well-established education program, your customers can move through their onboarding process at their own pace. It increases confidence of the customer using your product as well as speeds up the acceptance process.
Related: Looking to increase your customer engagement? Check out the recordings from Activate Summit.
Improves customer retention
Customers aren't going to purchase your product and then look at reasons why they should leave. But they will not be able to access the right information to make use of the product they've spent time, energy and money for.
That's why it's critical to develop a user education program that is able to meet the requirements of your users. They will stay loyal to you if they feel confident about your product and are confident about using it, and quickly recognize value from it.
Strategically build your customer education plan using customer segmentation
If you are creating a customer education plan for your company It is important to segment your clients. This can be highly beneficial to aid in the development of a curriculum as well as learning resources that can be tailored to the needs of each individual.
Customer segmentation is the process of splitting your clients into different groups based on particular facts and features concerning them. Businesses tend to analyze their audience and create customer "segments" to optimize marketing strategies for each segment, and improve their overall customer experience by individualization.
Grouping your customers into groups also allows you to connect to each group in a more efficient manner and to learn more about their habits and preferences throughout time, through the process of collecting data and observation.
There are numerous options to "segment" your clients based on the goals of your company: demographics, geographics and buyer behaviour, as well as purchase records, and many more.
Consider the segmentation of your Customer Education Model below to assist you in creating your customer education Program:
Be sure to make sure that your customers are educated at each phase in their process. Whether it is before they purchase your product or service, or after they have purchased after they purchase, or when they get activated, it is crucial to educate them throughout the process to ensure that customers understand what you offer and gain the maximum benefit.
Separating your clients into groups in accordance with the "stage" of their journey they're at when developing the customer education plan helps you to provide information at the right time with your information and also address your customers' specific questions, needs and objectives in their interactions with your organization over time.
Five best practices for creating a program for customer education
After you've learned the positive impacts a educational program for customers can bring for your company now is the time to start creating your own program.
Here are a few of our tips for launching your first customer education program from beginning.
1. Find the appropriate educational platform
Education programs for customers can include a combination of verticals, like:
- Training in person traditional
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Customer success stories
- Guides that you can download and whitepapers
Instead of taking an individual approach, it's best practice to combine all of these media formats and channels into one simple platform for your customers using a learning management system (LMS) which permits you to swiftly and effortlessly create on-demand classes.
Customer education platform checklist
Here's 5 things you should look out for when selecting the right platform for the Customer Education Program you're planning to run:
- Ease-of-use: To ensure that your customers are engaged and motivated to continue your education, you'll need create an environment that is as effortless as is possible for them to access your education program and complete the educational materials and lessons. Find a system which is designed with user experience in mind, with a robust, yet easy to use functionality.
- Capability to Scale:As your business scales, so will your customer base as well as the needs of customer education. As you grow the number of customers in your audience and expand in your services You will need to choose an option that will scale according to your growing business's needs without limitations.
- Progression Tracking and Insights:Having an understanding of how your customers interact with your education program can help you identify opportunities for improvement and areas to improve for the coming years. To ensure a high-quality learning experience for your customers within your educational program, and to continue to optimize your learning material to provide worth, you'll want to search for a platform that allows you to track your customer's learning progress, and can provide insights on their experiences being "students".
- Flexibility: Choose a platform that has all the features you require to start, manage and grow your customer education programs as well as courses. With a platform that allows the flexibility to change and does not have code required, you'll be able create courses with ease and quickly and effectively provide educational information to your customers at any time they need they need it.
2. Define success
Just like starting any new business process from scratch, it's crucial to determine success from the very beginning. Make time to outline the plan's goals, the future and near-term goals as well as KPIs that will be used to evaluate performance.
The possible goals be:
- Reducing customer onboarding time
- Decreasing the time that customer team members are spending training
- Expanding product utilization
- In helping customers to adopt preferential behavior
3. Start with your clients' most pressing pain points
If it's time to tackle your strategy Start with the simple win: solving your clients' most common challenges.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Which are your most frequent customer service questions within the initial three months following onboarding?
- Are they able to grasp the basic concepts? Or, are they making progress to the next level of use?
- Where are my customers dropping off in utilization?
- Are they taking correct decisions?
- Do you know of any under-used features?
After you've got a grasp of the education gap, you are able to begin working on the development of content.
Pro tip: Make use of the feedback of your customers. See if customers regularly suggest more information/materials following their onboarding, and then integrate those concepts into your program.
4. Keep content new and engaging
Content is the king. The right content and the right platform will make you successful when you launch your customer education program. So, how do you get started?
We suggest keeping these three things top of the list when creating content:
- Interactive: The ability to make your education materials interactive through questions, discussions, or surveys is a fantastic way to keep your customer entertained throughout the entire learning process.
- Intense: With everybody working harder nowadays, the average customer typically doesn't have a lot of time to learn about a brand new product or system. Maintain their interest by crafting short lessons.
- Informative: Make sure your material is informative and contains easy-to-understand information. Video, presentation as well as tutorials can be great content resources that resonate with customers getting up to speed about a new process or technology.
5. Optimize, optimize, optimize
Once you get your first education for customers off the ground Now is the time to celebrate!
Then, remember to make a plan for integrating regular optimizations of the program, based on:
- Customer feedback and interactions
- Course data and metrics
- Updates to existing material
- Customers want to have more material
Keep in mind The more you can help clients gain knowledge through high-quality training and education and the faster they will recognize the value of your services and more likely to sign up to renew or expand their subscriptions.