The benefits of a high-quality customer education program are undeniable.
If your customers know more about your software, customer support tickets — and your costs — will naturally decrease.
It also stands to reason that increased product adoption has a positive impact on customer retention. Educated customers onboard faster, cut time to value, enjoy higher satisfaction, and are much more likely to become loyal brand advocates.
It’s all well and good to talk about all these positives. But how do you actually prove them? How do you demonstrate to leadership that your customer education program generates value for the company?
This article will go over exactly what’s involved in measuring the ROI of customer education programs.
Start by asking yourself a simple question: Which metrics matter most to you?
If you haven’t already taken steps to align your customer training initiatives with your core business objectives, you’ll want to do that first. Here’s how:
Collaborate with other teams to develop a company-wide definition of what value looks like.
Understand your company’s go-to-market strategy and overall goals, and ensure you’ve developed your training content to align with both.
Share customer feedback and training insights with other teams within the company.
Let’s say you’ve developed a training course for your customers, and you’ve noticed it has a completion rate of 81%. On paper, that seems decent enough. The thing is, that number alone doesn’t tell you everything.
If you segment it according to customer role, demographic, or industry, you may discover that the completion rate for some groups is abysmal — for one reason or another, the content you’ve developed simply isn’t resonating with that audience. You need to find out why.
Listen to Your Customers
One of the best ways to improve your customer training ROI is by simply reaching out to your customers and acting on their feedback. Both customer satisfaction scores and surveys can tell you a great deal about whether your training was effective. They can also help you identify bottlenecks, content gaps, and quit points in your training content.
Consider the Full Customer Journey
Plenty of businesses think of customer education as what happens between a closed deal and product adoption. But an effective customer education program doesn’t end with onboarding. It encompasses the entirety of a customer’s relationship with your company, from the point of first contact to contract renewal and beyond.
For a complete picture of your customer education program’s ROI, you’ll therefore need to include customer success metrics and milestones such as:
You presumably keep track of how often and how extensively customers use your software. But have you identified which features are critical to product adoption and customer success? And are you monitoring how regularly and consistently your customers are using those features?
These metrics are closely linked with higher customer retention and better customer lifetime value. Both metrics are also indicative of a successful customer education program. Monitoring them goes a long way toward demonstrating value.
Consider Your Costs
Cost efficiency is another variable you should keep a close eye on. Start by cataloguing the total cost of your customer education program, including:
Software licensing fees
Salaries for instructors and designers
Resource development
Delivery
Marketing and communication
Maintenance
Long-term scalability
Tally all these costs together, then compare them to the financial benefits generated by your training, such as increased revenue, greater customer lifetime value, improved retention, and more.
Prepare Easily Digestible Reports
At some point, you’ll need to show the higher-ups that your training is getting results. Provided you’ve focused on the right metrics, you should have all the information you need. All that’s left is thinking about how you’ll present it.
Data visualization is the name of the game here. Use charts and graphs to simplify your data and focus on the metrics you know leadership cares about. The idea here is to cut out any unnecessary details so that people can see the value and merits of your education program at a glance.
Continuously Improve Your Content
For customer education, ROI measurement isn’t the only reason to keep track of all the metrics listed above.
They don’t just provide a window into the effectiveness of your training. They also play an essential role in optimization. By continuously assessing your training and how effectively it fulfills your customer needs, you can ensure your content stays current while also identifying gaps and bottlenecks.
Next Steps: Explore New Ways to Improve Customer Education
Now that you’re up to speed on how to measure the ROI of your customer education program, it’s time to consider ways to improve it.
