Virtual training

6 Key Benefits of Customer Education You Should Know

The CloudShare Team

Jun 18, 2024 - 3 min read

A good customer education program can be a huge competitive advantage for your business. Provided you have the right customer education platform to support your overarching strategy, providing educational content to both existing and prospective customers can have a huge impact on engagement, loyalty, and retention. And that, in turn, has some major long-term benefits for any business — especially one operating in a vertical as competitive as SaaS.

Let’s go over a few of the most significant benefits.

1. Lower customer support costs

The better a customer understands your software, the less likely they are to need product or technical support. That translates to some pretty big time and cost savings for your customer support, especially combined with resources such as a knowledge base and self-service portal. What’s more, because your team will be spending less time dealing with minor helpdesk tickets, they’ll have more time to assist with more significant problems — or simply to provide information that may not be readily and immediately available. 

2. Increased product adoption

Product adoption is basically the golden metric for SaaS companies, representing the moment when a customer has fully engaged with your software’s key features. Your customer education program is how you make them aware that those features exist and show them how everything works. Consequently, lacking an effective onboarding process is one of the most surefire ways to sabotage customer retention. 

While some of your users might still be able to figure things out, most won’t use your product to its fullest potential, and they’ll likely begin looking for a competing solution that seems like a better fit for their needs. 

3. Product and brand advocacy

The more a customer knows about your software, the likelier they are to have a positive opinion of your brand. And the more positive a customer’s opinion of a product, the likelier they are to recommend it to friends and colleagues. Considering that 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know personally over other forms of advertising, having more brand advocates in your corner can create a massive competitive advantage. 

4. Reduced time to value and better ROI

A good onboarding process can also reduce your product’s time-to-value — a customer education metric that measures how long it takes a new user to reach product adoption starting at the point of sale. This generally also results in a higher return on investment for your customers, meaning they’re more likely to continue working with your business moving forward.   

5. Less churn

If there’s one metric that nearly every SaaS company dreads, it’s churn, and with good reason. A high churn rate means you’re bleeding customers, indicating that there’s something wrong with either your software or your strategy. Low churn, on the other hand, usually means your users are satisfied with your product and plan to continue using it for the foreseeable future. 

Customer education is one of the best ways to reduce your churn rate, as it resolves the two most significant causes of churn — a customer not understanding how your software works and a customer not deriving any value from your software. 

6. More opportunities for upselling

Upselling can be a huge challenge if your users don’t fully understand your software. On the other hand, a well-educated and highly engaged customer will generally be much more amenable to purchasing additional software or adding new features. There are a few reasons for this:

• They already have a positive relationship with your business, so they’re more willing to hear additional sales pitches. 
• They know enough about your software to understand there are certain areas where it could improve — perhaps they may have even offered a few suggestions of their own. 
• Your software has already provided them with a demonstrable return on investment. 

How to embrace better customer education

Customer education is no longer something your business can afford to ignore. It represents an integral part of your sales and marketing strategy and a major contributor to customer success and customer satisfaction. Do it right, and you can position your business to not simply grow but thrive.

But now that we’ve gone over the benefits of teaching your users, how exactly do you go about it? 

We’ve actually written a few pieces on the topic. First, we’d recommend having a look at The Ultimate Guide to Customer Training in 2024 for a comprehensive overview of the processes, stages, and strategies involved in building a successful customer education program. From there, you should check out Measuring Customer Education Results: Key Metrics & Best Practices to Know to help you both understand and identify your customer education program’s KPIs. 

Finally, if you’re looking for a bit more in-depth knowledge, you can explore some of the ways artificial intelligence is helping to revolutionize customer education with 12 Ways to Propel Productivity in Customer Education with AI.