Glossary

Customer Education Program

There’s no doubt that informed clients result in more profitable businesses. Customer training is, therefore, a strong priority for most businesses. If your customers know how to use your product or service, they are more likely to get value out of it, resulting in better customer retention and satisfaction rates.

It’s worth studying the common practices behind customer education and what you can do to maximize the benefit you and your buyers gain from such a program.

Why Is Customer Education Important?

Businesses invest in customer training programs for several reasons. They might have a broad market strategy that involves customer success. They might want to offer an extra incentive to buyers to stick out amongst the competition. Or they simply think that customer training in general needs improvement in the organization.

No matter what, a more informed customer base results in higher satisfaction rates and fewer support tickets for your business to respond to. If you sell a subscription-based service, customer training will raise your renewal rates as well.

How Can You Improve Customer Education?

Having a customer education strategy that extends throughout the entire organization is the best step you can take. Most businesses do have education programs, but those are often inconsistent since each instructor produces his own materials and coursework. The result is a confusing and inefficient delivery system that requires constant revisions and takes up too much time to organize.

But what if you adopted a centralized customer education platform? This way, you have a scalable training program that anybody in the business can contribute to. By choosing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, you can make the case that another vendor will handle the maintenance and updates, while your business can focus on the training and communication with clients.

SaaS services are also easier to budget, as they use a regular subscription payment and don’t require investment into physical hardware or additional software. The implications here are that you are investing in the lifetime value of each customer and that you get more out of your training program over time.

How Can Customer Success Make a Move Towards Customer Education?

Customer success teams will need to convince the rest of the company that customer education programs are the way of the future. The best way to make your case is to show off the features of the SaaS platform you’re choosing.

Online learning through these types of vendors are more cost-efficient and accessible than traditional classroom-based methods. Because the content is available online, users can work around their busy schedules at any location. This unparalleled accessibility is ideal for the modern industry, especially among customers.

As mentioned before, customer education is an investment into the lifetime value of a client. Focus on this metric when you’re talking with other teams, as well as other important ones like retention rates and satisfaction. While analyzing the effectiveness of customer training isn’t always clear, you can definitely make a case for a new program.

How Do You Implement a Successful Customer Training Program?

Let’s end on some customer education best practices to get you started.

  • Write up the content. The lifeblood of your training program is the documents and lectures your users will interact with. Over time, add interactive elements like quizzes and hands-on activities to promote knowledge retention. Use the tools of the training platform to the highest extent.
  • Work with other teams. Finding out what your customers need the most involves talking with other teams that interact with your target audience. Ask support representatives what common questions get brought up. Ask project managers to see what components of your product lineup require the most training. Work with customer service managers to help develop your content.
  • Use feedback. It’s vital to understand that the ideal customer education program doesn’t come quickly. Don’t expect Day 1 results to be up to your standards, for instance. It’s an ever-evolving process that requires feedback from your instructors and participants to improve, and many online virtual training platforms have features to allow you to collect this data.
  • Measure your success. What key performance indicators should you be targeting with this customer training program? Is it time-to-value, adoption rate, or something else? Having a target helps you determine what to change in the future.

Customer training is almost always a worthwhile investment for any business. We hope that what you’ve learned here will encourage you to pursue a new training program today.

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