Customer Education 101: How To Get Your Program Started
Have your customers hit a roadblock in maxing out your product's capabilities? Or, are you losing clients at the time of renewal due to the fact that they're not receiving anything of value?
According to the CallMiner website, U.S. companies suffer losses of $136.8 billion annually because of unavoidable shifting.
If your clients aren't getting the full benefit out of your product or service and have decided to leave due to this you should think about creating a customer education program.
Uncertain of what it is?
Let's find out.
What is Customer Education?
At , we view the process of education for customers as the method of enhancing your customers' knowledge about your service or product in order to assist them in achieving more value and faster the growth of users.
Education of customers begins long before they purchase your product, and it continues throughout the entire customer journey. Example:
- Stage 1. Potential customers could require information on the way your product helped others solve their own problems.
- Stage 2. : New customers may require a bit of education on the basics of how they can use your product
- Stage 3. 3: Customers with a long-term commitment may require education about how to optimize their use of the software to increase its benefits
Ultimately, customer education equips your customers with the data that will help them get the most from your product and want to keep using it. In fact, when customers interact with educational material and their affinity for your brand grows in time, according to Conductor.
Education for customers can be provided through a variety of types of formats, based upon your company's specific objectives, audience and offers. For example:
- Customer Case Research: Demonstrate to prospective customers how others have found success using your product or service.
- Blogs and articles: Perfect for sharing step-by-step guides and detailed instructions on product/service use
- Video and recorded screen-captures: Are a great tool for sharing step-by-step instructions, instructional videos and instructional videos that show new users the basic skills needed to utilize your product or service
- Webinars Allows businesses to go deeper into the more complex aspects of your service or product or product, address your customer's questions, and connect to them in a more personal way
The benefits of a customer education program
You've made the decision to start a customer education program to scale your enterprise and cut down on customer churn quickly. This is an excellent initial step!
However, prior to doing anything else you must be aware of the benefits that customer education brings to your business.
Let's take a look.
Increased flexibility and scalability
In the current business environment it is imperative to meet the demand for flexibility in all area of running a business. It includes customer education.
On-demand education courses let customers deepen their knowledge on their own time. And digital courses are easy to upgrade when content is required to be refreshed.
When your company increases, so does your program for customer education. If you have the proper equipment, you don't need to sacrifice your program's reliability in order to accommodate your growing business.
Improves customer interaction and service
Does your customer service department mentioned it gets similar questions repeatedly over and That could be a sign your customer education program isn't up to par.
Slack's Chief of Staff, Customer Experience previously said "I consider CE [customer educationas jet fuel for CSMs. Everything we can do to help you build connections better and faster. ."
Effective customer education programs deliver need-to-know details to customers in order to understand what they are getting from the product . It starts by tackling the most frequently -asked questions.
In the event that an education plan answers the questions that are most commonly asked upfront, your customer service staff can be more productive in engaging with your customers in a professional manner and tackling their more in-depth demands .
Faster adoption and onboarding
Like everyone else, your customers are awed by their time. They've likely already been spending a lot of time and energy researching before deciding to go with your service. Which means, they probably want to get up and running with it quick.
Through an existing, online-on-demand education program, your customers are able to complete their onboarding at their own pace. It increases confidence of the customer using your product as well as speeds up the acceptance process.
Related: Do you want to enhance new customer activation? Check out the recordings from Activate Summit.
Improves customer retention
Your customers aren't likely to buy the product only to look at reasons why they should leave. However, they could have a hard time obtaining the right information to utilize the software 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 the users. They will stay loyal to you if they are confident in your product, are confident about using it, and quickly recognize value from it.
Develop a strategically designed customer education program with customer segmentation
When building a customer education program for your business according to your customer's needs, segmenting them is a great way to aid in the development of a curriculum and learning materials that cater to the specific requirements of your customers.
The process of segmenting customers is of dividing your customers into different groups based on specific facts and traits concerning them. Businesses tend to analyze their audience and create customer "segments" in order to improve their marketing strategies for each segment, and improve their overall customer journey experience through personalized customer service.
Segmenting customers into groups allows users to interact to each group in a more efficient manner and learn more about their habits and preferences over time through the process of observation and data collection.
There are numerous options to "segment" your clients based on the goals of your company including demographics, geography, buyer behavior, purchase records, and many other.
Consider the Segmentation of Customer Education Methodology below to help you strategically building your Customer Education program:
Make sure you educate your customers at every stage of their journey. It doesn't matter if it's before they buy your product or service, or after they have purchased, or once they are activated, you must educate your customers at every stage to help them understand your offer better and gain the maximum worth.
The segmentation of your customers in accordance with the "stage" of the process they are in when building your customer education program will help you deliver education precisely at the right moment through your content as well as address the customer's specific questions, needs and expectations in their interactions with your organization in the course of time.
Five top practices to use when building a customer education program
After you've learned the positive effects a customer education program could have for your company It's the time to begin developing your plan.
Here are a few of our tips for launching your very first program for customer education starting from beginning.
1. Find the most suitable education platform
Education programs for customers can include a combination of verticals, like:
- Training in person traditional
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Success stories of customers
- Guides that you can download and whitepapers
Instead of using the approach in a fragmented way, it's best practice to combine all of these channels and media formats into a single, easy-to-use system for your customers: a learning management system (LMS) which lets you quickly and effortlessly create on-demand classes.
Customer Education Platform Checklist
There are five things you should keep an eye out for when selecting the right platform for your Customer Education Program:
- User-friendliness: To ensure that your customers are interested and excited to keep your education, you'll want ensure that it is easy as it is for them to log into the education programs and to complete the learning materials and lessons. Find a system which is designed with user experience in mind, and is able to perform with power, but easy to use functionality.
- The ability to scale:As your business scales as does your customer base as well as the needs of customer education. When you increase the number of clients that you serve and broaden on your offerings, you will want to choose an option that will scale with you and cater to your growing business's needs without limitations.
- Information and Tracking of Progress:Having an understanding of the way your clients interact through your program for education will allow you to identify potential areas for improvement as well as areas for improvement to be made in the near future. To ensure a high-quality learning experience for your customers in your program and continue to enhance your materials to make sure they provide worth, you'll want to search for a platform that allows you to track your client's progress in learning and provide insight into the experience they have in the role of "students".
- Flexibility: Look for an online platform that offers all the features you require to create, launch and grow your customer education programs and classes. With a platform that allows the flexibility to change and does not have programming required, you'll be able create courses quickly and efficiently provide education for your customers whenever they need the information.
2. Define success
As with any business procedure from scratch it is crucial to establish the definition of how successful you are from the start. Make time to outline the program's vision, short- and long-term objectives and key performance indicators to gauge the performance.
Goals that could be considered include:
- Reduces time for customers to board
- Decreases the amount of time customer support teams spend on training
- Expanding product utilization
- Enabling customers to adopt preferential behaviours
3. Start with the biggest issues
When it's time to tackle your strategy begin with easy victories: the customers face the biggest challenges.
You can ask yourself the following questions:
- What are the most frequent customers' questions regarding customer service during the first three months of being onboarding?
- Do customers understand the fundamentals? or, are they taking them move to the next stage of use?
- What are my clients dropping off in utilization?
- Is the company taking correct actions?
- Are there features that are not being used?
Once you have an understanding of the education gap, you are able to begin working on the development of content.
Pro tip: Tap into the customer's feedback. 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. Having the right content on the right platform will make you successful in the launch of your customer education program. How do you start?
We suggest keeping these three things top of the list when creating web content:
- Interactive The ability to make your education content interactive with discussion, quizzes and surveys is a great way to keep your customer engaged throughout the learning experience.
- Intense: With everybody taking on more tasks nowadays, the average customer rarely has a ton of time to learn a new system or product. Make sure they are focused by making short lessons.
- Informative: Make sure that your material is informative and contains simple-to-understand content. Video, presentation as well as tutorials can be great sources of content that are a hit with customers getting up to speed on a new process or system.
5. Optimize, optimize, optimize
When you have your first education for customers in place It's time to be proud!
And, lastly, develop a strategy to incorporate continuous optimizations into the program based on:
- Customer feedback and interactions
- Course information and metrics
- Updates to material already in use
- Customer desires for expanded content
Keep in mind that the more you help your users gain experience through high-quality training and education, the sooner they recognize the value of your services and are more likely to join to renew or expand their subscriptions.