The Customer Education 101 Guide: to
Do your customers have the wall in their ability to maximize your product's capabilities? Do you lose customers during the annual renewal period since they're not getting any value?
According to the CallMiner website, U.S. businesses suffer losses of $136.8 billion per year due to avoidable consumer changing.
If your clients don't realize the value in the product or service you offer and leaving because of it, it's probably time to think about creating a customer education programme.
I'm not sure exactly what this signifies?
Let's discover.
What is Customer Education?
At , we view that customer education is the act to increase your customer's awareness of your product or service so that they can gain value faster and better scale the growth of users.
Customer education starts before customers purchase your product, and it continues all the way through the customer experience. For example:
- Stage 1. : Prospect customers might need education on how your product has helped other customers to solve a challenge.
- Stage 2 : New customers might need educating on the basics of how to make use of your product
- Stage 3 : Long-term customers might need education on how to maximize their usage of the product for extended benefits
In the end, it is about providing your buyers with the information that they require to get value of your product and to continue to use it. Actually, whenever the customer engages in educational material and their affinity for your brand grows over time according to Conductor.
Education for customers can be provided in a number of different content formats, depending on the specific needs of your business' needs, goals, and audience. Examples:
- Customer Case Research: Demonstrate to future customers why other customers are enjoying success with your product or service
- Blogs and Articles: Perfect for sharing step-by-step guides and comprehensive instructions regarding the use of products or services.
- Video and recorded screen-captures: Are a fantastic tool to distribute step-by step instructions, instructional videos and tutorials that teach new users the basic skills needed to utilize your service or product.
- 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 with them more intimately
Advantages of an education program
So, you've decided to create a customer education programme to grow your business and reduce customer churn quickly. It's a good initial step!
But, before doing anything else it's important to know the value-adds customer education brings to your business.
Let's take a look.
More flexibility and scalability
Today it is imperative to meet the demand for flexibility in all element of doing business. This includes education for customers.
Online education classes let users improve their understanding in their own schedules. And digital courses are easy to update when content needs to be refreshed.
Then, as your business increases, so does the customer education program. With the right technical tools, you will not have to compromise the reliability of your program due to your expansion.
Enhances customer interaction and service
Has your customer service team mentioned it gets repeated questions over again? This could indicate that your customer education program isn't up to par.
The Chief of Staff of Slack's department, Customer Experience has said that "I consider CE [customer education] as jet fuel for CSMs. Everything we can do to assist you in building relationships faster, better ."
Effective customer education programs deliver need-to-know details to customers in order to understand the true value of the item - and it is done by dealing with commonly requested questions.
If an educational program answers the questions that are most commonly asked upfront, your customer service team can devote more time to having quality interactions with customers and tackling their more in-depth requirements .
Rapider onboarding and faster adoption
Like everyone other customer, they value their time. They've likely already been spending a lot of time and energy looking up information before they decide to purchase your product. This means they'll would like to be up and running with it quick.
By establishing an on-demand, well-established educational program, your clients are able to complete their learning at their own speed. 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
The customers won't buy the product only to look at reasons why they should leave. They will, however, if they don't get the information they need to make use of the product they've spent time, energy, and money on.
That's why it's critical to develop a user education program that meets the needs of your customers. Your customers will be loyal if they trust your product, have confidence in its use and can quickly see benefits from it.
Develop a strategically designed customer education plan using customer segmentation
In the process of creating a customer-education program for your company, segmenting your customers can be highly beneficial to aid in the development of a curriculum and educational materials that are tailored to the specific requirements of your customers.
Customer segmentation refers to the method of dividing your customers into groups according to certain facts and characteristics concerning them. Business organizations tend to research their audience and create customer "segments" to optimize marketing efforts towards each group, and improve their overall customer journey experience through individualization.
Segmenting customers into groups also enables you to communicate to each group in a more efficient manner and learn more about their behaviors and preferences in the course of observation and data collection.
There are countless methods to "segment" your clients based on your business goals: demographics, geographics, buyer behavior, purchase histories, and much further.
Look at the Segmentation of Customer Education Methodology below for creating your customer education program:
Be sure to inform your customers throughout every phase in their process. Whether it is before they purchase your product or service, after they purchase and once they have been activated, it is crucial to educate them at every stage to help customers understand what you offer and gain the maximum value.
The segmentation of your customers depending on the "stage" of their journey they're in while developing the customer education plan helps you to provide information precisely at the right moment by utilizing your materials and also address your customers' particular needs, concerns, and goals when they interact with your business throughout the years.
Five of the best practices for creating a program for customer education
Once you've figured out the benefits a positive 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 beginning from the ground up.
1. Find the most suitable educational platform
Educational programs for customers may include a combination of verticals. For example:
- Training in person traditional
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Customer success stories
- Whitepapers and guides that can be downloaded.
Instead of taking an individual approach, it's best practice to condense all these media formats and channels into a single, easy-to-use system for customers to use: a learning management system (LMS) that allows you to quickly and easily build on-demand courses.
Customer Education Platform Checklist
Here's 5 things that you need to look out for when choosing a platform for your Customer Education Program:
- Easy-to-use: In order to ensure that your customers are enthusiastic and eager to carry on the learning process, you'll want ensure that it is effortless as is possible for them to use your educational program and finish the educational materials and lessons. Choose a platform which is designed with users in mind and is able to perform with power, but simple to use features.
- Capability to Scale:As your business scales, so will your customer base as well as the needs of customer education. If you expand the number of customers who are part of your customer base and increase on your offerings it is important to choose an option that will scale as you grow and meet your growing business's needs without limiting.
- Progression Tracking and Insights:Having an understanding of how your customers interact in your educational program will allow you to identify opportunities for improvement and areas to improve for the future. To provide a quality educational experience for your students within your educational program, and to continue to enhance your material to provide the most value to your customers, you'll need to search for a platform that allows you to track your customer's learning progress, as well as provide information on their experience as "students".
- Flexibility: Choose a platform that has everything you need to easily set up, launch and expand your education for customers and classes. With a platform that allows to be flexible and doesn't have code required, you'll be able create courses quickly and efficiently offer education to your customers at any time they need the information.
2. Define success
Just like starting any new business venture from scratch, it's crucial to determine your success right from the beginning. Take the time to define the vision of your program, its future and near-term goals as well as KPIs that will be used to evaluate efficiency.
Possible goals could be:
- Reducing customer onboarding time
- Decreases the amount of time customer team members are spending training
- Expanding product utilization
- In helping customers to adopt desired behaviours
3. Start with your customers' biggest problems.
If it's time to implement your plan, start with the easy win: solving your clients' most common issues.
You can ask yourself these questions:
- What is the top frequent customer service questions within the first 3 months after the time of onboarding?
- Are customers grasping the basics? or, are they taking them move to the next stage of usage?
- Where are my customers losing their use?
- Are they taking the proper steps?
- Are there features that are not being used?
Once you have an idea of the educational gap, you can start developing content.
Pro tip: Tap into customer feedback. See if customers regularly suggest more information/materials following their onboarding, and then integrate those concepts into your program.
4. Keep content current and exciting
Content is the king. The right content and the correct platform will ensure your success when you launch your own customer education programs. So, how do you start?
It is recommended to keep these three things top of the list when creating content:
- Interactive The ability to make your education content interactive with discussion, quizzes and surveys is an excellent method to keep your customers active throughout their learning.
- Digestible: With everyone working harder nowadays, the average customer rarely has a ton of time to learn about a brand new product or system. Keep their attention by creating short lessons.
- Informative: Make sure your content packs a punch with easy-to-understand information. Videos, videos, and tutorials are great information sources that appeal to people who are getting acquainted on a new process or system.
5. Optimize, optimize, optimize
Once you get your first education for customers on the road, it's time to celebrate!
And, lastly, create a plan to integrate regular optimizations of the program based on:
- Feedback from customers and interactions
- Course data and metrics
- Updates to existing material
- Customer desires for expanded content
Be aware that the more you help your clients gain knowledge through quality training and education, the sooner they realize your offerings' value and more likely to join to extend their membership or renew it.