The Essential Guide to

Customer Education

Customer education, often referred to as customer training, is a proactive approach to empowering your customers with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed with your product or service. At its core, customer education helps onboard, train, and retain both new and existing customers. These programs are not just about teaching technical skills—they are about delivering value that fosters customer success, leading to increased loyalty and advocacy.

The best customer education programs are designed with measurable business outcomes in mind. They drive product adoption by ensuring customers understand and utilize features effectively. They enhance customer retention by keeping users engaged and satisfied. Moreover, they boost customer lifetime value (CLTV) by enabling customers to achieve long-term success with your product. These outcomes directly contribute to the overall health and growth of your business.

Customers today demand quick results, seamless experiences, and ongoing value from the products and services they choose. Customer education bridges the gap between expectation and reality by equipping users with the insights and skills they need to unlock the full potential of your offering.

Ultimately, a robust customer education program is more than just a nice-to-have; it’s a strategic initiative that sets your company apart. By making education a cornerstone of your customer experience, you not only improve user satisfaction but also build a defensible competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

We already mentioned that customer education’s benefits are product adoption, retention and CLTV.

Before we get into more benefits, let’s take a step back.

What’s causing the surge in customer education?

A few things:

• Customer expectations are higher than ever (they need to see value)
• Competition is increasing
• Competitive advantages are harder to come by

Looking at these a layer deeper, they tell a compelling story.

Every single person on Earth buys something — whether it’s a product or service — to fill a need or solve a problem. Someone downloading a budgeting app wants to organize (and hopefully save) some money. Someone using Instacart and other gig services wants access to products whenever and wherever they need them.

A marketing leader who just bought HubSpot’s Marketing Hub wants to attract the right audience, convert more visitors and run inbound campaigns at scale. The list goes on.

If someone doesn’t see this value, they’ll move on.

They download another budgeting app or give another grocery delivery service a try.

Delivering this value is precisely what customer education aims to do — show people value quickly and continue to do so long term.

The right customer education program provides your customers with the resources and support they need to realize their intended outcomes, e.g., saving money, reducing support tickets, etc. For scaling companies, customer education can increase lifetime value, retention, net retention revenue, and sustain durable growth.

The competition is also why differentiators are harder to come by — gone are the days when a flashy marketing campaign or a few new features was enough to sway buying decisions. They certainly still help, but they’re no longer the be-all-end-alls they once were.

Companies that can show their customers (and prospects) that they have their back will stand above those that view customers as nothing more than a number.

We’ve covered the fact that customer education is booming, but how, exactly, does it benefit your bottom line? After all, getting and maintaining leadership buy-in relies on your ability to demonstrate clear business value to the decision-makers.

From a fundamental level, customer education aims to increase product adoption, engagement, and retention. It does this by decreasing time-to-value and empowering customers to learn whenever and wherever they want. Customer education also benefits internal teams. For example, it can improve marketing-sales alignment.

Enablement Materials

Knowledge is the cornerstone of success. Your Sales team, for example, won’t be able to sell if they don’t have the product knowledge to effectively communicate with customers and prospects. Similarly, your Customer Success (CS) team can’t be a strategic partner to your customers if they don’t know the nitty-gritty details of your product. And if your customers don’t understand how to make the most of your product to reach their business goals, all the work you’ve put into product development is for naught.

This is why enablement materials (i.e., providing your teams with the information they need to be successful), is paramount. With the proper knowledge, these teams will fulfill their duties and promises to your customers.

Product Adoption, Engagement and Retention

Customer education is a driver of product adoption and engagement. When your customers know about your product, what it’s capable of, and how to make it work for them, they’re more likely to use it, gain more value and promote it within their network.

Demonstrate the value of your product or feature first and then explain how it works down the road. The reality is that most of your customers don’t want to read an instruction manual for something they know nothing about. However, once they know what they’re dealing with, most are happy to dive in. Help your customers imagine what’s possible first, don’t describe the nuts and bolts.

Decrease in Time-to-Value and Support Tickets

Onboarding, often considered the most critical part of the customer journey, is, by extension, a vital part of any customer education program. A competent customer needs less hand-holding. They’re more likely to achieve successful outcomes on their own and less likely to eat into your support resources. An investment in customer education can translate into considerable savings in support costs later on.

The rest of your customer education program can also function as a “supplement” for more traditional onboarding processes. When you provide customers with self-service resources, you can reduce overall time spent in the onboarding phase and accelerate their time-to-value.

Organic Growth

Your customer education initiative seeks to add value for a specific audience through informative content. The key here is that content is geared toward customers and a wider audience referred to as potential customers. Companies like HubSpot and Compass do this well.

Such public-facing academies offer high-impact content relevant to their industry. Hubspot Academy primarily focuses on supporting marketers, while Compass’ courses are geared toward real estate agents. This type of content positions their academies to simultaneously improve the experience for existing customers while attracting new customers organically over time. Nothing is stopping your academy from doing the same.

For a customer education program to succeed, it’s important to involve stakeholders from across your company. No two customer education programs are the same, so the ideal team will differ from business to business. Still, there are a few key roles all customer education programs should consider:

• Customer Education Lead – It’s this person’s responsibility to get the customer education program off the ground and fully operational. They’re leading the charge.
• Executive Sponsor – Your executive sponsor should guide you to ensure your program fully aligns with the business’s strategic priorities.
• Subject Matter Expert – The subject matter expert is the brains behind all of your content
• Instructional Designer – They translate the concepts identified by your subject matter expert into content and courses that enable your customers to learn successfully.
• Technical Lead – If you want to deliver a fully integrated learning experience, you’ll need someone to handle the nuts and bolts.

With all that said, don’t let a small headcount stop you from getting started. Kicking off an academy as a one-person show is possible—just be strategic and make intelligent decisions, cutting out anything you really don’t need. Before you know it, you’ll start growing. With real business value in your back pocket, resources will follow and so will a larger team. Trust us, the effort will be worth it.

Now that we’ve covered the five major benefits of customer education, let’s take this one step further. If we map these benefits to the customer lifecycle, you’ll notice something pretty neat: Customer education can generate measurable business impact across the entire customer lifecycle.

But where to start? What, exactly, is it going to take to make this happen?

Here’s how to launch a customer education strategy in 4 simple steps:

Understanding the diversity in your customer base is crucial, as it underpins the need for a tailored customer education program. A one-size-fits-all approach to customer education often fails to engage effectively, because your customers not only use your product for different reasons but also prefer different learning styles. Segmenting your customer base allows you to deliver more personalized, relevant content that resonates with specific groups, enhancing user experience and satisfaction.

Here are some key strategies for customer segmentation in training programs:

Industry-Specific Segmentation:

• • Purpose: Tailor educational content to meet the unique needs, characteristics, and terminology of each industry.
  • Benefits: Increases relevance and applicability, enhancing the user’s ability to integrate your product into their specific workflows.

Use Case Segmentation:

• • Purpose: Group customers by the specific applications or purposes for which they use your product.
  • Benefits: Allows for more focused tutorials and guides that are directly applicable to each user’s daily tasks and goals.

Pain Point Segmentation:

• • Purpose: Identify and group customers by the common challenges or problems they seek to solve with your product.
  • Benefits: Enables the creation of problem-solving content that addresses these issues directly, improving customer satisfaction and product utility.

Skill Level Segmentation:

• • Purpose: Categorize customers by their proficiency or familiarity with your product.
  • Benefits: Ensures that content is neither too complex for beginners nor too basic for advanced users, facilitating better learning curves and product mastery.

Subscription or Plan Segmentation:

• • Purpose: Segment customers based on their subscription level or pricing tier and the specific features each tier offers.
  • Benefits: Helps tailor content to expose users to the full range of features they have access to, encouraging up-sell opportunities and deeper engagement.

Geographic Segmentation:

• • Purpose: Divide customers by their location—country, state, city, or region.
  • Benefits: Allows for localization of content, considering regional differences in market conditions, legal requirements, and cultural nuances.

There are many learning management systems out there, which is a strong indicator that there’s value to be had.

But, this is a double-edged sword.

The vast landscape also means you have a lot to sift through. Doing this manually would take ages, preventing you from realizing the value of customer education. Reading the rest of this section will only take a few minutes

Looking for an LMS? Start your search here with this free LMS Buyer’s Guide >>>

Narrow your search by identifying essential features and capabilities you can’t live without, like scale, usability and analytics:

Scalability

As your company grows and you need to onboard more customers, your customer education software must keep up. As a result, having a reliable and flexible LMS engineered to easily add more courses, for example, is mission-critical. If you have to jump through hoops whenever you need to switch things up, your academy will lose value quickly.

Usability

The success of your customer academy relies on one factor: your customers using it. If your customer education software doesn’t have an easy way to make your customers’ experience as intuitive and straightforward as possible, you’ll struggle. To get the engagement you need to reach your goals, you must always put your customers first. This means making your academy as mobile-friendly and intuitive as possible, which you can do by using supported integrations.

Analytics

Old-school learning resources like in-person training and manuals just don’t allow you to track metrics and KPIs, like engagement, that your leadership team will be looking for. By powering your customer academy with software that has robust analytical capabilities, you’ll be able to arm yourself with what you need to prove the value of what you’re doing. Plus, you can also use these insights to help enhance your iteration process mentioned above.

Here are additional features you should look for in an LMS:

Customizable Design

An LMS with a customizable design gives you control over how the user interface (UI) looks to the end-user. Nearly every LMS will let you change logos and colors; however, some, like Gainsight CE, will give you total control over every aspect of the learning interface, including the home screen, events page, login screen, profile page and more.

Mobile

Between the rise of remote work, the “on-the-go” lifestyle and the gig economy, your customers, workforce or partners will access some — or all — of your content on their smartphones. This is why your LMS must be able to optimize your content for mobile devices, allowing your learners to learn whenever and wherever they are.

Certifications

Certificates allow people to test their knowledge and show off their accomplishments. Certificates can be offered in a couple of ways.

Here are two examples from HubSpot to illustrate the point:

• Product: HubSpot Marketing Software Certification Course
• Industry:Content Marketing Course: Get Certified in Content Marketing

The first certification is for HubSpot customers and helps them get the most out of its software. The second one targets anyone looking to learn about content marketing (an industry related to HubSpot’s core business).

APIs, Integrations & Webhooks

LMS APIs and integrations bring your learning platform together with your tech stack (internal and external).

For example, integrating your LMS with HubSpot can power your Sales, Services and Marketing teams with learning data they can use to automate workflows and add learning into their content strategy.

At the same time, integrating your LMS with Gainsight lets you see how learning impacts your customer health score and retention.

Analytics: Measure the impact of your learning programs and optimize accordingly.

• Google Analytics
• Looker
• Power BI
• Segment
• Tableau

Authentication: Keep your academy secure with these connectors.

• Google Apps
• Auth0
• 0Auth 2.0
• OpenID
• Okta

Certifications: Create product experts and give your brand advocates something to cheer about with newly acquired credentials.

• Accredible
• LinkedIn
• Badgr
• Credly

Communication: Keep your team informed about learning activity and webinar registrations directly in the tools they’re already using.

• Microsoft Teams
• Slack
• Zoom

CRM: Track your progress, create automated workflows and more to deliver learning-based value throughout the customer journey.

• HubSpot
• Salesforce

Customer Success: Better manage the relationship between you and your learners.

• Gainsight

Help Desk: Arm your support team with learning data they can use to tailor conversations and personalize guidance.

• Freshdesk
• HubSpot Service Hub
• Intercom
• Zendesk

Workflows: Automate tasks and collaborate across departments so that you can focus on the high-value, strategic insights.

• Workato
• Zapier

So far, we’ve covered just about everything you need to be successful with customer education. But what about once it’s up and running? What’s it going to take to achieve long-term success and sustainability? While customer education trends change, there are proven and time-tested best practices for customer education you can’t live without:

Be Mindful of Course Length (Microlearning)

Micro-learning is an aptly-named approach to workforce training that utilizes short, “bite-sized” learning segments designed to help learners achieve a particular goal. This training style is preferred by on-the-go learners who don’t have time to sit down and invest in prolonged online courses. The key to a high-performing micro-learning strategy is to offset the reduced length of lessons with increased frequency and interaction. When done right, micro-learning can improve retention, engagement, flexibility and comprehension. To do this, you can simply take a one-hour-long online lesson and divide it up into smaller mini-lessons. You can also use questions and short quizzes to strengthen the memory of your learners. This forces the brain to recall information. You should also encourage learners to complete the lessons within a given period to build on the momentum of each mini-course.

Use Visuals Whenever and Wherever Possible

Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text. This puts a premium on visuals, so use them whenever possible, which will help with content comprehension and retention. Plus, using images instead of, or paired with, shorter text, quiz responses decrease burnout and are more pleasing to the eye. (gifs welcome!)

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

You need to deliver your content in an engaging way—this is the only surefire way to get your customers to retain knowledge. To do this, make training feel more personal and relevant. An easy start is to include their names on the welcome screen. You should also consider building groups, which will allow you to segment audiences and provide them with a more tailored experience. You can even customize the end-of-course screen to make a great final impression. This also helps create a more seamless transition in their workflow and helps alleviate any confusion or uncertainty about the next steps.

Optimize for Mobile

The reality is that the majority of your customers will access your content via mobile devices, which means it’s imperative that you optimize your content for these smaller screens — think bullet points, short videos and courses divided into short 2-5 minute modules vs. hour-long lessons (microlearning).

Sync Your Customer Education Software with Your Tech

The increasing prominence of customer education in the business world means that the technology powering these programs should be able to work in tandem with the technology other internal teams are using, namely your CRM. By integrating your LMS and CRM, you’re instantly aligning your efforts with Sales, Marketing and Services, allowing you to all walk in lockstep.

Looking for some inspiration and a glimpse into how some companies are using customer education to power their business? We’ve got you covered.

Uptick Enhances Customer Success with New Structured Digital Onboarding Program

Uptick has significantly reduced launch anxiety with a structured digital onboarding program. This strategic initiative enhances customer experience, streamlines user adoption, and accelerates the time to value, setting a new standard in effective digital engagement.

Customer Education Helps Updater 10x Trained Providers

Creating a customer academy that provided its customers with contextual learning experiences helped Updater achieve a 10x increase in trained and authorized providers within one year. Their approach systematically enhanced customer engagement and knowledge, empowering users at every stage of their journey. By prioritizing gradual skill development, the program ensures comprehensive learning, higher product utilization, and improved customer outcomes, embodying a transformative model for digital learning.

Iodine Software Boosts User Empowerment with Human-First Customer Education Strategy

Iodine Software enhanced its customer engagement through a ‘Human-First’ customer education strategy. This approach focuses on personalized learning experiences, tailored to individual user needs, fostering deeper product understanding and stronger customer relationships. By prioritizing human-centric educational methods, Iodine ensures that customers not only master the software but also achieve optimal outcomes through its use.