Reduced churn, customer retention, product adoption, and customer success. These are some of the most common goals for growing companies. The underlying theme for all of these is customer education.
The more complex your product or service is, the greater the risk it will be misunderstood by your customers. If your customers don’t understand your product and know how to achieve their goals with it, they are unlikely to understand its value, continue to use it, and engage with your business long term.
In fact, according to a Eureka report, product and service underperformance accounts for only 31.5% of customer churn. Overselling, customer service, onboarding, and poor relationship building is actually what makes up for the majority of reasons why a business loses customers (68.5%).
Think about that for a moment… Only 3 in 10 customers are leaving due to product deficiencies and the majority of reasons for churn are completely within your team’s control. In the U.S., avoidable customer churn is costing businesses over $136 billion a year.
So, what is the solution?
Customer training could be a competitive differentiator for your company according to a study conducted by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA).
Why? Companies have trained customers renew 92% more often than untrained customers, increasing self-sufficiency and reducing support requests by 87%. In essence, customer education is your company’s antidote to avoidable customer loss and it plays an influential role in the overall long-term success of your customer base and business growth.
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Skip ahead:
What is customer education?
Customer education is the process of teaching your customers about your product or service and enabling them to find success with it, and it starts before they even purchase from you and continues throughout their customer journey.
For companies, the discipline of training and educating customers can be done in many different forms and formats, including the creation of onboarding resources, online courses, blogs, digital resources, and knowledge bases. Customer education both supports your customers in making an informed buying decision and enables them to get the most value out of the product after they decide to buy.
“A Customer Education function strategically accelerates account and user growth by changing behaviors, reducing barriers to value, and improving the way people work.” – Adam Avramescu, Customer Education: Why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter
As a company or service provider, customer education provides you with an opportunity to reinforce your brand’s value proposition and deliver value to your customers while helping them move through the customer journey seamlessly.
The more a customer learns about your product and sees its value, the more likely they will convert into an activated customer that continues to purchase long-term.
For example, Chargebee uses online customer education through Subscription Academy to delight its customers and help them make the most of their experience on the platform.
Why customer education is important
Formalizing an online customer education program provides your company with an affordable option to scale your customer success efforts without needing to add to your head-count. Bringing your customer education online can also help you significantly increase revenue, streamline operations, dramatically reduce customer support costs and time spent directly educating customers.
For example, instead of spending time in 1-1 calls helping customers troubleshoot common issues, your customer success team can package their knowledge into online resources such as online courses and, eventually, an online academy that customers can access at any time they need. This empowers your customers to learn at their own pace, dynamically engage with your business, and access the knowledge and tools they need to get started with your product or service and find the answers they need without relying heavily on direct support from your customer success and support teams.
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As you begin to scale your customer education offerings and resources, you will likely see your support tickets decrease while improving key customer success metrics like Customer Lifetime Value, NPS Score, and Customer Retention Rate.
Let’s revisit the Chargebee example, a leading subscription-based platform. Initially, their team started formalizing their customer education program by building online courses to help onboard their customers onto their product. They started by teaching their customers the “basics” of using their platform, and began scaling their customer education library once they had streamlined their onboarding experience.
Now, they have built an entire online school for their customers using Thinkific Plus called “Subscription Academy”, offering a host of expert masterclasses, courses and certifications around key themes of billing operations, revenue recognition, pricing experiments, subscription analytics and churn management. Today, the Academy is being accessed by over 5400+ learners spread across 20+ countries and is a one-stop solution for all subscription-related business knowledge in an age when everyone is keen on unlocking a subscription-based revenue model.
https://www.chargebee.com/subscription-academy/
By investing in customer education, your company can go beyond streamlining onboarding and improve the entire customer journey. A customer training program can help you attract qualified leads, nurture them into becoming customers, adopt your product, and find success with it and your other offerings long-term.
Companies’ additional benefits from customer training are increased brand awareness, customer loyalty, customer lifetime value, and a significant reduction in 1-on-1 support questions when they use online courses to train their customers upfront. The proactive 1-to-many customer training model that online learning provides allows companies to build educational explainer content once and use it to train their users at scale — which reduces customer frustration, churn (or loss), and mounting support costs.
How customer education impacts success in the customer journey
An effective customer education strategy starts with the customer’s first interaction with your company and continues throughout their entire customer journey. Whether that first interaction after purchase is a blog post, an online course, or a person-to-person interaction, each moment shapes your customer’s relationship with your brand and product and is crucial.
By making the most of these interactions and leveraging them as an opportunity to deliver value to your customers through education, you’ll be able to help them adopt your product or service faster, align their expectations, and foster customer satisfaction.
The most meaningful customer interactions can be divided into four crucial stages of the customer journey: Presale, Adoption, Expansion, and Retention. As usual with any customer touchpoint, your customers will face opportunities and challenges within each of these stages, which can have a lasting impact on their long-term success and relationship with your business. Let’s examine each stage in more detail.
Stage One: Presale
The presale stage is the first point of contact a prospect or potential customer will have with your product or service, which is largely driven by your company’s marketing efforts.
At this stage, your marketing team is working hard to produce content that speaks to your target customer’s challenges and needs, informs and educates them on the value of your product or service, and positions it as a solution while explaining how you stack up against the competition.
The challenge: quantity over quality.
Providing unclear information or resources at the start can create the risk of attracting prospects that eventually become customers that are ultimately not the right fit for your product. This can ultimately result in your business having a large base of customers who require extensive customer support and eat away at your budget, feel like they have been oversold, and increase your churn as the customer leaves after a few months and is unsatisfied.
To avoid this, work with your marketing and sales team to ensure that your marketing efforts are directly geared towards your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and that you are converting qualified leads into customers.
Image by Cognism
Stage Two: Adoption
After a sale closes or your customer completes a purchase, their journey towards adoption of your product or service begins.
Your customer success or account management team usually leads this stage. The goal here is to successfully onboard the customer, effectively build and manage the relationship, and reduce potential churn risks by aligning and meeting expectations initially established at the onset.
The challenge: a janky customer experience.
When your customer is forced to search your website and help center articles to find the knowledge they need to start using your product or service, they are more likely to either abandon your product or service, or need extra support from your team in order to stay, which for your company means increased support tickets, costs, and time spent training and supporting customers 1-1.
Instead of troubleshooting unique issues and accelerating your customer’s path to success, your customer success and support teams will likely have to spend hours and hours answering the same questions and repeating the same script.
1 to 1 onboarding is simply not scalable. It’s obviously not cost-effective but it’s also not good for customer experience, as this high touch approach will lead to onboarding backlogs, implementation delays, slow responses to inquiries, and when you are eventually forced to reduce support, an increase in churn.
Pro-tip: Scale 1-1 onboarding by building an onboarding online course.
Leverage online courses to take your customer through a guided and interactive onboarding experience that you can even gamify with customer training platform like Thinkific Plus.
Online courses help you reach customers, at the right time and in an engaging format. That’s the strategy that Hootsuite, the world’s most widely used social media management platform, has embraced through Hootsuite Academy. They offer their customers a wide range of online courses with the goal of increasing adoption of their product and features, such as how to use the Hootsuite Dashboard.
Image from Hootsuite
Stage Three: Retention
As your product, service, and industry evolves, your customer success and support teams will need to be proactive about keeping your customers up to date to encourage maintained usage of their product, and increase their ability to do so.
In this stage, your customer success and support teams are your first line of defense to enable your customers with education and manage incoming customer inquiries. They are there to provide knowledge, answer questions, resolve issues quickly, and explain any complex aspects of using a new aspect of your product or service.
The goal is to provide effective education and quick support to customers while collecting data to continue to improve your customer education, and product or support documentation.
The challenge: a fast paced market and growing customer base.
For your customer success and support teams, a lack of customer understanding and basic knowledge of the key aspects of features of your product or service in your customer base means answering the same questions over and over again. The ticket volume is likely to become unsustainable long-term, leading your company to have to increase head-count and support costs, or face longer wait times and frustrated customers. If you don’t address these concerns, you could see increased customer turnover quickly.
Pro-tip: Create proactive online courses based on customer data to address ongoing customer support and continuing education. 80% of the questions companies receive in this stage could be answered by 20% of the courses they are creating. Make your customer education academy the first place they go to ask questions.
For example, Sendable, a social media management tool, put their most common customer inquiries into an academy and they’ve seen a huge decrease in the number of questions they were receiving through support.
Pro-tip for increased ROI on your customer training platform: Repurpose customer education for onboarding new employees. You’re creating great customer support content, why not share it with your internal team and partners? Repurpose that customer education as much as possible and increase your return on your investment.
Stage Four: Expansion
Beyond offering a wide range of courses to help your customers understand the basics of your product or service, you can scale your customer education courses and build a Customer Education Academy that is the one-stop for your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) to find the knowledge they need to do their job successfully and grow in their role long-term.
Going back to the Hootsuite example, Hootsuite Academy not only helps their customers gain the most value possible from their features, it has now evolved into a globally known online school for anyone interested in learning about social media marketing alike, where they can become certified social media managers.
The Hootsuite team understood that it was crucial to help people build knowledge and confidence about social media first before they could fully understand the value of their platform. Hootsuite’s Director of Inbound and Education , David Godsall agrees:
“ Education is how we ensure our users are successful, and that’s how they become loyal Hootsuite customers.”
Struggling to reduce churn? These 6 steps will help you develop and launch your customer education strategy to do so! #customersuccess #onlinecourses #CX
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