The importance of customer education has reached new heights. This is particularly true for the B2B SaaS industry, where new products, features, and innovative services roll out almost every other day.
Clients need to know how to make the most of these products if businesses hope to retain them long term. That’s where customer education comes into play. But what are the key benefits of providing customer education?
In this article, we address this very question and offer some additional insight into the importance of customer training and education.
What is a customer education program?
A customer education program is a holistic approach to getting a client accustomed to all the features, functionalities, and benefits that a product or service provides.
Many companies fool themselves into thinking that by enrolling customers in one or two training webinars, sharing a video tutorial, or a few useful how-to blogs, they’ve done their customer-training duty.
This could not be further from the truth.
A successful customer education program aims to help customers attain the product’s value as quickly and as effectively as possible.
Getting that “aha moment” early on means new customers will start using the product more often. As such, they will include it in their daily processes as their go-to solution for a specific need.
For a more in-depth look at educating customers, browse our guide to customer education.
Let’s now take a look at the importance of customer education.
Why is customer education important?
A comprehensive customer education strategy is among the most effective customer onboarding best practices a SaaS company can employ.
It plays a crucial role in product adoption.
According to the Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA), 68 percent of customers report using a product more after undergoing a training program.
Similarly, 56 percent use additional product features and functionalities after training, and 87 percent tend to work more independently because of it. In other words, without the constant need for a support team.
What these numbers highlight is that a customer training program helps first-time users better understand how a product addresses their needs and pain points.
This way, companies can increase the rate of customer success, increase customer retention, and lower churn.
Businesses can also reduce customer support costs, further benefiting their bottom line.
Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the perks of customer training. Let’s now look deeper at the key benefits of providing customer education.
11 key benefits of providing customer education
From customer loyalty to retention, engagement, brand loyalty, and everything in between, customer training and education are critical.
These benefits of customer education will help you better understand what you can achieve through a comprehensive customer training program.
#1: Drives revenue and decreases costs
An effective customer education program helps drive revenue and reduce costs.
According to studies from the IDC InfoBrief, businesses that invest in customer education see an average increase of between 10 to 16 percent in all key performance indicators across the entire customer journey.
These figures relate to sales, onboarding, renewal, and growth. At the higher end of the spectrum, businesses reported increases as high as 22 percent.
Another study by Forrester has shown that a formalized customer onboarding process generates a 6.2 percent increase in overall bottom-line revenue and a 6.1 percent decrease in customer support costs.
This helps both companies and customer support teams reach their business goals faster and more effectively.
#2: Creates loyal customers
Loyal customers are a key asset to any organization.
They are less likely to churn, spend more, and will even promote your brand through word-of-mouth advertising.
Research done by Salesforce shows that 70 percent of new customers say knowing how to use a product and its functionalities plays a critical role in choosing to work with that business. They are also 131 percent more likely to purchase after engaging with educational content.
What does this tell us about increasing customer loyalty? That businesses need to help customers gain the necessary product knowledge to use it effectively.
Companies can’t expect new users to learn the product all by themselves.
They won’t spend countless hours going through the product’s features, trying to figure out how to get the most value out of it.
Without a seamless training program in place, customers are more likely to switch over to the competition.
#3: Helps retain existing customers
It’s a well-known fact that retaining an existing customer is more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. The cost of new customer acquisition is between five to seven times higher than retaining old ones.
By investing in an effective customer education program, companies can boost customer engagement. That means providing interactive training content in the form of knowledge bases, FAQ sections, online academies, blended learning, quizzes, etc.
In doing so, learners reach their aha moment faster and begin integrating the product into their day-to-day activities. In turn, this leads to higher customer retention rates.
By reducing customer churn, businesses will also be able to increase retention, killing two birds with one stone.
#4: Increases customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is linked to how much value they can obtain from your product or service.
If they’re struggling to get a return on their investment or have trouble figuring out which functions to use, their overall satisfaction with the product will decrease.
It’s by improving the user experience, generally through customer education, that businesses can enable and empower new customers to adopt the product into their tech stack.
#5: Makes your brand appear trustworthy
Another major benefit of customer training and education revolves around trust.
The marketing department can work together with the sales team to provide potential customers with relevant training materials as part of their content marketing strategy.
This benefits the company before a new user even enters their actual customer journey.
For instance, sharing industry-specific information aimed at educating potential customers allows companies to strategically position themselves as market leaders.
By helping the target audience make more informed decisions, brands can build trust before they even close a sale.
Studies have shown that customers see brands as more trustworthy if they also educate them on the product, service, or industry as a whole. So, taking the necessary time to properly educate your customer base builds trust and customer loyalty.
#6: Empowers customers to become brand ambassadors
As any marketing or sales team can tell you, word-of-mouth advertising works wonders for a company’s customer acquisition.
In fact, according to Nielsen, 92 percent of customers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising.
Fortunately, most companies today can use social media to encourage loyal customers to engage with the customer education team on various platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.
Doing so in plain view of potential customers can draw their attention to your brand and product.
By enabling customers to become brand ambassadors, companies can help further educate new customers, drive sales, increase customer engagement, and even position themselves as thought leaders in their respective industries.
In turn, this drives customer trust, initiating a positive feedback cycle of loyalty, brand advocacy, and retention.
#7: Leads to better customer support
With customer education, companies can lower the overall number of customer questions, issues, complaints, or support tickets.
Customer training and education help address customers’ most basic questions about the product.
Through resources like FAQ sections, knowledge bases, or microlearning, product users can get answers without having to reach out to a customer service rep.
As a result, support teams can dedicate more time to complex questions or issues that other customers may have.
This helps to improve overall customer service, contributing to a better customer experience and satisfaction for everyone involved.
Companies also don’t need to invest in as many customer service reps, allowing their customer education strategy to pick up some of the slack. That way, they can scale their operations more easily with reduced overhead costs.
By also investing in customer service training, companies can further boost the customer experience.
#8: Speeds up customer onboarding
An effective customer onboarding program is specifically designed to ensure a quick and easy time-to-productivity for the client.
It helps them find value in the product faster, boosting their experience, retention, and loyalty.
An optimized customer education program can speed up this process by providing a consistent learning experience among all learners.
You can also use your onboarding program to educate a more diverse group of users by ensuring all of them start their life cycle with the same level of relevant information.
Effective customer education helps optimize your onboarding program by increasing engagement, retention, time-to-productivity, customer lifetime value, and most other essential onboarding metrics.
#9: Evolves your product development activities
Many companies fail to realize that customer education doesn’t only improve onboarding or customer support. It also helps drive product development.
Customers who become more knowledgeable about a product no longer ask basic questions or have easily resolved issues. Instead, their queries will now highlight actual problems and can translate into actionable insights.
Be it bugs, glitches, or even some ideas for improving or rolling out new features, educated customers can become real assets in terms of product development.
By listening to customers, companies can get high-quality feedback that’s effective at improving the product and its functionalities.
#10: Makes communication with customers more flexible
With easy access to high-quality education materials, customers can communicate more effectively regarding the company’s products and services.
A good education program, particularly one that incorporates mobile learning, lets users learn about the product from anywhere with an internet connection. This increases flexibility.
As mentioned earlier, it’s also a good idea to engage and communicate with both loyal and potential customers on social media. This broadens the number of touchpoints, increases engagement, and can even make you a market leader in your industry.
Generally speaking, learning pills are best for use on social media as a way of educating customers. These are short, bite-sized snippets of actionable information that address a single issue.
#11: Creates more upselling opportunities
If you’re looking to eventually upsell your customers, you need to ensure they have a great experience using your product or service.
One way of measuring this is through the time-to-productivity metric. The faster a user can derive actual value from the product, the better it is.
It means they’ve likely engaged with it and will become loyal customers in the long term. It also highlights the fact that you’ve kept your promise when you sold them your solution.
Only after this point can you consider upselling or cross-selling them. By seeing what your product or its features can do for them, they are more inclined to try something extra.
How effective you are at educating them will dictate if and when you increase their lifetime value.
So, how can you improve your customer education and take advantage of these many benefits?
Implement a customer education program with a robust LMS solution
While this list of key benefits is not exhaustive, it does help to show how much companies of all shapes and sizes can win with a well-implemented customer education program.
You’ll need a robust learning management system (LMS) to reap these rewards.
The right LMS allows you to automate time-consuming onboarding and training management tasks and scale your customer education initiatives. Plus, it helps users reduce their time-to-productivity.
For example, a high-powered customer training platform like Docebo enables you to build, deploy, and track engaging on-demand training materials.
With tools for mobile learning, microlearning, gamification, and blended learning programs, you can create impactful customer education that delivers.
Docebo also offers integrations with leading xCRMs for a seamless learning experience.
Schedule a demo with Docebo today to see how it can optimize your customer education program.