It doesn’t take a mathematician to know that customer success equals business success.
This is especially true for the SaaS industry, which relies heavily on product adoption and ongoing subscriptions.
SaaS companies must do everything in their power to attract new customers and increase the lifetime value of their existing ones by as much as possible.
Enter effective customer education.
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the importance of an effective customer education program and a dozen best practices to employ.
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of March 1, 2024.
What is customer education?
Customer education is how organizations typically instill product knowledge in new customers.
Also known as customer training, the process teaches new clients how to properly and effectively use a product or service to get as much value as soon as possible.
It’s also a tool for educating existing customers and upselling.
The purpose of educating new or existing clients is to help them shorten their time-to-productivity.
By doing so, they will reach their “aha moment” sooner and will introduce the product into their daily activities as a means of addressing a specific need or pain point.
A successful customer education program increases customer retention, lowers churn, boosts customer satisfaction, and improves most other customer onboarding and success metrics.
So, what types of educational content do SaaS companies typically use during their customer onboarding programs?
The types of educational content you can use
Educational content used during customer onboarding can vary based on the specific product.
Generally speaking, training content is about providing learners with enough product knowledge so they can use it as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
However, educational resources can also include broader topics within the client’s industry or specific niche, showing how using the product can give them a competitive edge.
Here are a few examples to give you a better idea of what effective customer education content looks like.
- Product walkthroughs: A step-by-step presentation designed to familiarize the learner with how the tool works. Depending on the product’s complexity, the walkthrough can be interactive and dynamic, with modals, pop-ups, tooltips, or hotspots.
- Video tutorials: Tutorials are great at providing in-depth information about more complex tasks. Engaging and interactive, video tutorials boost the user experience and connection with the course material.
- Live webinars: Great for users to ask real-time questions and solve problems they’ve encountered while using the product. Recorded webinars are not as effective but are the next best thing for those who were unable to attend the live session.
- Case studies: Highlight how others in your customer base were able to successfully use the product to meet their needs, address pain points, and achieve their desired business outcomes.
- Use cases: Ideal for helping new users better understand how the product will solve their needs by using your product.
- Industry-specific blog posts: A good option to provide a broader picture of how your product can help customers get a competitive edge. Blog posts can also help you position your brand as a thought leader in the industry.
- FAQ sections: Help users find answers to quick questions they might have. A chatbot integration can facilitate these answers faster for a better overall customer experience.
- Learning pills: Small snippets of factual information that address a single, in-the-moment need. These learning pills are an excellent refresher tool across the entire customer lifecycle.
- Self-service knowledge bases: On-demand information repositories for the end-user to access whenever they need to further their understanding.
While this is not an exhaustive list, it does highlight some of the most common types of e-learning content material used during the onboarding process.
Let’s now take a quick look at the importance of customer education and why companies need to take it seriously.
Why you need to take customer education seriously
Whether it’s to reduce customer churn, boost product and new feature adoption, minimize the volume of customer support tickets, or reach other business goals, organizations need to invest in customer education.
Based on a Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA) study, 68 percent of customers say that after undergoing a training program, their product use has increased.
In addition, 87 percent require less customer support, and 56 percent also increased their product feature adoption.
Another study by the MIT Sloan School of Management highlighted that customers who receive training and education on a product and industry regard the brand providing it as more trustworthy.
In other words, customer education helps to boost customer loyalty.
Forrester has also shown that a formalized customer onboarding program can increase the bottom-line revenue by 6.2 percent and lower customer support costs by 6.1 percent.
Furthermore, an IDC InfoBrief has shown an overall increase between 10 and 16 percent in all metrics and KPIs for companies that invest in customer education.
Have these stats piqued your interest? Check out our guide for a more comprehensive list of customer training benefits and the importance of a customer education strategy.
Let’s now dive deeper into what makes a successful customer education program effective.
12 best practices for an effective customer education program
Many companies make the mistake of thinking that customer education is a one-time thing. They believe that if a customer receives some training, their job is done.
This is not the case.
An effective customer education program is an ongoing process spanning the entire customer journey and even beyond.
This is particularly true if you’re rolling out regular updates or new features.
Here are a dozen customer education best practices to help you create an effective and successful customer training program.
#1: Get to know your customers and understand their needs
The first step to any worthwhile customer education program is to understand your customers’ needs and pain points.
Among the most effective methods is to create one or more buyer personas. These are depictions of typical customers based on various demographical, geographical, psychological, and behavioral factors.
They include information like age, gender, job title, industry, geographical location, specific pain points, challenges, the way they interact with your product, etc.
Companies can collect this data from a wide variety of places, such as through customer feedback, surveys, sales and marketing teams, analytics tools, their preferred customer onboarding software, and more.
By creating these customer personas, businesses can get a deeper understanding of their clients and their needs.
In doing so, they’ll be able to better personalize the training content, improve the learning experience, and lower churn rates.
#2: Focus on collaboration
An often overlooked part of customer training is social learning.
This is a teaching method that focuses on collaboration between learners to help and teach each other how to use a product or service more effectively.
Built-in forums are generally a good place for team members to share ideas and insights on how to use the product more effectively or how to better use certain product features and functionalities to get the desired results.
HubSpot, for example, takes social learning a step further. It provides its user base with certifications every time they complete an online course as part of the training program.
Users can then add these to their LinkedIn profile pages, prompting others to earn them too.
#3: Set clear goals
Without clear goals in place, it’s unlikely that a customer education program will get very far. You need to know what you’re aiming for to have any hope of reaching it.
This step may be a bit more complicated than first meets the eye.
You’ll need to do this at every level of the company so that all stakeholders’ customer training initiatives aim in the same direction.
- On a team level, you need to focus on the here and now. This relates to how your program impacts the end user in real time. Are you engaging them effectively? Do they get good customer support? That sort of thing.
- On a departmental level, you’ll need to figure out how each department, be it customer success, sales, marketing, product development, or customer support, measures success and how customer education impacts each of them.
- On an executive level, you take in the broader picture in terms of your overarching business goals and how they tie in with your customer education metrics, such as customer retention, churn rates, customer lifetime value, time-to-productivity, etc.
Both your customer training and business goals need to align for a strategic decision-making process. Each team, department, and executive will have different metrics they’ll use to quantify success.
You need to identify these and align them with your business goals.
#4: Segment your customers
Customer segmentation is an excellent way of further customizing and optimizing your customer onboarding and education processes. It’s also where customer personas come into their own.
Since different customers have different needs and pain points, a generic education program will rarely generate meaningful results.
Depending on your product and the target audience, you can segment your customers in a wide variety of ways.
For example, you can do it based on pain points. In this case, you focus your customer education on specific problems or issues that your product can address.
You can also segment your customer base on different industries. Here, you focus on the challenges found specifically in each business sector.
Alternatively, you can concentrate on the type of subscription plan or geographical location.
You do so by providing e-learning content tailored to those specific product features or local areas.
The point is that you can pick and choose from a variety of target audience segments that make the most sense for your product and tailor your training program to match.
#5: Involve all relevant teams
It’s always a good idea to have a dedicated customer success team to look after your client education program.
It’s also good practice to have other parts of the organization involved in the processes to various degrees.
Most notably, your sales, marketing, product development, and customer support teams will likely be the most involved.
The customer success team handles most of the day-to-day interactions with customers in terms of product adoption, training, onboarding, and so on.
The sales and marketing teams can also pitch in and profit from customer education in terms of providing relevant customer information. They’ll get useful marketing and sales enablement content material from the success team in return.
The customer support team should provide timely assistance with all customer queries to improve the overall customer experience.
In addition, the support team can gather relevant information regarding customer issues and complaints and forward it to the product development team.
Lastly, the development team uses this information to further make improvements in terms of bug fixes, user interface, or designing new features.
#6: Build education into the product itself
Another effective strategy is to design the product with customer education and training in mind. This is a more streamlined way of increasing product adoption, customer satisfaction, and retention.
It’s a proactive approach to some common issues that new customers may have while first interacting with your product.
Consider incorporating several customer training elements into the product itself. These can include things like an intuitive interface, tooltips, FAQs, UI hotspots, pop-ups, etc.
All of these elements help to keep the new customer using the product uninterrupted, and so reach their “aha moment” that bit faster.
#7: Take advantage of gamification
To increase customer engagement and knowledge retention throughout the customer education process, it’s a good idea to introduce some gamification elements.
As their name would suggest, these are various features taken from video games. They include things like leaderboards, progress bars, badges, point-based rewards, quizzes, and more.
Take, for example, LinkedIn. It was able to increase the rate of user profile completion by 55% simply by introducing a progress bar.
With a platform like Docebo, you can sprinkle gamification features throughout your e-learning course and increase your customer retention rate.
#8: Don’t forget the “top-of-funnel” educational content
Top-of-funnel (TOFU) content refers to any training material that’s meant to educate and raise awareness about the challenges surrounding the industry and how the product can help.
This is a good opportunity for your customer success team to work with the content marketing department to create this type of educational content.
It usually takes the form of blog posts and addresses potential leads who haven’t yet defined their specific needs or challenges.
Unlike other e-learning content, TOFU educational material branches out, moving away from specific product walkthroughs and tutorials.
It takes a more proactive approach to determining and defining the target audience’s needs and strategically places the product as a go-to solution.
The added benefit of this type of content is that it can also position your brand as a thought leader in the industry, increasing trust and customer loyalty.
#9: Choose the right LMS
The right onboarding learning management system (LMS) can be a real asset for your customer education program. It can streamline, personalize, and automate parts of the onboarding process.
In addition, it can be an effective tool for learning content creation and curation, providings a multitude of training modules in various formats.
With a customer onboarding tool like Docebo, you can implement gamification, social learning, blended learning, mobile, and microlearning, among others.
Customizable certifications allow you to celebrate customers’ success and motivate them to share their achievements with their network.
You can also white label the learning platform and brand it with your own logo and colors based on your specific needs.
#10: Incorporate microlearning and mobile learning
With your typical formal training, engagement rates tend to be low. This is, in large part, because of the sheer amount of information dumped on the learner.
A blended training approach tends to be the better option at this stage, as it combines the benefits of classroom-based courses with online training material.
Yet, in the weeks and months following the initial onboarding stage, new users will still need the occasional refresher course. This is where microlearning becomes truly useful.
Among the types of microlearning modules, we can include the learning pills mentioned earlier, which can be easily made using Docebo Shape. These can be in the form of short videos, presentations, or infographics.
They help new users find specific bits of factual information to address a particular problem they’re facing at that moment.
To further increase the flexibility of your customer education strategy, you can pair microlearning with mobile learning.
This way, customers don’t need to be at their desks to access the training content. They can do it on the go from any mobile device with an internet connection.
#11: Keep track of relevant metrics and KPIs
For any customer education strategy to be effective, you need to keep a constant eye on relevant metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Depending on the specific business goals you want to achieve, these can be in the form of customer churn or retention rates, training course completion rate, product adoption rate, time-to-productivity, customer lifetime value, etc.
Each of these metrics can shine a light on what’s working and what isn’t in your customer education program as well as provide insights into how to improve the effectiveness of your efforts.
A professional customer onboarding software solution like Docebo Learn Data will have the necessary analytics capabilities to help you track these KPIs.
Doing so, you’ll spot any trouble areas before they spiral out of control. That way, you ensure that you’re always on track to achieve your goals.
#12: Ask for feedback
Requesting customer feedback is always a good idea.
Listening to customers can provide plenty of useful insights into how your product looks from the end-user’s perspective.
You can also generate net promoter scores (NPSs) so you can assess customer loyalty and how likely your customer base is to recommend your brand or product to others.
Simply asking for feedback can also increase trust and loyalty by virtue of taking users’ opinions into account.
You should collect feedback at key stages and milestones throughout the learning program, such as after completing a particular training course, using a feature for the first time, or interacting with customer support.
You can send out automated emails with a survey or have a built-in feature, which you can do with Docebo Learning Impact.
The important part here is to thank them for taking the time, implement their suggestions wherever possible, and not overdo it. Survey fatigue is a real thing, after all.
These best practices will help you improve your customer education strategy and retain customers like never before.
Take customer education to the next level with a good LMS
A stellar LMS will enable you to implement and leverage these best practices. With the right solution, you can streamline processes and focus on the key aspects of your customer training program.
That translates into lighter workloads for your customer teams and an enhanced learning experience for your clients.
Schedule a demo with Docebo today and see how it can improve your processes in no time at all.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Here are a few answers to your questions.
Q1. What does it take to improve customer education?
The effectiveness of any customer education program revolves mainly around the quality of the education material and how it’s delivered to the customer.
Consider at what stage each individual learner is in their customer journey and personalize the content and its delivery to match their need at that moment.
Q2. Who should be part of the customer education team?
Depending on the complexity of the product and the size of the business, the customer education team can be comprised of the following members:
- Customer education lead: They are responsible for the entire process from start to finish.
- Subject matter experts: They have the most knowledge on how the product or its features works. They can be from different departments, depending on the topic at hand.
- Instructional designer: They are in charge of structuring the learning content to be as easily digestible by the customer as possible.
- Graphic designer: They create the look and feel of the customer training program to match each segment of the customer base.
Q3. What kind of tools are used in customer education?
- Learning management systems (LMSs) for creating, curating, managing, and tracking customer-education e-learning material.
- Knowledge management systems (KMSs) contain self-serving knowledge bases for both staff and customers to access and inform themselves.
- Analytics tools with reporting capabilities for tracking and measuring relevant KPIs.
- Video hosting platforms for creating video content or hosting live webinars and training courses.