As a SaaS business owner, your ultimate objective is to retain your existing customers, ensure they’re using and finding value in your product, reduce churn, and help them succeed. Sounds simple, right? Not quite. While each of those factors has its strategy, what they share in common is customer education.
Customer education is one of the most efficient ways to cut down on support hours for your customer success team, and it’s also one of the easiest ways to create brand awareness through word-of-mouth. With improved voice of customers (VOCs) and overall customer satisfaction scores, you can expect enhanced sales, referrals, and retention rates.
So, the question is: What is the best way to supercharge customer success through effective customer education? We’ll cover what customer education is, ways you can educate your customers, and how below!
What exactly is customer education?
Customer education is educating or informing customers about the product or service. It is a process that starts before customers buy the product and continue in the customer journey. It is necessary for customer success. It includes blogs, online courses, and knowledge bases.
What is the ultimate objective of customer education?
Customer education is a terrific way to help companies scale and improve their customer success efforts. The ultimate objective of customer education is to help your customers find value in your product. And when customers understand your product, they are more likely to become adopters, power users, and ambassadors.
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Best ways to execute a customer education program
Micro-learning sessions
One method you can use to educate your customers is through small sessions with your customers. These micro-learning sessions can help you simplify the onboarding process via progressive learning and spaced repetition techniques to create better engagement and mastery.
Social media can be a powerful tool to ensure customers learn about and engage with the company and product. You can increase customer satisfaction with memes, product blogs, social posts, opinion polls, etc.osts, opinion polls, etc.
Knowledge base
Knowledge bases will help make customer onboarding the foundation for increasing customer satisfaction. A knowledge base is a place that helps provide answers to customer questions, so they do not have to reach out to your customer-facing teams for common problems. You can also deliver customer training on product usage, tracking, resource sharing, assessment, and evaluation.
E-learning
E-learning includes setting assessments and evaluations and compiling content for product knowledge.
Enrolling in certification courses/accreditation
When someone completes your course, they’ll receive a certificate. This certification is unique and helps you understand if they understood the product or not.
Gamification
In this method of customer education, you can award unique badges to learners on completing specific tasks, which helps drive engagement and improves overall learning adoption.
How to supercharge customer success with effective customer education?
There are three stages of customer success engagement in any SaaS organization. Each of these stages requires skills and dedication:
Initial stage
In this stage, the core areas of focus are becoming more familiar with your stakeholders and seeing how the customer success management team can help ensure customers are successful.
User readiness stage
Users have realized the value and are training for full-scale adoption in this stage. They understand the problem, the solution, and the product.
With the help of a formal customer education strategy and training professionals, you can scale up your customer success efforts using the following.
Onboarding
Customer project managers and stakeholders need to learn about the product, functionality, and system better.
- Instructor-led public classes (virtual or in-person)
- E-learning, self-paced classes
Adoption planning
You can work with stakeholders to increase and maximize success and end-user adoption. This strategy can include change management, new processes, and optimizing performance. The key focus is on leadership involvement, training, and communication.
Adoption implementation and training
Implementing communication strategies and plans will help users get the best from your product.
Ongoing stage
To ensure that customers have found value in your product, you need to evaluate, track, and understand the earlier stages to ensure customer success and satisfaction.
Here are some tips to supercharge customer success with effective customer education.
Create customer journey maps by aligning interactions with customer types. You can see where customers are at in their journey, then create content or customer education tools to meet their needs. You need to manage customer relationships and reduce churn throughout the customer journey.
Listen to what customers have to say and record the data
Customer feedback is the basis for customer education. You can listen to what existing customers say about the product. Once you collect the data, you can offer a better experience to customers, thus improving customer success.
Focus on one course
You can create online courses to focus on customer support, product performance, and continuous education. You’ll potentially see increased turnover when you focus on one segment at a time, instead of multiple ones.
Create courses around outcomes and not features
Your courses can help your customers understand the product better and be successful when using it.
Focus on curating interesting content
You’ll need to create content that your target audience finds interesting. So consider utilizing multiple content types, quizzes, formats, and more to build a group that helps achieve success.
A suitable LMS is key. You need to look for a platform that is easy to maintain, set up, and integrate with brand needs—for example—video presentations for product explainers, graphic representations for charts, and more.
Final Thoughts
We’ve already discussed the definition of customer education and the objective it serves to accomplish. If you’re an enterprise-level SaaS company having an LMS makes more sense. But if you’re a startup, focusing on a knowledge base might be a better option.
By providing your customers with the knowledge base, learning community, and open learning, you save loads of time for your customer-facing teams so they can focus on more essential tasks.
Ultimately, customer education is beneficial to both your company and your customers. So, what’s better than creating a win-win situation for both?
Dattatraya Shetty is an IT Professional with 2 Decades of experience in areas of Product Development, Implementation & Service Delivery Management. As the Head of Implementations and SOC Compliance in Smartkarrot he is on a mission to provide relishing customer experience.
Published January 27, 2022, Updated March 02, 2023
