Customer Education 101: How To Start Your Program
Do your customers have the wall in their ability to maximize your product's potential? Are you losing clients at the time of renewal since they're not getting anything of value?
According to the CallMiner website, U.S. businesses lose $136.8 billion each year due to avoidable consumer shifting.
If your clients don't realize the value from your product or service and leaving due to this you should think about creating a customer education program.
I'm not sure exactly what that signifies?
Let's find out.
What is customer education?
At , we view customer education as the act of enhancing your customers' awareness of your product or service so that they can gain greater value quicker and with higher customer growth.
Education of customers begins long before they purchase your products and is maintained throughout the customer journey. For example:
- Stage 1 Potential customers may require education about the way your product helped other customers solve a problem
- Stage 2. 2: Customers who are new might need educating on the fundamentals of how to utilize your product
- Stage 3. : Long-term customers might need education on how to optimize their use of the software to increase its value
Ultimately, customer education equips your buyers with the information they need to experience value from your product and want to continue to use the product. Actually, whenever a customer interacts with education-related content, their brand affinity compounds in time, according to Conductor.
The customer education program can be offered in a number of different content formats, depending on the specific needs of your business' goals, audiences and offerings. Examples:
- Customer Case Study: Demonstrate to prospective customers how others had success using your product or service
- Blogs and Articles: Perfect for sharing step-by-step guides and comprehensive instructions regarding the use of products or services.
- Video and recorded screen-captures: Are a fantastic tool to distribute step-by step instructions, instructional videos and instructional videos that show new customers the basics on how to utilize your product or service
- Webinars Allows businesses to go deeper into the more complex topics regarding the product or service you offer or product, address your customer's queries, and interact to them in a more personal way
The benefits of a customer education program
It's time to develop a customer-education programme to grow your enterprise and cut down on the rate of customer churn. That is a great start!
But, before making any other decisions it's important to understand the added value that education for customers can bring to your company.
Let's look at HTML0.
Greater flexibility and capacity
In today's environment, there is a heightened need for flexibility across every area of running a business. That includes customer education.
On-demand education courses let customers improve their understanding at their own pace. And digital courses are easy to modify when the content requires to be refreshed.
As your company expands, so will your customer education program. If you have the proper tools, you will not have to reduce the quality of your education program due to your expansion.
Boosts customer interaction and service
Does your customer service department noticed that they get the same questions over and over again? That could be a sign your education for customers isn't up to par.
Slack's Chief of Staff Customer Experience, once said "I imagine CE [customer education] as jet fuel for CSMs. We can do anything to assist you in building connections better and faster. ."
Solid customer education programs deliver need-to-know facts to help customers understand the true value of the item - and it is done by dealing with frequently -asked questions.
When an education program covers the most frequently asked questions in advance, your customer service staff can spend more time engaging with your customers in a professional manner as well as addressing their specific demands .
More rapid adoption and easier onboarding
Like everyone else, customers value their time. They've probably invested a significant amount of time and energy looking up information before they decide to purchase the product. That means that they would like to be into the game quickly.
With an established, on-demand educational program, your clients are able to complete their onboarding process at their own pace. This builds confidence among customers using your product and accelerates the onboarding process.
Related: Looking to increase your customer engagement? Take a look at the recorded sessions from Activate Summit.
Improves customer retention
Customers aren't going to purchase the product only to look for reasons to leave. However, they could not be able to access the information they need to use the tool you've invested time, effort, and money on.
That's why it's critical to create a customer-education program that will meet the expectations of your users. Your customers will be loyal if they trust your product, feel confident in using it and can quickly see value from it.
Strategically build your customer education curriculum using segmentation of your customers
If you are creating a customer education program for your business according to your customer's needs, segmenting them is a great way to help you build a curriculum and educational materials that are tailored to their specific needs.
Customer segmentation refers to the method of splitting your clients into groups according to certain facts and characteristics about their characteristics and facts. Business organizations tend to research their customers and develop "segments" to maximize the marketing effort for each customer as well as improve the overall customer experience by personalized customer service.
The ability to divide customers into groups also enables users to interact to each group in a more efficient manner and to learn more about their preferences and behaviors throughout time, through the process of data observation and observations.
There are countless options to "segment" your customers depending on your business goals: demographics, geographics and buyer behaviour, as well as purchase histories, and much more.
Consider the Customer Education Segmentation Methodology below for creating your customer education Programme:
Be sure to inform your customers throughout every stage on their path. It doesn't matter if it's before they buy your product or service, after they purchase, or once they are activated, it is crucial to educate them throughout the process to ensure that the customer understand your product better and gain the maximum value.
Separating your clients into groups in accordance with the "stage" of the journey they're in while developing your customer education program will help you deliver education precisely at the right moment with your information, and address your customer's specific questions, needs and objectives as they interact with your organization over time.
Five of the best practices for creating a program for customer education
Once you've figured out the benefits a positive customer education program could have for your business It's the time to begin building your program.
Here are some of our suggestions for starting your first customer education program starting from scratch.
1. Find the right education platform
Customer education programs can contain a mix of verticals. Examples include:
- Traditional in-person training
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Customer success stories
- Downloadable guides and whitepapers
Instead of taking an individual approach is the best way to combine all of these media formats and channels into a single, easy-to-use system for customers to use that is a learning management software (LMS) that permits you to swiftly and easily build on-demand courses.
Customer education platform checklist
These are 5 items you'll want to keep an eye out for when choosing a platform for your Customer Education Program:
- Easy-to-use: In order to ensure that your customers are enthusiastic and eager to carry on your education, you'll wish ensure that it is effortless as possible for them to access the education programs and to complete your learning material and lesson. Choose a platform designed with users in mind with a robust, yet user-friendly features.
- The ability to scale:As your business scales as does your customer base, as well as your customer's education requirements. When you increase the number of customers that you serve and broaden on your offerings, you will want to pick an option that will scale with you and cater to your businesses' growing needs without limiting.
- Progression Tracking and Insights:Having an understanding of how your customers are interacting with your education program can help you identify areas of opportunity and improvement to be made in the near future. To provide a quality educational experience for your students within your educational program, and to continue to improve your educational material to provide the most value to your customers, you'll need to search for a platform which allows you to monitor the progress of your customers' learning, and can provide insights on their experiences being "students".
- Flexibility: Search for the platform with everything you need to set up, launch and grow the customer education as well as courses. If you choose a platform that permits to be flexible and doesn't have coding required, you will be able to build courses with ease and quickly and effectively provide educational information to your customers at any time they need the information.
2. Define success
Like starting any business venture from scratch, it's crucial to determine your success right from the beginning. Make time to outline the plan's goals, the short- and long-term objectives as well as KPIs that will be used to evaluate efficiency.
The possible goals include:
- Reduces the time of customer onboarding
- Decreases the amount of time customers' team members are spending training
- Expanding product utilization
- Enabling customers to adopt preferred behavior
3. Start with the biggest issues
If it's time to tackle your strategy Start with the simple wins: your customers' most common problems.
You can ask yourself these questions:
- Which are your most frequent queries from customers during the first three months of being onboarding?
- Are customers grasping the basics? Or, are they making them move to the next stage of usage?
- What are my clients dropping off in utilization?
- Are they taking right decisions?
- Do you know of any under-used features?
When you've got a grasp of the education gap, you can start working on the development of content.
Pro tip: Take advantage of the customer's feedback. See if customers regularly suggest more information/materials following their onboarding, and then integrate those concepts into your program.
4. Keep content new and engaging
Content is King. Making sure you have the best content available on the right platform will make you successful in launching your own customer education programs. So, how do you begin?
It is recommended to keep these three things top of mind when developing content:
- Interactive: Making your education materials interactive through quizzes, discussions, and surveys is a great method to keep your customers active throughout their learning.
- Intense: With everybody taking on more tasks today, a consumer rarely has a ton of time to spend learning the latest system or new products. Make sure they are focused by making short lessons.
- Informative: Make sure your material is informative and contains easy-to-understand information. Video, presentation, and tutorials are great sources of content that are a hit with customers getting up to speed about a new process or system.
5. Optimize, optimize, optimize
When you have your first customer education program off the ground Now is the time to celebrate!
And, lastly, create a plan to integrate regular optimizations of the program based on:
- Customer feedback and interactions
- Course information and metrics
- Material that has been updated
- Customers want to have more content
Be aware that the more you can help clients gain knowledge through high-quality training and education and the faster they will appreciate the value your products provide and are more likely to join to extend their membership or renew it.