You’ve just subscribed to a new online service. Maybe it’s new graphic design software, or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) app. It could be a new streaming service or even a new phone. You’re excited and ready to start using it! And then you can’t, because you’re not sure how to even access all the features available to you. You look for a ‘Help’ button, some sort of customer education, but there is nothing. You’re on your own and starting to feel frustrated – you don’t have time for this nonsense! You shut the window in annoyance and go back to how you’ve always done things: using Excel spreadsheets or a Google doc, because you know exactly how to use them.
Sound familiar?
Offering customer education is critical if you want to successfully onboard and retain customers. Creating and implementing a customer education strategy doesn’t have to be complicated, and good education gives your customers the tools and support they need to be successful. And successful customers are more likely to be satisfied with your business.
What is Customer Education?
Customer education refers to teaching your customers how to use and get the most value from your products. It is the process of arming customers with the tools and resources they need to become a more informed user of your product or service.
The primary goal of customer education is to onboard, engage, and retain new and existing customers. So, while customer education involves creating material and resources to train your customers, it is a strategic business function.
Offering customer education around your products or services is key to retaining customers and staying ahead of your competition. Effective and engaging customer training that adds real value is built with your business goals in mind, relevant and achievable learning objectives, and the best solution in terms of delivery for your customers.
Why is Customer Education Important?
Depending on the industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer can cost a company anywhere from five to 25% more than retaining an existing one.
With today’s hyper-competitive market and advancing technology, products are inherently more complex. Therefore, customer education programs are necessary to ensure adoption by your customers, and make your products more successful in the market.
Before customers decide to buy your product or service, customer education teaches buyers about the market and your product. After a customer has bought your product, customer education teaches them how to use the product to get the most value from it. Time is a resource we’re all short on and enabling your customers to use your product or service to its full potential in the shortest and most efficient period if time is critical for retention.
Creating a customer education program arms your customer support team with a real solution to customer training needs. Companies often spend a great deal of time responding to simple questions about product features and functions. A customer education program would free up your customer support team to respond to more complex issues not covered by customer education.
How Do You Do It?
Follow the Process
When you create a customer education program, it follows the same process used for designing and developing employee training. At Enable Education our learning experience designers use the ADDIE model.
Whether your customer education program is a fully digital online experience, like Virtual Instructor-led Training (VILT), downloadable PDFs, a podcast or webinars, your process should begin with an analysis of your learners’ (your customers) needs, and an audit of your existing customer education resources.
Once you know your customers, what their goals are outside of your product or service, the pain points they’re trying to solve, and what they need to learn to use your product successfully, you can start the design of your customer education program. That begins with identifying the specific learning outcomes for your program, and structuring your content accordingly.
How you plan to deliver your content will depend once again on your customers and their needs and preferences. How do they prefer to consume content? Where do they spend their time looking for answers? It will also depend on the capacity and capability of your customer education development team, and on your existing learning technology, for example, whether you have a learning management system
Customer Education Team
When creating customer education material, as it often is with the design and development of employee learning programs, collaboration between teams in different business units, and a thorough understanding of your customer, is fundamental.
A team comprised of learning experts, product developers, customer service agents, and subject matter experts brings a range of diverse perspectives to your customer education program:
- Your product experts bring knowledge and insight about the product features and functionalities
- Your customer service experts know your customers and what they’re looking for
- Learning experience designers have an in-depth understanding of how adults learn, and the process of creating learning experiences that enable the learner to achieve the desired outcomes in an engaging an purposeful way.
In addition to considering a range of perspectives, it’s important that you thoroughly understand who your customer is and what they need. Creating comprehensive personas will help paint a clear picture of the tools your customers need to be successful, as well as their:
- goals
- motivations
- potential frustrations
5 Tips for Starting a Customer Education Program
Want to learn how Enable Education can help you start your customer education program initiative? Reach out now!
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