Why customer education matters
In addition to empowering customers, customer education contributes to cost-savings and revenue goals by:
- Improving customer onboarding
- Increasing product use and adoption
- Increasing renewal or repeat customers
- Nurturing overall satisfaction and enthusiastic customer advocates
Additionally, customer training can unburden Account Managers, Customer Success Managers and Support teams by addressing common questions and helping customers find information independently.
6 Customer education best practices
How to educate customers tip #1: Start with your goals
How to educate customers tip #2: Understand your audience
Your organizational goals are only one part of the equation. Your need to create customer education that helps customers achieve their goals.
Who are your learners?
B2B products can be used by many different people within a single “customer.” Segmenting and establishing user personas will help create relevant training. An end user may need significantly different education than an administrator. Customer education plays an important role in aligning these use cases within accounts.
What’s in it for them?
What is each usertype trying to achieve with your product? Clearly message how learning the product will help each persona achieve their goals; those goals may be different than their account’s goals. Additionally, wherever possible, deliver learning within each usertype’s unique workflow to make learning easy.
What’s in it for them?
Get familiar with your customers’ post-purchase journey to develop your training strategy. Recognizing your users’ challenges and milestones will help you decide when and how to incorporate learning. For example, you may need to deliver live training during onboarding and then focus more heavily on on-demand content as the account matures. If your company has a Customer Experience, Customer Success or Customer Marketing team, they may be helpful partners for this exercise.
How to educate customers tip #3: Choose your methods
Depending on your goals, resources, and your customers’ needs, determine how you want to deliver training for each audience. Some commonly used methods include:
- Classes / Training – Classroom style education involves a trainer or expert sharing information and walking learners through concepts. This approach allows for questions and clarifications but can’t be revisited if a learner forgets some of the information shared.
- Courses – Learning courses deliver information in a step-by-step format, with knowledge checks or quizzes and a certificate of completion. You can deliver these electronically via Learning Management Systems or through written or video-recorded content. Courses offer thorough and engaging training but need regular audits to ensure up-to-date information.
- On-demand microlearning – Articles, videos, and images that customers can access on an as-needed basis allow proactive learning and quick question resolution. On-demand content can take the form of a searchable user guide or customer manual, or a collection of knowledge base content. While consumable and effective, this type of education requires you to consistently remind learners that it exists and why and how to access it.
- In-product training – In-product education offers pop up tips, step-by-step walkthroughs and clickable tooltips to help customers learn while they work. While most common in software, this type of education can work for many products (think of all the in-product education cars include: seatbelt alerts and safe driving reminders, for example). While this form of training reaches customers directly in the flow of their work, it can be distracting and frustrating if not carefully tested.
- Peer learning – Connecting customers to share use cases and tips can offer valuable insights into customer needs and behaviors and help create trust and excitement. This can take the form of written case studies, video or podcast interviews, webinars, in-person or virtual conferences or roundtables, community forums, or social media campaigns. While this type of customer education can create advocacy and stickiness, it can also take significant resources and runs the risk of spreading misinformation.
- Indirect education – Most B2B companies have champions, roles at customer companies that have a vested interest in seeing the product succeed. Education teams can provide resources and guidance that these individuals can tailor and deliver in the ways that work best for their organizations.
Your organization might use one or a mix of the above to educate customers, but be creative: your goals, customer needs, and ongoing trial and error will inform the route you take.
How to educate customers tip #4: Build the right teams
Given the variety of ways to train customers, clarify which teams or roles are responsible for delivering different methods at different times. You might use other names for these roles (for example, Patient Educator, Customer Listening, User Assistance) depending on your industry, but the below are some common categories of customer education professionals.
Trainer
Customer trainers typically work in a formal, direct-delivery capacity, interacting with learners in-person or virtually to walk them through predefined material and to answer questions. Some trainers may also play a broader role, crossing into Instructional Design or content development by creating their own curriculum or developing educational material such as guides, coursework, documentation or videos.
Organizations may offer engagements with trainers as a paid service, while others include it as part of customer onboarding as a crucial step toward customer success and partnership.
Instructional Designer
Instructional Designers break concepts into consumable pieces and then build training content that takes stakeholder needs, learning preferences, formats, and delivery models into account. Instructional Designers may be responsible for building the customer training curricula that trainers deliver along with formal, self-serve coursework customers use. As noted above, Instructional Designers may also serve as Trainers and vice versa.
Community or Content Manager
The type of informal customer education that community programs offer may require talented writers or content creators to develop these less formal, on-demand resources. While this work can be performed by an assigned writer or by a combination of product marketers, customer marketers, community managers, trainers, it’s important that your organization prioritize the development of informal customer training and education. Your customers will often look for this type of content when they need a refresher without re-doing formal training or when they want to expand their capabilities.
Platform Administrator
A customer-facing Learning Management System offers polished, self-serve customer training. Similarly, a Community platform or a set of social media channels allow customers to learn informally. These technologies require a dedicated administrator who knows how to manage everything from user access to customization. In many cases, you may be able to assign administration to your Community Manager or Instructional Designer, but for very robust programs, you might wish to hire individuals who are fully focused on the management of each platform in order to deliver the best results.
Your organization may employ a single person to handle all of these roles or you may need multiple people serving in each function to successfully train and educate customers. The titles may differ and the methods may differ, but whatever shape your customer education team takes, make sure it can support each piece of your customer education strategy
How to educate customers tip #5: Measure and evolve
Whichever approaches you take to educating your customers, track whether and how your programming impacts the goals you established in tip 1.
- Track metrics like learner engagement, use, and completion of content
- Ask learners for feedback and suggestions
- Compare success rates pre and post customer training
As with internal training, if your data affirms that your programming is impactful, lean into it, seek additional investment and grow! If not, review the above tips and try a different approach or message. And don’t underestimate the importance of talking to your learners. Building a customer education strategy isn’t a one-time exercise: it’s an ongoing process. It should grow and evolve alongside your organization’s goals, products, and customer needs.
How to educate customers tip #6: Train your own teams first!
Of course, as an organizational training platform, we’re biased. But an essential component of customer education is team enablement. How can your customers understand your positioning, product, audience, and content if your own organization doesn’t?
When your entire company – from sales to support to product management – are on the same page, your customers will have a meaningful head start.