Imagine a successful, satisfied customer. This customer uses your products in meaningful ways, prepares for changes, engages with your brand, and shouts best practices from the rooftop. Organizations are discovering that excellent customer training and education can nurture more of these unicorn customers. While Learn to Win typically focuses on employee education, the right approach to teaching can meaningfully impact your customers, too.
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
Tip #1: Start with your goals
As with any strategy, connect the dots between your What (the Customer Education program you create) and your Why (your organization’s strategic goals). Does your organization need to increase product use? Focus on in-product training and train-the-trainer programs. Are you prioritizing new business through advocacy and referrals? Lean into peer education and events. As we counsel with employee training, start with the highest impact opportunities. Then, measure and adjust over time.
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?
Many different people can use B2B products 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 a vital role in aligning these use cases within accounts.
What’s in it for them?
What is each user type trying to achieve with your product? Clearly message how learning the product will help each persona achieve their goals; those goals may differ from their account’s goals. Additionally, deliver learning within each user type’s unique workflow wherever possible to make learning easy
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 focus more 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
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 provide 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, customer manual, or a collection of knowledge base content. While consumable and effective, this type of education requires consistently reminding 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, including seatbelt alerts and safe driving reminders, for example). While this form of training reaches customers directly in their workflow, 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 be 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 run the risk of spreading misinformation.
- Indirect education – Most B2B companies have champion 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.
Tip #4: Build the right teams
Given the various ways to train customers, clarify which teams or roles are responsible for delivering different methods at different times. Depending on your industry, you might use other names for these roles (for example, Patient Educator, Customer Listening, User Assistance). Still, 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 considers stakeholder needs, learning preferences, formats, and delivery models. 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, and trainers, your organization must 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 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. You can often assign administration to your Community Manager or Instructional Designer. Still, for very robust programs, you may hire individuals who are entirely focused on managing each platform to deliver the best results.
Your organization may employ a single person to handle all these roles, or you may need multiple people serving in each function to train and educate customers successfully. The titles and methods may differ, but whatever shape your customer education team takes, make sure it can support each piece of your customer education strategy.
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 evolve alongside your organization’s goals, products, and customer needs.
Tip #6: Train your own teams first!
Of course, as an organizational training platform, we’re biased. However, 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 – is on the same page, your customers will have a meaningful head start.
