Your goal as a business is to reduce churn, increase customer retention, product adoption, and aim for customer success. The underlying theme for all of these is customer education.
A study shows,
“Only 3 in 10 customers leave due to product deficiencies and the majority of reasons for churn are completely within the company’s control!”
Research by TSIA shows that customer education can immensely enhance your retention. Customers who are trained renew 92% more often than untrained customers.
Suggested Reading: Renewal Playbook- What magic can it do?
What is customer education?
Customer Education is the training you give your customers that help them use and find value from your product. If you educate your customers, it benefits them in every stage of their journey.
You should educate your customers before and also after a sale. Your marketing team has found a lead. And the more a lead learns about your product and sees its value, the more likely it will convert into an activated customer.
As a Customer Success Manager, you need to educate your customers post-sales. And this includes educating them about how to use the product. This helps them get the most value out of your product.
Why is customer education important?
Customer Education serves multiple personas
Customer Education is beneficial for many user personas: buyers, product owners, champions, admins, end users, and many more. The goal is to educate people who are involved with the buying decision. But you must ensure to also educate those who will actually use the product.
If you are a B2B SaaS company, you will have a multi-layered education process. As a CSM you need to make sure to educate the individual users and help them find value in your product.
Customer Education helps customers grow
The goal of educating your customers is not only to help them learn more about your product but actually to help them grow. And this is possible when your customers learn to derive value from your product.
Your customer education process should address how you’ll drive customers’ maturity throughout their journey. Different personas have different journeys and have to be educated in different ways. Once you’re clear about what they want to achieve, it’s time to consult them, guide them, and help them reach their desired goal.
Customer Education changes behavior
We know a customer has been educated about the product just by his behavior. An average person in your business might say the goal of education is only knowledge, but a trained customer may also add skills to it.
Yes, it is extremely crucial for a customer to learn and have good knowledge about the product but moreover, it is important that Customer Education must be dedicated to helping customers find value. To grow an account, each member of the team needs the right skills.
Your customer education program should change the way people behave. This indicates your program is giving them the Knowledge they require and also the Skills that enable them to get value from your product.
Increased Customer Maturity and Satisfaction
Customer Maturity- This is a stage where your customers grow past the basic adoption. Customer education helps increase customer maturity. Mature customers know how to derive value from the product. Every business defines maturity differently.
Satisfaction- Customer satisfaction can be measured in many ways and the most used is NPS(Net Promoter Score). This asks the customers how likely they are to recommend your product to others. Customer Education helps customers become loyal advocates by empowering them and connecting them with others.
Bonus Tip: What is NPS, CSAT, CES? Why is it important?
5 Actionable steps CSMs can use to educate customers
Now that you know how important customer education is at every stage of the customer journey, here are 5 steps that will help you to start building your own process for consulting customers.
Draw out your customer journey
Start by mapping out your customers’ journey. Pay attention to details, right from the start where they learn about too, to their decision of buying your service. And what your post-sales stages are gonna look like.
Understand the needs of your customer
Find out and understand what your customers are asking you. Provide them with the content that answers their questions and helps them move ahead.
Start with one course
You’ve mapped the customer’s journey and also collected data about their questions. Now it is time you put your strategy into action. Start designing your first course. This can be as simple as you addressing and solving questions that your customers ask frequently.
Create engaging content
No one likes boring content. Your content has to be interesting and engaging. You can add interesting videos and also include quizzes that help your customers engage. Also, build a community that your customers can use to put forward their thoughts.
Find the right customer success platform
As a CSM you need a customer success software like CustomerSuccessBox that helps you know more about your customers and hence helps you educate them in the right way. CustomerSuccessBox alerts you at every activity of your customer, this gives you a piece of complete knowledge of when and what your customers should be trained.
