To achieve success in a quick time it is essential to have training in place. Without it, it’s an attempt to climb a ladder that results in a fall. Especially in a subscription-based model, where customer retention is built into the business model, losing a customer shouldn’t be due to little or no understanding of how your product works for them. Hence it’s essential to incorporate a customer education program into your processes.
The adoption of a customer education program depends on the maturity of your organization and thus it is imperative to have different ways of learning associated at every stage of the customer journey. With the right amount of empathy and quality embedded you can yield the best customer experience.
Customer education with the evolving Organization
- Organization just starting out
At this stage when your company has just started out, it is overwhelming to even start with essential customer education, but It is still possible to come up with the best training, here’s how.
No matter at what stage, you need to leverage the understanding of the core pillar of your product. This can be done by 1:1 live screen share training on WebEx or Zoom to train them with your product usage can aid training that is well enough. These training sessions can serve as a knowledge library for your customers.
- Organization at an intermediate stage of growth
Here providing product experience consolidated with technology can be leveraged. So, providing on-demand learning or self-paced learning is the best way to inculcate customer education by building learning pathways where virtual on-demand courses or virtual 1: too many deliveries of the course can be a good means of training for the customers.
To come up with these pathways, firms have to consider the designers, marketers, content strategists, and technologists in a team to attain proficiency with the tech, also scaling assessment to make product learning more interactive.
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- Organizations at maturity level
This is the stage where you scale to come out from cost center to profit center as an Org. Meaning it’s where you monetize the learning pathways in a way or two considering the personas of the customers that you are catering to. It can either be credit-based or as a part of a license. It becomes necessary to certify the distributors or consultants who are offering this training on behalf of the company.
The role of the customer lifecycle and customer personas
- Customer lifecycle management
Customer lifecycle management starts from customer acquisition. For enterprise technology, the learning process starts upfront. They manage to leverage their marketers to make them better ones by teaching the ins and outs of the practices to assess why a customer would need their product. So marketers act as the face of their product. This is one of the ways to keep them engaged during the acquisition part of the customer’s lifecycle.
Trial optimization with trial conversion rates can increase if customer education is imparted in this process as well. The more apt the state of learning is, the more they want to know about the product.
An in-app training technology for a quick intro to the features, or any new upgrades can deem engaging for the customer.
- Segmentation
As the name suggests, it depends on the type of segments you’ve got at onboarding. The use cases the customers intend to solve using your product. For them, a dedicated learning module can be developed.
When you are delivering learning, think of just one outcome and an experience that has a context to who is learning.
What resources do you need?
Product Managers and Customer Success Managers can work out a part of their time to have a meaningful impact, otherwise, a dedicated resource who has experience in training, and management must take up this responsibility.
When the processes become streamline, an automation tool can be used for repetitive success
Onboarding tools can impart in-app learning by giving a quick intro to feature description and utilization.
All in all!
The crucial learning in this process is to understand the core of the product, comprehend the user personas, define the lifecycle of customers, and then leverage the tech to accomplish it.
Summing up
The better the role of a customer education program, the better it can aid them in adopting the product. So when are you incorporating this into your strategy?
