Why Customer Education?

Customer Education is a set of programs, that help your other customer success processes scale. Customer education drives:

• Increased adoption through training

• Reduced friction through documentation

• Community building for regular customers and prospects

• Certification opportunities

• Masterclasses and advanced user achievement

• Higher efficiency and effectiveness from the customer's side that leads to higher profit margins, or improved cost per sale ratio

• Higher value for money for your customers

• Improved ROI when we're talking about B2B markets

Customer Education is a method to create efficiency in the customer service field. Hiring more and more managers to solve the same problems over and over again is not doing your company any good. On the contrary, every question your customers have, every time they get stuck, or frustrated, or just confused about your value offering, that is the best time to think of a learning community.

Customer Education can be dynamic and multi-directional. Do you remember that teacher who said the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else? Your top customers, your power users, could be those instructors (and for free!). Why would they do that? Because they love your products and services and would like to see more users onboard. Maybe you can motivate them with some perks, why not? The end point would be the building of a self-sustainable learning community of experienced and new users, where experts from your company – or even an outsider during a masterclass- can offer the community members privileged information, exclusive rights, etc.

Customer Education is not a fancy term for a loyalty programme. It is about offering genuine new knowledge, or helping your customers and prospects develop new skills that will facilitate and accelerate product adoption. The ability to share knowledge is an important attribute that students develop in learning communities, enabling them to succeed in their education and future goals. Aligning the cognitive understanding with the emotional needs is where learning meets marketing and companies build learning communities of loyal followers.