Customer education—onboarding and engaging customers via informational content about your product—is vital in modern business. In fact, customer education (also called customer training) drives significant results.
According to Adobe, when you run a customer education program, you can increase product adoption, lower your support costs, and improve overall customer retention.
You’re not alone if your brand has yet to leverage a customer education solution. Luckily, with platforms like Thought Industries, informing your customers is easy. Join us as we outline the benefits and implementation of thorough customer education.
The Importance of Customer Education
As products, technologies, and other offerings become more sophisticated, they can become harder to understand. Customers are confronted with myriad features, advanced functionalities, and more. Clarifying these complexities is the least you can do for your audience.
However, customer education strategies pay dividends even if you sell a relatively simple product.
First and foremost, customer success education has a substantial impact on ROI. Our recent survey of companies using our maturity model for customer learning found that 97% of companies have enjoyed a positive return on their investments in customer education.
When your ROI improves, your profitability increases—it’s simple math. As such, customer education can directly boost your bottom line. A 2024 study from Forrester found that customer education programs can improve top-line revenue by 7.6%.
Of course, it’s not all about money. When you educate your customers, they tend to stick around. If your users only develop a shallow understanding of your product, they may jump ship when a new offer comes along. But if they become deeply entrenched in your solution, they’ll likely stay for the long haul.
Customer Education Examples
If you need proof that customer education works, take note: All the world’s most successful organizations are doing it, from multinational enterprises to startups.
For example, look at corporate training solutions from companies like—
- Hubspot Academy: A robust suite of courses covering both fundamentals and deep-dives into Hubspot’s features, perfect for learners at all levels of skill/literacy.
- Gong Academy: High-quality video content educating users on product uses and benefits, including highlights of how Gong’s own team members use the software.
- Seismic University: Interactive course designs for in-person, virtual, and hybrid sessions to help learners of all styles master complex administrative tasks.
The Benefits of Implementing Customer Education
With an external learning platform targeted toward your customers, you can enjoy:
- Increased customer retention and revenue: Customer education platforms draw customers into your ecosystem and make them happy, which keeps them there. And, while they’re engaged, they’re contributing to present and future revenue.
- Better product adoption: Education promotes adoption, turning new customers into power users and brand champions that provide social proof to prospects.
- Reduced support costs: The better your customers know your products, the less likely they will reach out for help. This reality allows you to run a leaner support center, saving you money. The same Forrester report mentioned above found that customer training powers a 15.5% decrease in customer support costs.
Key Strategies for Effective Customer Education
The benefits of customer education should be clear by now. The question now is: How do you implement a successful customer training program?
Here are some tips:
- Understand your audience: If you’re selling a product, you need to drill down on particular market segments to target. Utilize analytics to determine which groups need which information, why, and the best ways to communicate it to them.
- Develop a plan: Before you start writing guides, create a customer education development plan. This plan should outline the scope of your training program, set a timeline, and determine how you’ll measure success.
- Create an on-brand experience: Your educational content is, in a sense, a product, too. With that in mind, your customer learning and partner training programs should embody your brand. Pay close attention to colors, font choices, visual cues, and more, creating a cohesive experience you’re proud to show off.
- Personalize the training: Customers respond well to personalization, so look for ways to tailor content to individual users. For example, if multiple audiences use your product to different ends, you could create separate modules for each purpose.
Leveraging Technology in Customer Education
Most importantly, you’ll want to utilize state-of-the-art technology to facilitate customer education. Whether you’re hosting live virtual sessions or developing e-learning for customers, technology will form the backbone of your efforts.
We highly encourage you to use a learning management system (LMS) to create and manage your educational content. Professional training platforms like Thought Industries allow customers to access content on demand in both instructor-led training (ILT) and virtual instructor-led training (VILT). This flexibility frees up your customer education team’s time while improving the customer experience.
With an LMS, you have a centralized learning environment. All your content lives in a single place, making updates and delivery easier. What’s more, you can easily scale your LMS to accommodate more courses or learners.
Don’t just take our word for it: Our customers have seen remarkable results. Seismic returned 6,500 hours to their Customer Success team, ArrowStream saw a 74% decrease in time spent on onboarding and training, and all organizations enjoyed a 2–3x increase in customer retention rates.
Measuring the Success of Customer Education Programs
Naturally, creating training is only half the battle. You also want your customer education program to be effective. To make sure it’s making waves, you’ll want to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like:
- Course enrollment rates
- Course completion rates
- Active users
- Session duration
- Assessment scores (if applicable)
- Course ratings (feedback from customers)
- Support ticket reduction
Luckily, an LMS makes it easy to monitor these metrics. Analytics are already built into the platform, so you can confirm that your education delivers results. Using what you’ve learned, you can continuously improve your program, scaling it up or down as needed.
Thought Industries: Your Customer Education Tool
Overall, educating your customers is one of the smartest decisions you can make as a business. Customer education increases revenue, customer retention, satisfaction, and more.
If those are the results you’re looking for—and they should be—explore customer education solutions front Thought Industries. Our best-in-class platform has on-demand support, powerful integrations, and limitless customization.
Try it today to see why Thought Industries is the premier customer education platform.
