Customer education (CE) is essential to customer experience (CX) and efforts to improve customer retention. A recent Forrester study on loyalty and learning found that customer education increased product adoption by 79%, decreased sales cycles by 72%, and lowered support costs by 63%.
In other words, CE considerably minimizes customer acquisition costs while maximizing revenue.
In practical terms, these figures all point to learning positively impacting revenue and customer lifetime value (LTV). External learning, which includes CE and other critical educational areas, can be an engine for customer loyalty and revenue.
Below, we’ll explain how you can improve your external learning program to reap these benefits—from initial planning through implementation and management.
1. Identify Factors That Influence Retention
The most fundamental step in transforming your external learning platform into a customer retention program is how you reach and engage customers with it. Your user experience (UX) can’t only be smooth; you must personalize learning through the content’s relevance and its delivery to meet varied user needs and preferences.
For example, with a multi-team platform like Salesforce, training must accommodate data engineers and marketers with different responsibilities and understandings.
Your customer service teams must also be positioned proactively and reactively to foster retention. Customer success teams reinforce value and increase satisfaction by educating users on priorities. Customer support teams quickly remedy UX issues and friction to keep users satisfied and participating.
Lastly, consider how to continually improve your UX to be more accessible and intuitive. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) tools for customer support optimize response times, accessibility, and overall quality of service. This makes learning programs easier to use, even when something goes wrong—which, in turn, keeps users coming back.
2. Personalize the Learning Experience
An effective customer retention strategy revolves around personalizing any customer-facing content or interactions. Try these methods for customizing your learning experiences:
- Using adaptive learning paths: People learn in different ways, and learning programs should design lessons according to their preferences, knowledge, and experiences.
- Incorporating user feedback: Learning programs should collect customer feedback and consistently adjust to meet their needs.
- Leveraging customer data for personalization: Feedback and data aren’t just for gauging customer satisfaction. Your platform should natively gather them directly from customers—like your most popular content and customers’ average quiz scores—to inform recommendations and tailor support.
Flexibility is one of the most important aspects of personalization. According to the Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Report, just over half of customers expect brands to anticipate their needs, but just under a third feel they accomplish this.
Delivering on those customer expectations requires attention to detail and adjustments based on changing user sentiments—which require engagement to monitor effectively.
3. Enhance User Engagement
Another key element when building a customer training program is prioritizing user engagement at all touchpoints. Users need to have agency and feel compelled to use it, taking their learning into their own hands and being rewarded.
To that effect, you can enhance customer retention through engagement by:
- Gamifying the learning journey: Incorporate an achievement system with badges, leaderboards, points, and quality prizes to incentivize learning.
- Providing interactive and diverse content: Use various media such as videos, quizzes, and case studies to make the learning experience dynamic.
- Facilitating community engagement: Incorporate peer-to-peer learning and encourage customers to post on discussion boards or social groups.
Scholars have known for decades that social learning—observation, modeling, and related activities—impacts traditional education. The same goes for applications like customer education and all other elements of external learning.
4. Simplify the User Experience
Effective customer retention strategies often boil down to minimizing variables and streamlining experiences. For external learning programs, this means making engaging with the content as easy as possible.
Approaches to this may include:
- Designing an intuitive interface: Portals and user-facing elements should be intuitive, directing users’ attention subtly across their design language.
- Streamlining onboarding processes: There should be ample support available through interactive guided tours, tutorials, FAQs, and/or live chat.
- Enabling mobile accessibility: Learners can access training ‘on-the-go’ content with mobile-friendly modules and a standalone app.
Meet and exceed customer expectations by reducing barriers to their learning and catering to their needs.
5. Measure Success With Customer Retention KPIs
Another important factor in merging customer success and customer education is collecting and acting upon key customer retention metrics. External learning key performance indicators (KPIs) include completion rates, assessment scores, re-attempts upon failure, and a healthy customer feedback loop. These metrics paint a picture of how well customers are learning—and, critically, how they feel about it.
It’s also important to look at factors indirectly linked to your external program.
For example, net promoter score (NPS) is intimately tied to LTV. A customer who’s bought into your training and is valuing the experience will be more likely to recommend your business than one who isn’t trained or enjoying it.
It’s also important to monitor negative indicators, such as trainees dropping out or not finishing modules, to identify key pain points that contribute to customer churn.
6. Foster Continuous Learning and Development
Customer retention rates are not measures of how many customers return to a platform, product, or marketplace once or twice. They’re about repeat customers who are in it for the long haul and return consistently over an extended duration.
In external learning, that means leading users along a continuous journey by:
- Introducing microlearning modules: Learners have busy lives; give them bite-sized modules they can complete in pockets of time throughout the day.
- Offering gamification and badging: Incorporating gamification and badging can enhance engagement and motivation in external learning programs, turning education into an interactive and rewarding experience.
- Updating content regularly: Learners don’t want to be served the same or repetitive content even twice. Keep it fresh and relevant to reward a revisit.
Keep satisfied customers engaged long-term, and you’ll reap the rewards for years.
7. Leverage Technology to Enhance Retention
All of the above suggestions culminate in the kinds of technology you choose to run and optimize your external learning. When selected carefully and managed effectively, learning management systems (LMS) can be de facto customer success platforms.
The right platform should streamline content creation, delivery, and management to make retaining customers—both new and existing—easy.
You should seek out solutions that smartly use emerging technologies, like AI and machine learning (ML), for user content delivery, analytics, and user support. The best providers—like Thought Industries—build best practices like gamification, user customization, accessibility, constant updates, and more directly into our platforms.
Choosing the right external LMS often involves finding a provider committed to smartly using the right technology and continuous innovation.
Increase Customer Retention With External Learning
External learning and training are directly tied to retention, value, and customer success. To turn new customers into loyal customers, you should identify the factors that influence them, personalize based on their needs, enhance engagement, simplify training, measure success, foster their continuous learning, and—maybe most importantly—leverage the right tech.
Using a robust platform like Thought Industries makes it easier and more effective to take a learner-centric approach to external training and refine your programs around their needs. We’re committed to improving LTV through impactful learning.
To learn more about effectively training customers, see our guide to customer training. To start improving customer retention today, get started with a demo!
