Customer education refers to the process of providing information, resources, and training to customers to help them realize the full value of your products or services. It includes courses, peer supported learning, product tutorials, webinars, user guides, FAQs, and other resources.
Educational content can be designed to both acquire and onboard new customers and to engage and retain existing ones. If you think this sounds incredibly important and useful, congrats! You’re absolutely right.
Customer education can provide massive benefits to organizations with:
- Complex products that are frequently updated with new functionality
- Products that require users to adapt their existing processes or workflows
- A diverse set of use cases and user needs
- Customer success and support teams that need to be scaled
Customer education is crucial for enhancing the overall customer experience, leading to revenue growth, increased satisfaction, lower support expenses, and more. Let’s examine this further.
Five advantages of customer education
- Reduces support costs: When customers are educated about your products or services, they are less likely to need assistance from customer support, which can help reduce your overall costs and scale faster. Docebo customer Zoom (heard of them?) uses customer education to save their CSM team hundreds of hours. Now they spend their time strategically, providing customized solutions instead of troubleshooting.
- Increases customer satisfaction: Educated customers are better at getting the most out of your products or services, which leads to increased satisfaction and loyalty. With complex products that have frequent updates and new functionality (especially in the SaaS space), ensuring your customers are up-to-speed is paramount. By focusing on customer education, Acoustic was able to raise their Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by 16%.
- Increases revenue: Educated customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, upgrade to higher-priced products or services, and recommend your business to others. Plus, trained customers tend to use your product more, which helps with upselling and cross-selling. Through Docebo’s Customer Education solution, Wrike discovered that users who take the Wrike Discover onboarding course are twice as engaged and have 3x higher conversion rates compared to non-users.
- Improves customer retention: Customer education provides customers with the tools and knowledge to fully grasp the benefits of your products or services. This leads to increased loyalty and renewals, higher lifetime value, and lower churn.
- Decreases time to value: Through onboarding and in-product training and guidance, you can speed up how long it takes for customers to realize the value of your products or services post-sale. This isn’t just a small increase, either: When PowerDMS implemented Docebo for their customer education, they saw a 30% decrease in customer onboarding times. And of course, if your customers can get value out of your product more quickly, they’ll be more likely to stick around.
Investing in customer education is a strategic move that can help your business thrive in the long term. By providing valuable and relevant information to your customers, you’ll be able to increase customer satisfaction, reduce support costs, and drive revenue growth. It’s a win-win situation. And let’s be real: Who doesn’t like happy customers?
