4 Ideas to Boost Your Customer Experience with Customer Education

Companies are looking for ways to improve their CX with customer education and here’s why. In the not-so-distant past, customer experience (CX) was a secondary metric followed only by the Marketing and Customer Success teams. Few, if any, executives made company-wide decisions based on CX metrics. It’s no longer just about the product, it’s about how you treat your customers. It’s so important that the customer experience is now the primary focus to beat out the competition for more than two-thirds of companies – up from only 36% in 2010!CX is also the top business priority for companies over the next five years. It's clear that we understand the importance of the customer experience, but what can you do to stand out from the crowd?

Along with customer experience, the focus on customer education is growing like rapid fire. Ninety percent of companies used online education as a training tool in 2020.

Ok, I'm listening. 

Customer education improves customer experience, which in turn improves customer retention. And if you increase customer retention by just 5%, it can increase profits from 25-95%. So you can see what all the fuss is about.

What precisely can you do with customer education to improve your customer experience? Here are 4 ideas.

Here are four ideas to boost your customer experience with customer education.

1. Standardize Your Onboarding to Give Customers Better Start
   
   

   It's true that 88% of organizations don't onboard well. So how can you make sure that you're not one of them? Create an onboarding experience that gets the job done. Onboarding is perhaps the most critical part of the customer journey. You might want to know, 55% of people say they've returned a product because they didn't understand how to use it, while ​​63% of customers consider the company's onboarding program when making a purchasing decision.

   When onboarding is said and done, customers should be confident in using the product, which will require less hand-holding and fewer calls into your customer success team — freeing up their time to focus on more significant issues. Said another way, you’re decreasing time-to-value.

   How can you ensure that each customer is getting the best version of your onboarding process? Standardize it. With a learning management system (LMS), you can create the holy grail of onboarding courses. You can easily keep it up to date, see if (and where) customers are getting stuck and use that feedback to make improvements. Knowing that each customer is getting the training they need, no matter what, will drastically improve the customer experience and your bottom line. SaaS companies that focus on customer experience can collectively expect to increase revenue by $1 billion.

2. Use Learning Paths to Optimize Customer Education:
   
   

   Part of delivering a stellar customer experience is to make it incredibly easy for your customer to know what they need to learn and in what order. Learning paths increase engagement and ensure they get everything out of the content and consume it in the way you intended. 

   The best part is that learning paths are customizable. You can personalize a customer's learning experience based on different features they will use or their technical knowledge — no need to waste time sorting through lessons they don't need.

3. Make Your Customer Education Mobile-Friendly to Improve Customer Experience
   
   

   Do I need to reiterate how often we are on our phones? I don't think so, but I will anyway. 57% of Americans spend 5 hours or more on their smartphones each day. (5+ hours! Do I actually need to continue writing this section?)

   If you're at the beginning of your customer education journey, make sure you choose an LMS that performs well on mobile. For example, you can't assume your customers want to learn on a desktop because 80% of your product usage is on a desktop. Often, learning happens when it's convenient, which means many of your customers could be learning on the go. If you already have many customer education elements in place, go back and update them. 

   Optimizing for mobile doesn't mean changing out one PowerPoint presentation for another. It means making learning easy on mobile devices. Think bullet points and short videos vs. long paragraphs and long-form answers as well as dividing your course into short 2-5 minute modules vs. hour-long lessons (microlearning). 

   Mobile optimization is one of the simplest things you can do to enhance your customer experience. In 2022, it’s a non-negotiable.

4. Connect Your LMS with Your CRM to Reach Your Customers Along Their Learning Journey
   
   

   It's no secret that Marketing, Sales, Service and L&D teams often work in silos, with different goals and priorities. Unsure of what their colleagues are working on or working toward, employees can easily duplicate efforts or worse, have conflicting goals and send confusing messages to customers. By connecting your LMS to your CRM, your teams can work in unison. 

   For example, A CRM-LMS integration lets you automatically send learning content to customers exactly when they need it. A sales rep can reach out to a prospect with relevant information. The Marketing team can segment audiences based on courses completed. Together, they can link their efforts and create better customer experiences and business outcomes.

Customer Experience Trends for 2022

Customer experience and the teams supporting initiatives around it continue to grow and gain resources. While customer education isn’t a quick fix, cutting-edge companies are putting in the time and effort to make extraordinary learning experiences for their customers. 

Do you want to see how Northpass can help make your customer experience next level? Reach out today to see how we can help you meet your goals.