How to Build a Customer Education the Right Way

Customer education is the process of training your customers to be successful with the products and services your business offers. Some kinds of products or services are very easy to understand how to use straight away. Customers may be able to purchase these types of products or services and start using them as intended almost immediately. However, the software is not one of these kinds of products.

To build a customer education program that gets results, you’ll need to take advantage of some of the very best customer training tools. For example, a learning management system (LMS) like Northpass can make it easier to organize and deliver training content to customers as well as customize their training experiences.

Software products or services like the kind SaaS companies sell usually come with a steep learning curve. It’s important to provide customers with the assistance and resources they need to navigate the learning process as easy as possible. This leads us to one of the most pressing issues in all of the customer success: how to educate customers about your product effectively. 

What's Customer Education?

When you hear the term “customer education,” you might picture the initial training that happens during the customer onboarding process. But what is customer education really? While the onboarding process is indeed a very important part of the customer education journey, customer education extends beyond onboarding alone. 

Onboarding is simply the first step of customer education, meaning the customer education process should continue even after the onboarding process is done. You should strive to provide your customers with resources and opportunities for learning throughout their entire customer lifetime. Maintaining an ongoing customer education process is one of the best ways to improve customer retention and drive the adoption of new products.

How to Build Your Customer Education Program & Strategy

Customer education should be organized; otherwise, you’re unlikely to see any meaningful results. If you want to improve customer education at your organization, the very first order of business should be developing a customer education strategy to guide your efforts. You can use this simple, four-step process to build an effective customer education strategy.

1. Set Objectives

Your customer education program should begin with clear goals. Of course, the overarching purpose of any customer education program is to shorten the time to value for your customers, enabling them to reach their desired outcomes with your product or service as quickly as possible. However, you should also consider which business outcomes you want your customer education program to influence. Do you want to drive product adoption? Improve customer retention? Lower customer education costs?

2. Find the Resources

Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish with your customer education strategy, you’ll need to allocate the resources to make it a reality. One of the most common obstacles customer success teams face when they’re trying to get customer education programs off the ground is a lack of resources. Try not to let resource limitations discourage you. Instead, focus on whatever small actions you can take right now to improve customer education outcomes. Start with incremental progress and work your way toward big gains. 

It’s also very important for customer education managers to communicate with company leadership. A great way to get executives to increase the customer education budget is to show them all the ways better customer education can contribute to the organization’s bottom line.

3. Create Content

Once you know your objectives for your customer education program and you have the resources to make it happen, it’s time actually to build your educational content. The content you include in your customer education program should be designed to help customers accomplish their intended outcomes with the products or services you offer — as well as further your education program's educational goals. It’s important to carefully balance each of these considerations as you build your program’s content.

Here are a few of the most important aspects of your content to think about:

• Subject Matter - This is the information you’re going to present to customers that represents what they’ll actually learn. For this part, it’s usually best to work with a subject matter expert (or a few) who is extremely familiar with your product or service and all its features and use cases.

• Content Mix - This is the variety of formats you’ll use to present the information. Customers usually learn more effectively when you offer a mix of formats rather than relying on a single kind — for example, by asking them to watch a video, then read through an infographic, then complete a quiz instead of just giving them a single block of text to read.

• Content-Length - Shorter lessons are usually more effective. Try to work with your learners’ attention spans, not against them, by asking your customers to learn in short bursts instead of expecting them to devote multiple hours at a time. You can also use incentives like customer education certifications to encourage learners to complete courses.

• Delivery Method - This is how you’ll get your educational content in front of your customers. There are many ways to deliver customer education, but one of the most efficient ways is to use a learning management system like Northpass.

4. Measure and Iterate

Now that your content is ready and you’ve delivered it using an efficient method like a learning management system, it might seem like your work is finished — but there’s still more to do! 

Building a customer education program is an iterative process. Once your customers are using your training content, you should track the way they interact with it and measure their outcomes. The data you collect will provide invaluable insights that you can use to improve each iteration of your customer education strategy in the future. Some customer education tools, like Northpass, offer analytics features that can make it easier to monitor and understand customer behavior in your online learning academy. 

Besides using technology to track customer behavior, you can also gather insights by asking customers for feedback directly. Including short surveys at key points throughout the customer education process can help you determine what is working for customers and what needs to change.

Customer Education Best Practices to Follow in 2023

As you’re building your learning strategy, it’s important to keep customer education best practices in mind. The following tips can help nearly any SaaS business develop a more effective customer education program:

Keep Courses Short and Sweet

You should design your courses to maximize positive customer outcomes — and no one learns best when they have to sit through an hours-long presentation. It’s usually better to create short, “bite-sized” pieces of learning content that your customers can consume in short bursts. Taking this approach to customer training can improve customers’ engagement, comprehension, and retention. Shorter courses are also ideal for busy customers who are always on the go and don’t have time to devote a large, continuous chunk of their day to training. 

Customize Everything You Can

Personalizing the training experience for every learner is a great way to make them feel more valued as a customer, which can improve their relationship with your brand — even better, customized training materials are more likely to fully engage customers and help them retain the information that’s covered. When customers are presented with a generic experience that isn’t customized for them, it’s often harder for them to remain engaged because the experience doesn’t feel as relevant.

Here are a few ways you can personalize the education experience for your customers:

• Include personalized details like the customer’s name on the welcome screen. 

• Create groups to segment learners and present them with customized experiences.

• Personalize end-of-course screens to guide each user toward their next step.

Optimize Courses for Mobile Devices

Very few of your customers are completing all their training courses seated at their desks in front of a computer. They’re much more likely to engage with customer education materials whenever they have a bit of spare time, which means they’re often viewing your courses or resources on mobile devices. It’s essential to design your learning experience to function well on mobile devices since many of your customers will be primarily accessing learning materials while they’re on the go.

Why's Customer Education Important?

Customer education is crucial for SaaS businesses — by delivering high-quality customer education throughout the entire customer journey, you can shorten your customers' time to value. This can lead to a whole host of positive outcomes like improved product adoption and customer retention. 

One of the most important customer education best practices to remember is to use the right tools to power your program. Manually managing and delivering all of your training materials would be next to impossible. Instead, the most successful customer education examples are often powered by customer education software.

Northpass is a customer education platform that SaaS businesses can use to build, deliver, and manage their customer education programs. Features like customizable learning paths, advanced analytics tools, support for numerous languages and content formats, and more make Northpass one of the best choices for brands that want to deliver better product education experiences.