Customer Education: A Surefire Way to Boost Customer Loyalty and Retention

In this article, you'll learn why customer education is crucial to building loyalty and increasing retention. We'll explore how training your customers can lead to increased satisfaction and long-term relationships.

When a customer purchases your product, you want them to be able to navigate it easily, use its full range of features, and extract the greatest possible value from it. But how do you facilitate a successful customer experience?

Of course, in a perfect world, your product is so self-explanatory and user friendly that every customer knows how to use it at first sight. But in reality, customers’ goals, backgrounds, and knowledge vary greatly, and they may require some extra details in order to use your product successfully. This is where customer education comes into play.

Customer education is by no means a new notion, but the way that businesses train clients has become transformed in recent years. In this article, we’ll explore how to educate your customers so you boost their chances of success with your product. 

What is Customer Education? 

Customer education is the process of providing relevant knowledge and skills to customers to help them understand a product or service better and use it effectively. 

This is usually achieved through a set of learning programs or educational content created by the business. It can include providing product manuals, video tutorials, and eLearning courses to help customers troubleshoot issues, as well as offering webinars or virtual training sessions to deepen their understanding of the product and facilitate the customer journey. The idea is to guide customers through the entire process – from onboarding all the way to mastery of the product. 

Why is It Important to Educate Your Customers? 

Customer education is a win-win propositio: it allows buyers to perform their business or personal tasks effectively and helps you retain your customers and gain their loyalty. 

By providing valuable information, you empower your clients to make informed decisions that lead to a more satisfying experience with your products. This not only boosts their confidence in your brand but also increases the chances of them returning as customers and recommending your brand to others. In addition, educating your customers can also generate feedback that can be used to enhance your products and overall customer satisfaction.

Benefits of Customer Education

There’s no doubt that investing in customer education is an investment in the long-term success and growth of your business. The real question is how. Here are the key benefits you can realize:

1. Onboard customers more quickly

Almost every digital product involves product onboarding – a set of instructions and tips on how to use the product. Onboarding is a vital part of your education program. However, it also includes additional learning resources: help docs, guides, online courses, etc. A successful customer education program lets your business provide faster onboarding to more customers and scale up easily.

2. Reduce the support team’s workload

A customer support team and customer success managers often spend their days answering the same questions over and over. This is not only frustrating, but it’s also not an efficient or cost-effective use of your employees’ time, as it uses up valuable resources. Explore the frequently asked questions and include them in your customer education resources. This will reduce the workload of your support specialists and customer success managers, making them more available for higher-impact client interactions, and decreasing tech support costs. 

3. Build customer loyalty and become a lovemark brand

All successful businesses have one thing in common: they engender loyalty in their clients. When a business invests in customer education, it fosters a stronger connection with the brand and reduces the chances of clients switching to its competitor. By generating loyalty, your customers become brand advocates, spreading the word and growing your user base. 

4. Position your brand as a market leader

Investing in great customer education positions your brand as the market expert. By sharing high-quality, industry-specific knowledge, your business can show existing and potential customers that you know the field better than any of your competitors. This inspires trust, thereby increasing customer satisfaction scores and helping your business convert your target audience to customers.  

How to Launch a Customer Education Program

As you can see, providing ongoing customer education is essential for retaining customers and ensuring their long-term satisfaction with your products and services. But it’s a big investment for a business. If you’re unsure of how to train consumers, use this guide as a starting point. Here’s a closer look:

Step #1: Set up goals

The first step toward implementing your customer education program is to define its goals. This will help you clarify what you’re trying to achieve and serve as a baseline that will be used to measure the results of your customer education program.

Step #2: Assess your current customer education program

Once you have defined your goals, it’s time to audit your current learning material if you already have some kind of customer training in place.

Learn the ins and outs of what your company does and what resources or materials are available by asking the right questions:

Step #3: Decide on the educational content

The next step is to decide what format you’ll use for your customer product training. Customer education training can be conducted in a number of ways. Here are 6 of the most common ones:

Now let’s look at how to educate customers using different learning methods and content types in more detail so you can see which is the best choice for your particular needs.

To drive customer development effectively, a blended learning approach works best. By combining online courses with live sessions led by a customer education team, corporate blog posts, and help documents, you increase the chances of having more successful customers.

Step #4: Map out your training program 

You’ve defined the business objectives, audited the current customer education initiatives, and chosen your tools. So, what’s next? It’s time to map out the training program. At this stage, it’s important to use the data you gathered in the previous stage to understand what objectives you can help consumers achieve. 

When outlining your customer education program, factor in the following considerations:

Determine the learning goals and objectives 

Delineate what the key learning outcomes for customers are and how your training program can get them there. Come up with a maximum of three learning goals that you want your learning program to achieve and three to five objectives per goal. 

Here’s an example:

Want to know more? Read this article on how to set learning goals and objectives for online courses.

Identify subject matter experts (SMEs) in the company to lead the way 

Their vast experience makes SMEs an essential part of the creation process. Utilize their expertise to provide ideas on case studies, interactive activities, or other essential materials.

Capture content ideas

Put your heads together to come up with a content mix. Outline all the types of customer education content you want to include to make your training dynamic. For example, use video, visuals, knowledge checks, and simulations to build educational content that your learners will enjoy. 

Define the length of the content

Define the length of your lessons and keep this consistent so customers know how much time they need to dedicate to each one. Customers are short on time, so bite-sized lessons work best. 

Decide on a delivery method

Think about when and where your customers will take the training. Most consumers will do this on the go, so it needs to be available anywhere, anytime. For maximum engagement, your customer education content should work on all types of devices.

Research how successful companies train customers

When outlining your training program, explore how other companies are successfully educating consumers and use this as a source of inspiration. 

Step #5: Create learning content

Once your customer education program is defined, it’s time to create educational content. This is where course authoring software comes into play. If you want to provide your customers with versatile interactive content that engages them, opt for a well-rounded tool like iSpring Suite Max.

A slide from the course created with iSpring

With iSpring, you can:

• Build online courses on any topics you like in a matter of minutes right in PowerPoint
• Use ready-made slide templates, and images of characters and locations to make professional-looking content 
• Engage customers with interactive activities such as role-plays
• Create quizzes and assessments to check customers’ knowledge
• Educate and engage consumers with video
• Create multi-device online learning content
• Collaborate on content together with your team in a single online workspace
• Update your content with ease whenever needed.

Step #6: Deliver learning content

Once you’ve created your educational content, you need to share it with your end users and/or clients. Of course, you’ll publish general educational materials on your website, blog, and YouTube channel, but it is difficult to evaluate their effectiveness – if it only comes through feedback from customers. And you want to clearly understand if you have an effective customer education program that brings good results and helps your clients grow. For this, you will need a learning management system. 

When choosing the right customer education software, consider the following factors:

Is it user friendly?

Your customer education LMS is the tool your clients will come into the most contact with, so opt for one that’s intuitive and easy to use. Search for a platform that users can navigate from day one.

Can it record metrics?

You’ll need a way to measure the success of your customer education initiative and share the results with your leadership team. It’s best to invest in an LMS with strong analytical capabilities so you can demonstrate the value of the education program in terms of customer satisfaction, engagement, and performance. It also offers invaluable insights into how the program can be improved.

Is it scalable?

Your customer education tools need to grow with the business. That’s why choosing a scalable LMS is a must. These are the main features of a scalable platform:

If you still don’t have customer education software, you can try iSpring Learn LMS. It’s powerful in terms of functionality but has an intuitive design, so it will be perfect for trainers and trainees who have never used a learning system before.

iSpring Learn interface

iSpring Learn will help you create your own online academy that will let you:

• Segment audiences to offer personalized learning paths
• Develop courses with the integrated iSpring Suite authoring toolkit
  and the built-in course editor
• Automate training management tasks like managing deadlines
  and sending invites and reminders
• Create comprehensive, custom reports for evaluating the success
  of your customer education and measuring user engagement
• Customize the platform with your business branding for a seamless
  user experience
• Utilize the mobile app to deliver on-the-go learning
• Amp up your customer learning with gamification tools like badges,
  certificates, and points
• Scale your training in line with the business, building on your
  program over time

Step #7: Use data to evaluate your results 

Rolling out your customer training is only the beginning. Once it’s live, you’ll need to gauge its success. There are different ways to do this: сheck LMS reports, send surveys, use star rankings, and create an open channel for feedback. The more you know, the more you can improve your training program. It’s crucial to address your customer expectations, so take their feedback into consideration and react.

Metrics to Measure Customer Training Results

If you conduct training via the LMS, you have the opportunity to monitor the learners’ results and changes in behavior. All LMSs have a variety of reports. Let’s take a look at customer education metrics that can be measured with iSpring Learn. 

1. Learner progress 

These reports give a full overview of how customer training is working. They give insight into how engaged customers are. Low results could indicate that customers aren’t aware of the training, don’t find it relevant, or are having access issues.

This report details how many courses have been completed and how each customer performs.

2. Learner results 

This report gives a detailed picture of how an individual customer is performing. This information is crucial if a particular customer is having issues, reaching out to your support team frequently, or has submitted a complaint.

You can see the content assigned to the consumer, the time spent with each lesson, and

the number of attempts made.

3. Course details 

Course detail reports provide you with the right metrics for analyzing how customers are progressing with a specific course. Keep an eye out for consistently low test scores, as this could indicate that the quiz is too difficult or needs clarification. On the flip side, if all customers are getting the maximum score on assessments, you might want to make the lesson more challenging.

You can check what modules have been completed, the time spent on each one, when a customer completed the course, and how they performed on assessments

4. Progress achievements 

This report works perfectly for exams and assessments. If your customer training program offers certification upon completion, this data allows you to see who has been certified and when.

This report shows how customers are progressing via online assessments.

Want to know more? This handy article on LMS reporting will let you know how to utilize the analytics.

Customer Education Best Practices 

Creating customer education eLearning courses in-house is a surefire way to effectively train your customers, but it requires some research and skills. Here are some tried-and-true best practices to transform simple users into expert users of your products:

Stick to bite-sized learning 

Microlearning is the most effective way to educate clients. Customers are on-the-go learners who want their training at the point of need. Microlearning, when done well, boosts retention and engagement. To utilize microlearning, divide a one-hour online lesson into smaller chunks, or microlessons. 

Learners respond best when these microlessons include knowledge checks and interactive training content that oblige them to recall what they have just learned. Adding time limits to these lessons helps build momentum and add a gamified element. 

Use a variety of learning styles

Everyone learns differently. To give your customers the best chance of understanding and retaining the educational content, tap into different learning styles. We’ve put together an overview of five common learning styles to implement in your training program, including clear-cut examples of how to incorporate them into your customer education strategy:

Keep your style consistent

Add variety to your customer training through different types of interactions, storytelling, and a creative use of multimedia, but keep your look and feel consistent. Before making your first lesson, invest some time building a clear style guide to follow. 

As a general rule, the following elements should remain consistent:

• Tone of voice: Whether it’s conversational or professional, keep the tone of voice consistent throughout your lessons.

• Look and feel: Color palettes, fonts, call-to-action buttons, page layout, etc., should be standardized to facilitate seamless navigation for learners.

• Image style: Keep the style of images consistent throughout your content. For example, try not to mix cartoon images with photos.

• Negative space: Negative space is the blank space on each slide of your course. Don’t overcrowd your slides, and keep a consistent amount of blank space throughout.

Personalize your content

Excellent consumer education engages learners, helping them to retain knowledge. A critical driver of customer engagement is creating training that feels relevant and tailored to the individual. You can achieve this with some nice touches, like adding the learner’s name to the welcome page, customizing the end-of-course screen, and segmenting learners into relevant groups in your customer education platform.

Customer Education Examples

Here are a few case studies you might want to check out to learn how real companies educate their customers to facilitate successful product adoption.

IMT Matcher

IMT Matcher(TM) provides IVF management technologies and quality management systems to fertility centers, donor banks, and other Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) centers.

Learn how the company is training its rapidly growing customer base worldwide and was able to reduce training costs by 25%.

Read the full case study →

BEST SAP

BEST is an official SAP partner focused on developing, implementing, and supporting SAP add-on products.

Learn how the company built a new approach to training customers during the COVID-19 outbreak and reduced user training time from 3 days to 5-6 hours.

Read the full case study →