A Guide to Customer Education: What is it? Why is it Important?

Customer education programs build long-lasting growth

When I’m looking to buy a product—whether it’s a new pair of headphones or a fleet of plug-in air fresheners to send into the olfactory battlefield that is our cat’s basement lair—the first thing I look for is the benefits and features list. What are they? How do they compare to the competitors? How easy are they to use? And how quickly will they solve my problem?

For businesses, the goal is essentially the same: How quickly can we communicate to customers that our product is the solution to their problem? How can we guarantee that customers fully understand and use the features and benefits as intended? And once they’re no longer a new user, how do we retain their loyalty to our brand?

The answer? Quality customer education that breaks through the constant noise and distraction of today’s digital landscape to build long-lasting customer retention and business growth.

In this post, we’ll guide you through what quality customer education is, why it’s important, and how to build a thriving customer education program.

What is customer education?

Customer education, or customer training, is more than just the accordion-folded instructions manual that comes with every new product. It’s a comprehensive strategy to give your customers the knowledge and skills they need to go from first-time users to loyal advocates as quickly as possible. It’s giving your customers the confidence necessary to reach their goals using your product, which helps you retain those customers for good.

One thing that needs to be made clear? Customer education is not marketing, sales enablement, or customer support, but all three benefit from it. It’s helpful to see it as onboarding your customers in the same way you onboard employees. You want them to feel comfortable, motivated, and reach full-productivity as soon as possible.

Real-world examples of effective customer education programs

Let’s take a look at 3 real-world examples of strong customer education strategies and why they work so well.

1. Canva Design School

Canva makes design easy for anyone, whether you’re an educator, content creator, or entrepreneur looking for cost-effective marketing solutions. Canva Design School offers free courses, tutorials, and resources that help new users discover and leverage features they otherwise may have missed.

Why it works: Canva’s customer education program is great at showing how seamless the experience is. Design School lessons and tutorials are embedded inside Canva itself, which gives new users quick, easy wins, provides just-in-time learning, and optimizes workflow. Plus, it’s available in multiple languages and fully localized in five global languages.

2. Salesforce Trailhead

Salesforce’s Trailhead Academy provides interactive, gamified learning paths for customers and partners. Hands-on challenges represent real-world tasks, and can be personalized to match specific roles and skill levels. Users earn badges and rewards to keep them engaged, motivated, and even competitive with colleagues.

Why it works: Users of Trailhead Academy enjoy an accelerated time-to-value. This builds confidence in their knowledge of product features and services. It also has a social learning element where users can learn from other users. Product knowledge is built and advanced by the community, for the community.

3. Articulate E-Learning Heroes Community

Articulate’s E-Learning Heroes Community houses user guides, tutorial courses, e-books, and articles filled with tips from e-learning experts. This community of practice is made up of e-learning professionals from around the world seeking to enhance their course creation skills, build foundational knowledge for new users, and advance the craft to new heights.

Why it works: Members of E-Learning Heroes can do more than explore guides and tutorials. They can exchange best practices, discuss products on live forums, and even suggest ideas to the development team. In other words, they’re not just treated as customers or users, but valued partners dedicated to creating an engaging online training experience.

Why is customer education important?

Showcases how to get the most out of your product

A quality customer education program communicates product features and benefits clearly from day one. Customers know exactly how to get the most out of the product, and spend little to no time troubleshooting on their own. This seamless experience accelerates time-to-value for customers and increases the chances they’ll move from new user to loyal advocate.

Quick story: For four years, I drove a used, mid-size SUV perfect for Minnesota driving. It had a small enough engine to get good gas mileage and all-wheel drive for the grueling, six-month-long winters. But, here’s the kicker. Until the day I sold it, I had no idea that an embedded folding table was hiding beneath the cargo space carpet, accessible via a lever I’d never noticed before.

My point? If I had known about this table from the beginning, I wouldn’t have had to pack one every time we went camping. These are the types of moments that a quality customer education program helps you avoid.

Empowers your support team

Your customer support team is a reactive force. Customers don’t call to say how wonderfully a product is working, or just how pleased their team is with its features. They call with problems they’ve likely been dealing with and troubleshooting on their own for enough time to make them angry.

Your customer education program, then, serves as a proactive, preventative force. First-time customers get the knowledge and skills they need to avoid calling customer support. Those repetitive, simple questions that your customer support team loathes? Gone—as long as you build a quality customer education program.

Drives customer satisfaction and loyalty

With improved customer education comes increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and customer loyalty. Happy customers tend to talk, if given the opportunity, which naturally drives business growth and enhances net promoter score (NPS). This is called a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. It’s proven to be more trusted by consumers than any other form of marketing, and provides a natural boost to your brand’s reputation.

Fuels customer adoption, retention, and growth

A recent study by Forrester revealed that organizations with customer education programs saw 38 percent faster product adoption among their customers. Faster time-to-value for your customers means upsells are easier, because they already trust your brand. L&D departments use customer education programs to increase customer retention. The sooner they go from new users to loyal advocates, the more likely they are to stick around.

How to build an effective customer education program

Audit what’s already in place

Your organization likely already has some form of customer training in place. Your first step is to analyze it. There might be full user guides, tutorials, and courses, but they might not be up to date. Look at available learner tracking data—if set up within your LMS—to see where customers drop off, what modules they leave unfinished, and which knowledge checks they fail the most.

Find out if all key stakeholders are involved in customer education, communicate with in-house subject matter experts, and consider pulling in the sales and customer support teams. Their experience will be a big help in our next step.

Identify knowledge gaps

Customer education programs only work if organizations understand the customer experience. Look at available learner tracking data—if set up within your LMS—to see where customers drop off, what modules they leave unfinished, and which knowledge checks they fail the most.

To be absolutely sure, conduct a few customer interviews. Unfinished modules may be due to confusion or because the information presented is already common knowledge. You won’t know until you ask.

In addition to surveying actual customers, look to your own teams. Ask your customer support reps what the most common questions are on support tickets. Ask the sales team what products aren’t winning over potential customers, despite their advantages over competitors. Collaborate with subject matter experts to update and validate customer education training materials.

Create scalable resources

L&D departments use scalable resources to make growth more manageable. Think on-demand webinars, bite-sized microlearning courses, and self-paced modules. Your customers have variable schedules, live in different time zones, and have unique needs and preferences. The more you gear your learning content towards flexibility and adaptability now, the easier it will be to meet future needs.

Start by building a strong core of self-service content for new users, revamping courses so they’re modular, mobile, and easy to update, and setting up personalized learning pathways. It’s also helpful for your customers to set up a content library of blogs, how-to videos, and product user guides. Set up an online community where customers can exchange best practices with other users, access product training, and participate in gamified challenges.

Remember, L&D departments don’t just prepare for the now, they prepare for the future. Once you’ve identified skill and knowledge gaps, prepare for a growing customer base by setting up sources that scale.

Choosing the right tools for customer education

If you’re shopping for a more effective customer education program, agile course creation tools and a robust learning management system should be at the top of your list.

Learning management systems

L&D departments depend on learning management systems to enrich the learning experience for their users. They make courses easy to access anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Those scalable resources we covered in the last section? Your chosen LMS is where you’ll manage, update, and deliver them.

An effective LMS will also allow you to:

• manage user access
• collect data on learner performance
• automate training delivery
• personalize learning pathways
• customize courses to match company colors, logos, and messaging
• streamline global training delivery

Within the Articulate 360 platform, Reach offers seamless user experience so you can launch training, manage users, and update courses for easy scalability. Take it from Sara Russell, Tamr’s Head of Customer Support and Education: “We regularly release new features in our Tamr Cloud SaaS platform, and it’s simple to keep courses up-to-date with one-step publishing to Reach.”

Course creation tools

Of course, to populate your learning management system with effective customer education content, you’ll need access to a powerful course creation tool. One that’s ideal for making both fully interactive, highly customizable courses and modular, quick-hitting courses that adapt to every device.

L&D departments use course creation tools to build engaging, interactive customer education content. With a little help from an embedded AI assistant, you can transform old source material into interactive blocks, drag-and-drop knowledge checks, or digital flashcard decks.

Articulate’s Rise and Storyline course creation tools are used by every Fortune 100 company, the Articulate 360 platform simplifies course creation, collaboration, and distribution. Take it from Curtis Poole, Director of Curriculum Development at Avid Technology: “The minute they start working with it, they discover it’s easy…even veteran course designers who might be skeptical of new ways of doing things are enjoying the modern creation experience.”

Supporting tools

In addition to a robust learning management system and powerful course creation tools, you also want to set up:

• A blog with helpful content, including how-to videos, user guides, and new features announcements.
• A community of practice where users can talk to other users, share examples, access basic knowledge bases, and exchange best practices.
• A FAQs page, on-demand and recorded webinars, a living glossary of terms, and case studies to show your product in action.

These on-demand tools will complement your courses. L&D departments rely on this type of content to provide a comprehensive learning experience for both new and experienced users.

Balance automation with human support

Lastly, it’s important to balance automation with human support. Powerful AI assistants, embedded AI chatbots, and machine translation for localized courses may be essential to operational efficiency, but should be treated as co-pilots. Always review AI-generated content before publishing, and look to in-house or third-party experts to validate global learning.

Successful customer education programs lean on human reviewers, subject matter experts, and other tools, like language service providers, to create engaging, interactive, and culturally sensitive content for global audiences.

Measuring and improving customer education success

Metrics to track

There are several metrics to track to accurately measure the effectiveness of your customer education program. Consider the following metrics:

• Adoption rate. This shows the percentage of users who begin using a product or feature in a meaningful way within a specific time period. This could be measured weekly, monthly, or strategically rolled out when new products or features are released.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT). This one measures how satisfied customers are with your product. CSAT scores can be collected through surveys and based on a scaled range from 1-10 or phrased from “very unsatisfied” to “very satisfied.”
• Support ticket reduction. This can be measured by collecting support ticket data before and after a product or feature release. It represents your customer education program’s ability to reduce incoming support tickets that represent avoidable or redundant issues.
• Customer retention. This metric compares the number of users or customers you have at the beginning of a selected time period—at product release, for example—to the number of users at the end of that selected time period. It also considers how many customers were gained during the same period.
• Upsell data. This measures the ability of your organization to sell additional products and features to already established customers.

Also critical to the measurement process is collecting feedback. Distribute customer surveys on a regular basis, and especially surrounding new product campaigns and feature releases. Use analytics from customer feedback surveys and learner performance data to inform content updates, and keep training relevant.

Help customers succeed and strengthen brand loyalty

Customer education programs are vital tools to increase time-to-value for customers. This drives product adoption, reduces learning friction, and strengthens customer satisfaction and loyalty. It also reduces operational costs. When customers have access to on-demand resources, personalized learning pathways, and mobile-ready courses, your customer support teams carry less of a burden. Boost long-term growth by improving customer retention, increase upsell opportunities, and turn new users into satisfied advocates.

Ready to reduce learner friction and give customers the tools they need to succeed? Check out our free e-book to unlock growth and engagement with customer training, and start your free trial of the Articulate 360 platform today.