5 Customer Education Tools You Need for Success

Customer education is a powerful tool for brands to drive revenue, improve customer experience, and increase customer loyalty. 

According to Forrester, 90 percent of companies have seen a positive return on their investment in customer education. It’s why organizations have increased spending on customer education by 80 percent in the last two years.

Customer education tools exist to make your life easier as the program facilitator. From proactively providing support to surveying learners on autopilot, investing in the right customer education tools can pay dividends in the long run.

So, which customer education tools do you really need to run an effective program? 

We’ll share the importance of educating your customers and five customer education tools to support your program.

Why is customer education an important tool in customer success?

Customer success drives bottom-line revenue for businesses. The happier customers are with a product, the less likely they are to cancel their subscription and the more likely they are to become loyal customers and brand advocates.  Your customer education strategy plays a large role in customer success. 

Read more: 6 Ways to Prevent Customer Churn

A customer education program gives users the resources, product education, and customer training they need to become experts on your solution. 

They can watch product demonstrations, read support guides, and chat with other learners in your branded community. Each of these factors contributes to a program that improves overall customer satisfaction. 

But don’t just take our word for it. Studies show that customer education programs can:

• Increase bottom-line revenue by 6.2%
• Improve customer retention by 4.7%
• Decrease support costs by 6.1%

Read more: 4 Steps to Creating a Successful and Empowering Customer Education Program

Types of customer education tools

Now that we know the importance of a well-equipped tool stack, let’s explore the five types of customer education tools you need for success.

1. Customer education platform or LMS
2. Support guides
3. Product walk-throughs and demos
4. In-app guides
5. Customer support

Customer education platform or LMS

A customer education platform is a tool that helps support teams produce learning content for customers. They’re also known as a customer learning management system (LMS). 

Your customer LMS is a single dashboard for your customer education content. It’s an online portal where customers can browse, participate, and provide feedback on the entire program. 

When searching for a customer education platform, choose one with the following features:

• Polls and quizzes. Make learning more interactive with polls and quizzes encouraging learners to complete an action rather than passively browse. Test their knowledge with end-of-module quizzes that reinforce learning objectives. 
• Certifications. Automatically certify customers who’ve completed your training course and passed the end-of-module quiz. This type of certification incentivizes customers to continue learning and alleviates pressure on your support team since customers have completed your product training.
• Progress tracking. Do you know whether your customers are completing their learning materials? Track learner progress and analyze how certain customer segments best engage with your learning content. You might find that customers with product training certification are 50% less likely to churn than those who don’t—building the case for more investment in customer education.
• Integrations. Customer education plays a larger role in your goal to retain customers. Look for a customer LMS that integrates with other apps already in your tool stack. WorkRamp, for example, integrates with popular sales and support tools like Salesforce, Gong, and Zendesk—without manually transferring data between them.
• Functionality. Instead of several different platforms (which all come at their own cost), look for an all-in-one solution where you can also do internal team training and employee onboarding. Customize your customer LMS to separate it from yourinternal training program designed to upskill your team.

Spinify, the AI-powered sales generation platform, used WorkRamp’s Customer Learning Cloud to increase product adoption amongst new customers. It deployed a variety of learning formats, from flip cards to audio and post-course surveys to track customer satisfaction.

Within a few months, Spinify launched over 50 product courses, taken by 160+ customers with a 95 percent learner satisfaction rate.

“We wanted an LMS that would be user-friendly for our customers and myself, and, ultimately, add lifetime value to our product. That’s definitely something WorkRamp has brought to the table.”

—Mia Ford, Head of Customer Engagement at Spinify

Support guides

Support guides are designed to answer customer questions about your product. 

Let’s put that into practice and say you’re a SaaS company that sells accounting software. New customers often have questions about connecting their bank accounts and inviting their accountants to reconcile transactions. 

Instead of forcing these new customers towards a support team to answer questions one-to-one, produce a support guide that walks them through the process. Incorporate this document into your customer LMS and make it readily available for future customers.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that customers can self-serve and pick up the support guide whenever they need it, rather than overwhelming your support team with hundreds of questions on the same topic.

Product walk-throughs and demos

Not all customers absorb information through plain text. 

Support guides can provide documentation learners can use to understand your product better. However, you can make your educational content more accessible—and cater to different learning styles—with product walk-throughs and demonstrations. 

This learning format does exactly what it says; it walks customers through how to solve pain points using your product. 

Draw inspiration from Hopin, a SaaS company designed to help companies create community experiences. It launched its online customer academy, Hopin Learn, to educate customers on how to use its product and increase product adoption.

Its video producer Adri Lueiro says: “We not only want to teach, but we also want to inspire them by showing the different ways that our product can be used. That’s why we usually include examples of how our customers have used the product. For example, by showing how our different integrations look in an event.”

“Using the different forms of content within WorkRamp, including quizzes, tips, videos, and more, make it easier for customers with all different learning styles to process the information and practice their knowledge.”

—Shira Moskowitz, Customer Education & Internal Enablement Manager at Hopin

In-app guides

Do customers use your product by signing into an app? Whether it’s an online dashboard or mobile app, use in-app notifications to drive people toward your customer education platform. 

In-app guides can grab customers’ attention while they’re already in the headspace to talk about your product. Use them strategically to signpost relevant training material based on the page, event, or use case they’re engaging with.

“Another really important piece was not asking customers to go further from the point where they were,” says Jennifer Foster, Product Learning and Development Specialist, Quantum Metric. “So starting to put some of that training interactively inside our product was really critical so they didn’t have to go even one step away from where they were.” 

Examples of how to use in-app guides to improve customer education participation include:

• Pop-up messages to signpost relevant learning materials based on the page or feature a customer is using. (If they’re using your keyword research tool, for example, point them in the direction of your product walk-through that demonstrates how to use it effectively)
• Notification widgets that tell customers when new learning materials are added or updated
• Live chat support buttons that use artificial intelligence to answer customer questions without forcing them to exit the app. You can configure these tools to divert customers towards your learning platform, using direct access to your support team as the last resort

Spinify puts this into practice with in-app messaging. Mia Ford, says: “Anytime users login to Spinify, they’ll see a pop-up. It says, for example, ‘you haven’t tried this before; how about coming into our academy to learn how to use it? Or how about getting certified so you can become a Spinify ninja.'”

Read more: 5 Ways to Successfully Launch Your Customer Education Academy

Customer support

No matter how much you try to provide learning materials proactively, sometimes, people need to thrash out their problems with a real person. 

Look for a customer support platform as part of your customer education tool stack. 

Zendesk, for example, is a customer support software that connects customers with your support team to ask questions. Initiate phone calls, live chat messages, and emails all from the Zendesk dashboard, which stores important information about each contact. 

The best part? Zendesk integrates with WorkRamp’s Learning Cloud. Customer support teams can easily reference learning material housed in your LMS midway through the conversation with a customer. This allows your team to process more requests and improve overall customer satisfaction. 

How WorkRamp can help you create customer education materials that work

The Learning Cloud from WorkRamp is the all-in-one solution for training. Whether educating customers or onboarding new team members, do it all in one place.

“WorkRamp enables us to train employees and customers in a single platform,” says Chauncy Cay Ford, Director of Customer Enablement at Quantum Metric. “This allows us to share training materials across teams and provide an amazing education experience for our customers without the added work of spinning up a new instance.” 

Learn how WorkRamp’s Customer Learning Cloud can help scale your customer education programs. Contact us to schedule a free, personalized demo.